I am partners with my two brothers on some waterfowl hunting property at Delta March in Manitoba. Like a lot of duck hunting, the focus is on the early morning shoot, with afternoons tending to be a little more relaxed and more open to improvisation. The water levels in the marsh will fluctuate year to year and some years, if the water has dropped, there may be the occasional extensive mud flat.
One year, I was out in the morning with my brother and another good friend of ours and had a great morning shoot on ducks. When we got back to the lodge to make breakfast around 10:30 or 11:00 am, I noticed that across the bay about half a mile, directly in front of our place, a very large number of snow geese had gathered on one of these mud flats. While I was cooking and eating breakfast my mind turned to one of my favorite pastimes....wild goose chases. Because while there is a great deal of truth in the cliche, sometimes....
I talked my two companions into rowing across the bay (really, circling it to try to slide up reasonably un-noticed) but of course, before we could figure out how to get within range, the several thousand birds all got up and left. Now with Canadas I wouldn't have bothered, because when Canadas leave, they leave. But snows sometimes will come back. With that hope in mind, we slide the duckboat into a hiding spot and started to wander the mudflat, looking for a good place to set up. The mudflats, BTW, were quite dry and easy to walk on. We found the spot!
In almost the dead centre of about a 200 yard radius of mudflat, one outpost of reeds had managed to grow up. Circular in shape, about 15 feet in diameter and with reeds 6 to 7 feet tall. When we poked our heads in, we found it was hollow....essentially a circle of reeds. We carefully climbed in, lay down and began to wait. Truthfully, after a late night before, a very early morning with a limit on ducks and a large breakfast recently eaten, all three of us were quite relaxed and soon we were all sawing logs.
I don't know how much later but guessing an hour or so, I awoke to an amazing sight. Directly above me, as I opened my eyes, the sky was dense with birds coming in to land. So close you felt you could reach out and grab one. I rolled over and peered through the reeds......it was a sea of white starting not five feet from where I lay. I kicked my companions awake and shushed them at the same time. We spent probably 15 minutes just enjoying being in the middle of all this. Completely unplanned and just damn lucky.
This was before my SxS affliction took over so I was equipped with an 870 as was one of my companions. My brother had his Win M1200 with him. When we were ready, we took up positions 120 degrees apart from each other and stood up. I had three shells in the gun, three shells in my hand and three shells in a specific pocket, ready to go. On a signal, we stepped out of the reeds (it was that easy) as chaos erupted everywhere. It is the only time I was six for six on geese. As were my brother and his friend. The total count was 22 birds and while it was a slaughter, given that the daily limit is 50 and unlimited possession, I didn't feel too bad.
The best part was waking up to that cacophony! Very, very memorable.
There are many, many other great days but the days that stand out in my memory tend to be days where I watched my dog, or someone else's, do something amazing.
