Chasing Pintails

 

The Portland, Oregon area isn’t known for its harsh winter climate, but at least once a year we’d get a brief bit of real weather.  A few inches of snow and a week-ish below freezing—not enough to winterize your house, but it would freeze up the standing water.  It was in the middle of one of these cold snaps that I had the fortune to draw a reservation for the Johnson unit of Sauvie Island Wildlife Area; good fortune in that it is the most productive unit in the whole area, bad in that everything was frozen.  The draw was such a coveted one that we couldn’t pass it up, but we were still disappointed in anticipation as we rolled up to the check station. 

I’ve had many hunts that started with certainty of success only to be dashed.  I’ve known a few hunts that have fulfilled their high hopes, and I’ve gone out knowing it’d be lame and been proven bitterly right.  However, this is the only hunt to date where the fourth possibility popped out of the waterfowling bingo cage.  We walked out with our usual load of two or three dozen decoys, hoping Sturgeon Lake would be open, but the snow on the ice glared in the moonlight.  We made a half-hearted attempt to break a hole, placed a wigeon and five pintail decoys in the refreezing puddle, and put no effort into a blind in front of our buckets.  The forms having been fulfilled, we settled into conversation as the legal shooting time rolled by. 

All that jaw flapping snapped to an end as the birds started funneling past.  We were on the front edge of a 65 yard wide semi-flooded cutting through a smallish bit of woods that sits between the refuge and the river, and as luck would have it, this gap must have been connecting two of the few pieces of open water.  The whole Island was silent except our zone as we had a steady stream of birds pass by. 

Not only had the ice concentrated the ducks, but it also turned their habitat into ours.  Catching a crippled bird on the ice is not a hard proposition.  Once we realized this, we started stretching out more, taking advantage of some of the more marginal shots we would normally not even think of.  And getting cocky. 

I finally was hoisted upon my own petard by a passing flight of pintails at 55-60 yards.  I took the shot, and a limit of pintails, my only scotch double to date, glided down about 100 yards from us.  Vasilios and I jogged over, each marking a bird for the easy retrieve.  I can’t speak to the details of his experience; I can only say his hen was as alive as my drake and under a tangle of willows and blackberries.  My drake was quite mobile, scooting with surprising alacrity through the woods, as I stumbled after with an embarrassing clumsiness for a land-based predator (thank goodness all the other mammals had already been scared off by the shooting and weren’t watching me with scorn).  At last he found a deadfall to hide behind.  What followed was the classic cartoon chase around the log one way, then the other, with periodic pauses to glare and wheeze.  He was too fast to catch, too close to shoot, and the brambles around the log were too thick to jump. 

My higher brain function finally showed up, and I threw my gun on top of him, pinning him long enough to scramble around (slipping) and make the retrieve. 

Upon returning to our blind, Visilios handed me what was left of the hen.  “Here.  Uh, her head came off.”  Guess we all learned lessons that day.