Gingerbread Man on 16/8/2018 at 23:16

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It’s 1:55 AM. I’m old, I have to get up to pee. I’m stupid, I crash into the blinds next to my bed. I stumble blearily across the hall, find the toilet, lift the lid, have a pee. Accidentally slam the lid down. BANG. I crash back to the bedroom, touching things in the blackness. Shove the dog over. Try to slip silently into sleep.

2:15 AM and the sound of buzzing and ducks. Amanda’s alarm has gone off. I immediately feel like a jerk for probably waking her up ten or fifteen minutes beforehand. She leans over me in the darkness...

“You sure you don’t want to come hunting with me today?”

“Hell, no,” I grumble. “I went yesterday.”

The dog is confused. One of us is getting guns and waders and hot beverages ready, but the other is asleep in a warm bed. I have to call the dog three times before she realizes that I’m not going anywhere and neither is she. Aspen is a wonderful dog, but she’s still a bit of a liability in the blind. It’ll be nice for Amanda to have a morning without the two of us whining and complaining and falling into pits.


Original Gangster
She comes home about noon. The rain has been light but steady. She’s holding three coots by their huge, Godzilla feet. All headshot. She’s only pulled the trigger once.
How am I supposed to compete with that?

I’ll tell you how I compete with that: I have a rather grotesque and intuitive skill. I have never been taught how to skin an animal, but I can turn practically anything freshly killed inside-out and reduced to meat and desirable organs in hardly any time at all. Here’s how you skin a diver duck: Feet off, wings off at the elbow, pluck the breast a little bit, snip the skin perpendicular to the sternum, fingers in under the skin and reverse the construction of the animal. Slit under the breastplate and lever it up and clip it off. Grab the heart and gizzard. Break the leg joints and pull the skin over and through. Hooray! You now have breast meat, two legs, a gizzard, a heart, two wings (dog toys), feet for stock, and a perfectly-intact coot hat. Smells kinda gory, but it’s a great hat. Seriously. I will sell you one for $450. Plus shipping.

It’s been very slow so far this year. Opening day was a bit of a massacre, but we weren’t there. We went the next day, then the next Wednesday (I think), then Saturday and Sunday. And then the next Saturday. Yesterday the guns averaged fewer than one bird per. But the storms are coming, one’s due on Wednesday, the weather will break and the birds will come. Last Saturday I talked to eight dudes coming out of the swamp and they all said they had seen nothing, that even the Northern Sacramento Valley complexes were ghost town. There’s a new storm brewing soon, and it’s cold at dawn. Maybe soon.

But until then there’s dove. And fishing in the ocean on the 13th. And pheasant on the 14th and 15th. And turkey starting on the 17th. The sky is full of food, my friends. So is the sea.

And I still can’t believe she shot three birds with one shell. What the hell?