Another Morning On The Hard Scrabble
The alarm goes off at 5 o’clock this morning, playing Missed The Boat by Modest Mouse. There’s something about having Modest Mouse as your alarm that gives way to a relaxed feeling when you wake up. I was laying there for about 1o minutes listening the the deluge outside contemplating whether or not I felt like heading out to the swamp. My curiosity of whether the ducks would be on the move early because of the crappy weather got the best of me. I drove over to my father’s house where he greeted me with a hot cup of coffee and a deposition of everything he hand been thinking over the night before, regarding decoy placement, wind direction and water levels. He has a way of over thinking things a bit which I can relate to in terms of fish. We sat and drank coffee for a bit watching the news and discussing duck and goose flight paths. Around six we made our way out to the blind, once there we set up the decoys exactly how my father had dreamed the set up the night before. Sitting there in anticipation three dark objects fly across in front of us about 1oo yards away. My dad hits them with four loud quacks, as they turn to investigate I pick up the calling using a combination of feeding chatter and low raspy quacks lulling then into a false sense of security. They make the final turn falling out of the sky dangling there legs underneath them. The silence of the marsh is then broken by what turned out to be our bad shooting, of the three we only dropped one. Not ten minutes later a lone mallard drake comes out of no where with every intention of landing in the decoys. Luckily I was quick enough on the gun to get him before he realized what was up. After that we spent the morning shooting the bull about fishing and hunting, with my dad throwing in fatherly advice and life lessons. All in all it was another successful morning on the hard scrabble.
