The sun is setting on another Arkansas duck season.
Though the 4 a.m. ringing alarms and the drives through the dark will end for now, the stories will continue to be told and retold.
You see, in a duck hunter’s heart, the season never really concludes. There’s just more time to read about duck hunting, tell stories about duck hunting and quietly contemplate future hunts.
One of the people with whom I’ve hunted through the years is fond of saying, “I’ve gotten to the point where I rather talk about it than actually do it.”
The older I get, the more I think back on duck hunts with my father and his friends. They were men who influenced my life greatly.
As a small gift to end the season, I thought I would share this story by longtime Little Rock lobbyist Bill Brady, who grew up at Gregory in Woodruff County and often hunted ducks with his dad. Enjoy.
Take it away, Bill:
“I killed my first duck on Broadwater.
“That’s what we called the wide place on the Cache River where my dad and some of his hunting buddies had a duck blind. My dad was an avid hunter. Deer, duck, quail, squirrel, dove, you name it. If it was game in western Woodruff County in the 1950s, my dad hunted it. His favorite — and mine, too — was mallard hunting on the Cache River at that place we called Broadwater, where he and his buddies had built a fine blind on floating logs. They had managed to tie onto four good logs that they found in the area and then drag those logs by boat to the choice spot on the east side of Broadwater where they knew the ducks would work.
“These seasoned duck hunters knew everything that there was to know about locating, building and camouflaging a duck blind. To an 8-year-old looking to bag his first greenhead, it was all a great mystery and a grand experience just being there with those men.
“Once I turned 8, my dad started getting me ready to go on my first duck hunt. He had a 20-gauge Remington Model 11 shotgun that he used primarily for quail hunting. That was to become my duck gun. I recall that it had a Cutts Compensator on the end of the barrel, and he had put the modified full choke on. My how I loved that gun. It was semiautomatic, but for the first year Dad would only let me put one shell in the barrel and none in the magazine, turning it into a single shot. And that was fine with me.
“The only problem I had back in those days was with boots. I never could keep my feet warm. This was before insulated boots. I hunted in some black leather lace-up boots that were just about the coldest things you can imagine. At about the age of 10, I wrote a letter to the editor of some sporting magazine and suggested that a company should invent electric socks, powered by flashlight batteries. I never heard back from that magazine editor, but about 10 or 15 years later, there they were — electric hunting socks. That was my first good marketing idea.
“Broadwater was a stretch of the Cache River in what we always called Black Swamp. It’s now a part of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Rex Hancock Black Swamp Wildlife Management Area. It was particularly good for duck hunting in that it was at least 50 yards wide and perhaps a quarter of a mile long, running north to south. Access to Broadwater from our home at Gregory was to the east on a road that the locals referred to as ‘the road to Fred Lee’s place.’ Fred Lee was an old hunter, trapper and fisherman who lived alone on a floating cabin on the Cache in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Usually, we would have to walk or boat the half mile from the edge of the bottoms to the river and then cross by boat to the blind. The blind was on the south end of Broadwater on the east side in an area that ducks really seemed to like.
“The blind had a snug warming shack and a front porch for shooting that would safely accommodate five shooters. They had done a great job of decorating it with freshly cut oak branches so that it looked just like a big brush pile to a duck. Inside the shack were a propane stove, a food locker and cookware. A week before the season, Dad somehow would manage to get a large cylinder of propane brought in by boat so we would be ‘cooking with gas’ for the entire duck season. One of my fondest memories of a meal was when Dad cooked me a fried egg and a spiced ham sandwich right there in the blind. I would give a lot of money for one of those sandwiches right about now.
“I also fondly recall Rule No. 1: Dip the coffee water from the north side (upstream) and take a leak on the south side (downstream). Pretty practical rule, huh?
“In the blind with us the day of my first duck kill were a couple of dad’s buddies, one of whom had a reputation as a quick shot. That’s someone who would take his first shot before the caller yelled ‘take ’em.’ The plan that day was for the caller to work the ducks all the way to the water, right in front of the blind. I would then get the first shot of a greenhead sitting on the water. Mr. Quick Shot would never let the ducks get close to the water before he would start blasting. That’s when my dad told him that if he did that one more time before I could kill my duck, ‘I’m throwing you and that damn gun of yours in the Cache River.’
“I got my first duck about 10 minutes later.
“We also fished from our blind. Yes, we caught crappie right off the front porch. There wouldn’t be many ducks flying some days, and Dad would get out his crappie poles, bait a couple of hooks and we’d try to catch a mess of crappie between flights of mallards. Occasionally, we would take our crappie home to eat the next day. If we only caught three or four, we would clean them and cook them right there in the duck blind for a late lunch of fried fish and light bread.
“Another fond memory concerns the occasional ‘red wasp invasion.’ Dad had a buddy with whom he hunted often, and the two of them enjoyed taking a nip about midafternoon when the ducks had almost quit flying. But they didn’t just pull out the bottle and start drinking. They had a ritual.
“One of them would suddenly slap a leg and complain that he had been stung by ‘a big ol’ red wasp.’ Well, that pretty much mandated that some alcohol be applied to the sting — the bourbon type of alcohol. One of them would fetch a bottle, and they would begin to doctor each other, even the one who had not been stung. The one who had been stung would start it off by taking a long slug, chased with a Coke, in order to ‘ward off infection and swelling.’
“Then, the other one would take his slug to prevent the red wasps from swarming. This routine might go on for the rest of the afternoon, and I would have to drive the boat back over to the launch and get those two happy hunters out of the woods and back home safely (without any swelling or infections from red wasp stings). This routine was funny, and I loved it. Though I never saw a red wasp in that duck blind, I’ve been known to resort to the red wasp antidote a few times myself in the years since then.
“I enjoyed many a day in the Cache River bottoms and the beautiful Black Swamp. In the process, I observed both hunting and hunters at their best. Some of my fondest memories still emanate from that Broadwater duck blind on the Cache. I learned a lot about hunting: The building of a blind, the setting of a spread of decoys, the calling (my favorite part), the living by the rules, the actual hunts.
“And I learned a lot about life and being a sportsman and a good guy. Most of all, I still cherish the memories of my time there with my dad and his buddies, all great men and all gone now to that big duck blind in the sky, where I suspect the mallards are still working and the red wasps are still swarming on beautiful, mild winter afternoons on a stretch of water much like Broadwater.”