Cold brings memories of the hunt

Local columnist

link Karl Terry

This time of year, especially on a cold foggy morning, my thoughts drift back to a duck blind on a playa lake.

I didn’t grow up hunting ducks. We mostly hunted quail around Portales, but I learned how to duck hunt quickly in my early 20s.

I had moved to Tucumcari and was in a job where I had a lot of time to get outdoors. I fished at least three days a week in warm weather and it was hard not to be out doing something when the lakes started to freeze and the snow began to fly.

I became acquainted with my buddy Terry because we both had somewhat flexible and open work schedules and for a couple of years we took full advantage of the opportunity. It started out with a group of four or five of us going out for a duck hunt one morning; but soon it was just Terry and I willing to get up and freeze our tails off.

We built blinds on three or four different lakes where we had permission and we began to assemble a flock of plastic decoys to work over. Terry had grown up hunting ducks in Minnesota and was well schooled in waterfowling. I was like a sponge soaking in every minute of it and getting better and better every morning we went out.

The romance of constructing a good blind in just the right site and being able to effectively call in ducks or geese to your decoys was indescribable. Who knew the whisper of those wings cutting the crisp morning air could excite a person so.

The Duck Commanders, before they became a Duck Dynasty, used to claim they hunted every day of duck season. Terry and I never bragged that we did that but we probably weren’t far from it, especially if you gave us extra credit for the days we went morning and evening.

Our mornings usually started at 4:30 at his house where he was taking hot biscuits out of the oven when I arrived. After breakfast we headed out in his Bronco and went to whatever blind we figured would be most productive. We would hunt there until 9 a.m. or so if things were going right; if not we left by 8 a.m. and hit several potholes and tanks where we knew we could jump shoot birds if they happened to be there.

One day Terry confided that his ex-wife, to whom he owed back alimony and child support, had located him and it was time to leave. And so it was that he left quicker than a wary mallard drake flaring away from a frosted up set of dekes.

I learned a lot about waterfowl from Terry but I always wondered if I got the whole story about his past. It was fun though, and I’ll never forget those days of hunting.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]