Larry married into the farm when he was 21, and fell in love with it, too. By the time I arrived two years later, my dad had already staked out a dove field. In the South, though, dove season rarely holds anyone’s attention much beyond opening day gatherings that are usually more about the gatherings than the birds. Ducks can be a different story.
In the far northwest corner of Louisiana, the farm is far removed from any of the major flyways, but was still spotted with cypress sloughs that somehow escaped the plow, and an oxbow lake cut off long ago from the meandering Red River. And there was the river itself, too, where he hunted from stick-up blinds on the sandbars with young, hard-charging, like-minded friends.
With the advent of more children and dogs and fewer ducks on the river, Larry shifted his focus back to the cypress sloughs with their fluorescent-green carpets of duck moss and ancient trees that seem to move when the breeze stirs the Spanish moss hanging from them.
Opening day of duck season there is much like dove season. While there’s a passing chance at the resident wood ducks, it’s more about gathering afterwards for gumbo, red beans and rice, and a cold beer on a warm day when the first frost is still sometimes weeks away.
It was Larry’s happy place, and he shared it with four generations of family and friends. What began as one duck blind barely big enough for the two of us is now four blinds that can each hold four grown men. Except for Larry’s blind. It’s tailor-made for two people. And for the last several seasons, that’s usually been him and his friend Marty.
Sometimes weeks would go by without either one of them firing a shot. Sometimes because there just weren’t any ducks, other times because they would be in the middle of a story or a good laugh and just not scanning the skies like their younger selves might’ve been.
Larry passed away in the summer at the age of 84, and his passing affected people far beyond our family. Like his hunting family.
On opening day, Marty would hunt Larry’s blind with a younger member of the group, and again, with no expectation of seeing any ducks. They brought back six and were the only blind to fire a shot.
The next Saturday, Marty was out of town, so Joe and his young son Mark Paul drew Larry’s blind, and Mark Paul downed his very first duck on the wing—a fine wood duck drake, in Larry’s blind.
That Saturday was also opening day in Arkansas, where my wife and I were settling into our blind with our youngest, Grace. She shoots a Winchester Model 12 20-gauge pump handed down to her by her granddad Larry, who shot it well as a young man on his way to several trap and skeet titles.
There wasn’t much water in our woods, and not many ducks in the air. But at least we were there, at the beginning of a new season, with each other. Larry taught us the value of those simple pleasures. And Grace inherited his shooting eye, too.
She saw them first. Two mallard drakes sailed in from behind us without a sound and were already leaving when, boom, the trailing bird tumbled. So I moved to the lead bird and was almost on it when, boom, it cartwheeled into the middle of the decoys.
“Did you shoot?” I asked my wife.
“No, did you?”
“No.”
Grace didn’t say a word. She just watched us figure it out. She had rolled them both. A true, clean double on greenheads with two shots and one shuck of her granddad’s old Model 12 shotgun.
We all experience loss in this transitory life. And we all grieve in different ways. Maybe we even see things sometimes that aren’t there, just because we need to.
But for two weekends at the start of this season, there was no denying that our ringleader and elder statesman was still with us, in his blind, and in his granddaughter’s hands, glistening eyes and knowing smile.
