Best I can remember, it has happened a couple of dozen times or so in 45 years of duck hunting, and it happened again on Monday. One time it was with a pair of black ducks but all the other times were with mallards, usually single drakes like Monday’s bird.
Just when I thought the greenhead and I were having a good conversation about the realistic paint jobs and inviting positions of the decoys in my spread, he suddenly lost interest. It was like having the person on the other end of a phone call suddenly hang up to take a call from someone else. I could still taste the walnut oil from the little single-reed that Joey made when I said aloud but to myself, “he’ll be back”. I believed it enough that I repositioned putting a tree between me and where the duck headed. The tradition, or maybe superstition, of audibly saying, “he’ll be back” started in the early 1990’s back when Moultrie still had reliable wild mallards.
I’ve always hunted alone but a coworker, a dove shooter named Ray, asked if I would put him on a mallard. He wanted a mounted greenhead for his office, or man cave, or something. Dove Shooter Ray owned a piece of property and a tractor but didn’t have a boat so I felt there wasn’t much risk of losing one of my favorite hunting spots. His friends called him Crazy Ray but I never understood it since he was actually rather safe and somewhat boring. Now that I think about it, I seem to recall he was a golfer too.
Well, “Crazy Ray” did the mule trick when we met at the boat landing. After spending too many pleasant summer days on friends’ pontoon boats, he called my perfectly adequate duck boat a “death trap”. After convincing him it was going to be all right, he squeezed into some borrowed waders before I handed him a handful of steel shotshells to stuff in his pockets then we were off.
Fidgety Ray and I waited in a stumpfield until mid-morning when I finally worked a greenhead. The bird liked the call and made several circles ‘kreeking’ every time he turned towards the decoys. Things were looking promising for Ray’s man cave then the bird just pulled off and left. Confused Ray, kneeling behind a stump, turned around and looked at me with a ‘what happened’ look on his face. I’d seen mallards do this before so I reassured him, “he’ll be back.”
I wasn’t used to hearing my own voice while hunting. The words I intended to be succinct instead sounded arrogant, brash, and somewhat cocky when said aloud. If I was by myself and got stood up by this greenhead, I could easily forgive and forget. This time, though, I had a witness who had a bunch of dove hunting buddies who probably knew the duck hunters I knew. I felt exposed. All I could do was hope that I read the bird right and that he would return.
To Ray’s credit he stayed in the game. It hadn’t been 20 minutes before we heard a familiar Kreek. Our boy was 300 yards out and on a string. He wasn’t flapping. He just coasted into the decoys and the waiting Ray, kreeking the whole way. I had shot clays with Ray and knew he was a good shot so I expected him to fold his future mantelpiece. Ray stood up. The mallard flared. The gun just clicked. The shells I had given him were still in his pocket and the bird was gone for good. This time I did not make any promises about him returning.
During Monday’s lull, I thought about Duckless Ray and the mallards that have come back over the years. I wonder how many times they actually came back and how many times my ego made me forget that I had been stood up. I keep an electronic database but I wouldn’t know how to search it since I haven’t tagged or described these “he’ll be back” scenarios in any consistent way. Searching on “mallard” would eliminate probably less than half of the 40 years of entries. Going forward I need a term to describe these returning mallards. There is something unique about the way they approach the decoy spread on their return visits. I just need to put my finger on it. I was running through the options in my head when a familiar “kreek, kreek” pulled me out of my self-reflecting trance.
I looked and my newest friend was on a zipline and coming straight into the slot in my mallard decoys. He flapped a time or two but mostly glided as he dropped altitude. He was making the mallard drake kreek almost constantly waiting for landing instructions from his artificial friends. I gave him a stifled, “QUACK, Quack, ack, ack” that solidified his resolve. I had done a good job of putting the tree between us and had to take a step around to get a clear shot. He saw the movement and started a panicked climb. It was too late. I’m not usually a great shot but I covered him with the barrels and pulled the trigger. One shot was all it took.
He had acted like a wild duck, but I hurried to pick him up so I could check. He had eight long, sharp toenails. Long nails gross me out when they’re on my cashier at McDonalds but I was happy to see them on this greenhead.
The plan for Tuesday, the last day of the 2022-23 duck season, was simple but I wasn’t diligent enough. I left the hill unusually early but another group of hunters had already beat me to the island I wanted. I backed off to another point on the lake and set out my meager offerings – a half dozen each of mallards and bluebill. SCDuck’s M1A1 had given me these decoys five or six years ago as headless blobs. I burlapped them, added Autumn Wings heads then painted and rigged them with stainless steel hardware. I’ve had the mallards done for a while but just redid the bluebills. Prior to two weeks ago, they were redheads that pretty much stayed under the house. Now that they are freshly painted scaup, I wanted to let them ride the waves a time or two before they got put back in the crawlspace. I also put a pair of common merganser decoys off to one side. I made these giant decoys from Herter’s 81 duck bodies that Bogster gave me and some Homer super magnum heads.
For most of the season, I stayed true to my decade-old mission to kill new-to-me South Carolina duck species. I did take a couple of short mornings to shoot wood ducks and teal but when I had time, I went after something new.
I spent the early seasons trying to find and get under a flight of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks. I got as close as about 100 yards once, but it might as well have been 100 miles. As the weather cooled, the tree ducks seemed to get almost nocturnal so I switched my focus to trying to find a common merganser. I intensified these efforts after the brutally cold weather we had over Christmas. These biggest of mergansers don’t usually make it to South Carolina but I hoped the cold weather to our north and west would push a couple out of their normal range.
Unfortunately, I ended the 2022-23 season the same way I started it - stuck at 25 in-state duck species. My last day chances for a common merganser weren’t zero but the mallard and bluebill decoys were an admission that I didn’t have a lot of confidence either.
The boys on the other point started at daylight. They shot a handful of times. I think they killed a greenhead because a noisy hen came back to their spread. She would circle but not get close. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her tone change as she circled. She was doing what I think of as a “demanding hen” call made up of a series of staccato single quacks as she looped their spread. I could hear them calling back but it didn’t work and the hen left again.
Things got quiet for a little while. I don’t know where he came from but I looked up in time to see a single scaup parachuting into my bluebill decoys. He was backlit and I could tell it was a lesser. It took two shots to put the late season bluebill limit on the water.
Not long after, the lost hen came back to the island hunters. As before, I could hear her quacking and them calling back. She circled a couple of times before leaving, once again, without giving them a shot. This time, though, she flew out in my direction. She caught me off guard and I couldn’t reach for my lanyard without her seeing me. When she got past the decoys, I grabbed Joey’s single reed and hit her with a comeback call. She looked over her shoulder but kept going.
“She’ll be back,” I said to myself.
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