I have never experienced a duck hunt of the sort that many of my friends imagine—the drunken-bubbas-blasting-away stereotype. As most hunters will tell you, hunting is not about shooting. It’s about providing food; it’s about earning those provisions; it’s about a heightened sense of awareness. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My husband, Kevin, and I usually fly to Memphis on the Friday after Thanksgiving. We get up at four the next morning to drive an hour and a half northwest to Weiner, Arkansas, with my uncle Norfleet. This part of Arkansas is rice and soybean country, and for miles in every direction the land is parallel to the horizon. It’s dark the way only deep country can be, so dark that driving along those flat roads is like floating in space. The Muzak oozing from my uncle’s car lends a Prozacky element to the surreal drive. Then ... blam! We hit the first of many potholes that announce our proximity to Claypool’s Wild Acres. Uncle Norfleet floors the accelerator, bouncing guns and gear and dogs around madly. In the joggling distance we can see the lights of the clubhouse.
Claypool’s is privately owned, by three cousins and a family friend (their daddies bought the club from Wallace Claypool, an automobile man from Memphis, in the mid-Seventies), so it is a clubhouse, but the word gives the wrong impression. It’s really a frumpy old two-story farmhouse with a semi-attached boot shed, plunked in the middle of a big gravel driveway. Norfleet grinds to a stop beside three or four other vehicles. Labrador retrievers pop up from their backseat beds to inspect the new arrivals and sniff. The vast oxygen-rich winds that blow over the fields must smell incredible to them. I can’t smell anything in particular, but in the hours before dawn the coolness feels like spirits passing overhead.
Inside, it smells like coffee. And peanuts, and gunmetal—and rubber boots, and old tobacco, and even older men. There’s a big fire burning in the living room fireplace, and a coffeepot and mismatched mugs on the table. Hunters lounge on dumpy furniture that crackles when you lean back because of all the peanut shells behind the cushions. Others are banging around upstairs in the dormitory bedrooms. There are dead wasps on the windowsills and worn issues of Ducks Unlimited, dusty taxidermied ducks, and old sepia-toned pictures of hunters and dogs and ducks and woods. And there are maps—beautiful maps depicting Claypool’s 1,370 acres of flooded woods and reservoir, and maps showing the location of blinds: Brown’s Hole, Well Island, Snowden’s Hole, Johnny’s Hot Spot, Turner’s Hole, Mystery Hole, Fifth Avenue.
It’s almost always the same cast of characters, most of them weirdly named, southern-style: my uncle Norfleet Turner, sassy and elegant, and his earnest son-in-law Mike Robbins; Skeets Boyle, vivacious and grumpy; Toof Brown and his boys; John Riley, for 32 years the gamekeeper, a giant of a man and the terror of local poachers; and my cousin Bayard Boyle Jr., a gentle loner who hunts by himself. As the sky lightens and everyone announces where they intend to hunt, the same old sparring breaks out, as it has for at least 50 years.
“I think you’ll git some ducks at Well Island, Norfleet,” says John Riley.
“He can try,” starts Skeets.
“Not if you scare my ducks I won’t,” says Norfleet.
“Did Steve make the coffee this morning? God, it’s evil.”
“I’m going to put my waders on,” says Bayard softly, and we all tromp into the boot shed.
Green rubber waders hang on pegs along one wall. Guns, primarily 12-gauge, rest on a tall rack. Masks, camouflage jackets, and boxes of neat orange and yellow shells sit on a long bench. There’s a dead mouse in the toe of one seldom-worn wader. The shed is dingy and gloriously atmospheric, smelling of leather and wet wool and dogs held in high esteem.
“Good hunt!” yell the hunters to one another as they heave their creaking, squeaking selves into their cars. Norfleet’s chocolate Lab, Claypool, is alert now, and moving into that loopy joyousness of a dog on the hunt. John Riley is with us to help call the birds, with his Lab Shiner. We drive along a dirt road through wet trees dripping with mostly imagined water moccasins and pull over near a lean-to that houses the Argo, a muddy little all-terrain vehicle that carries us, guns, and dogs out to Well Island.
Well Island is actually a grove of pin oaks in a flooded wood. “Mallards love them pin oak acorns,” says Riley. There are decoys floating in the clearing, and blinds hidden around the perimeter. Once we are settled, the Argo stashed, the dogs hushed and shivering with anticipation, and the hunters’ guns loaded and their masks on, the water stills. Everything stills. And we wait. Very quietly. So concentrated is the quiet that the slow zigzag of a leaf falling from the canopy captures everyone’s attention. This is the true character of hunting: a Zen-like state of simultaneous excitement and calm that allows for acute observation of nature. It’s why I don’t have to kill anything in order to experience a good hunt.
Overhead, ducks fly by in flocks and pairs, and higher up, geese travel in tremendous, fluttering ribbons. Riley begins calling—a wonderful, lonely quack and trill combination—and the ducks start descending into the clearing.
“Betty!” shouts Robbins, letting everyone know she’s a hen. No one shoots. And then everything is silent again. Uncle Norfleet lights up a cigarette. I can see its glowing tip and the long black barrel of his gun peeping out from the blind.
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