My First Duck Hunt by Ross Kiner

My First Duck Hunt

Do you remember the very first duck you ever brought to bag? You don't? Has it been so very long ago, and you have killed so many since, that you have forgotten quite? Well, I do. Many and many the time had the single-barrel muzzle-loader roared, spitting fleecy smoke and shredded newspaper in the wake of a small charge of 5's, trying to overtake a bunch of scurrying, cloud-scraping pintail, or neck-craning, towering mallard, but the duck was never where the shot was, and the shot was never where the duck was, and beside, like the flea, a boy is never still, you know, and after I stood and crouched in one location as long as I could stand it, I would move, then, and not till then, would the ducks come and wheel and circle over the very spot that I had just deserted.

It was March, a wind-blown day with winter's chill still gripping. The muzzle-loader was at home behind the kitchen door, and in my hands was a Remington 12-gauge hammer gun; not the model with the low circular hammers, but an earlier one, black barrels, with high hammers that stood upright like rabbit's ears. My stepfather had borrowed the gun for me from Billy the liveryman.

All that day I had chased here and there, up and down the river flats, in the vast Jefferd's and Pritchard pastures, whanging at pintails way too high, cutting futile holes in the air yards behind the rocking bluebills. Along toward the late afternoon I started homeward, sometimes in the rutty, chuck-holed country road, at times angling across the bare March fields.

Passing one farmhouse perched upon the brow of a barren hill of sand, just at the supper hour, a little lad came out and started toward the pole and slough-hay roofed barn, singing: "Come to the house, Papa, and get a piece of Yankee bread and butter." Hungry? So hungry that I thought I would never reach home. At the eastern line of Fritzche's pasture grew a long high row of willow. I approached them with caution, on the other side was an overflowed ditch, and once upon a time in the Springs that had gone before, I had bellied up to that fence corner, sneaked up on what looked to me like a million ducks, poked the old single-barrel through the fence, and, "She snapped!"

I approached the willows Indian-like. There were no ducks in the ditch, so, Remington across my knees I sat down behind the fence to rest awhile. There came a "We-ee We-ee" of slanting wings, and a pair of weary pintail came to rest not 30 yards away. "Buck fever!" Yes, I had it, but in the end that pair of dancing blackish barrels came for one brief instant square between those weary ducks, "Whang!" Picture to yourself a breathless boy racing around the end of that willow fence, gaining the other side just as the hen struggled into the air. "Whang!" breathless or no it was a clean kill, and then, regardless of chill wind and icy water, heedless of short-legged boots, and the danger of pneumonia, that boy waded waist deep and hand retrieved his game.

That never-to-be-forgotten night he swaggered into Gresser's store and flopping down that luckless pair of pintail, received in coin of the U. S. A. the princely sum of two bits. Why didn't he eat them? Why? Because only by swaggering into the store and selling his game there before the assembled clientele, could he at one bound attain the prestige that he craved in his duck hunting rite of passage.

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