Quirks

I had a wonderful dad who provided for his family. He did have one quirk, though, that caused him to leave his family every year about this time. He would drive from our home in Iowa to North Dakota. Then, he would crawl on his belly in blizzard conditions to get to his duck blind, wait quietly until he saw a flock of ducks or geese flying in the sky, call them on his duck whistle, then, when they got within firing range, he would rise up and shoot them dead.

He often asked me if I wanted to join him in this endeavor. However, I always had some excuse related to the game of basketball. Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve we always had duck and/or pheasant, along with home grown delicacies from Dad's sizeable garden. Somehow I managed to eat my share of the wild birds, even though I had nothing to do with getting them to the table.

I do remember one occasion, though, when I was a young teen learning to drive. My dad and his brother invited me to drive, while they looked for pheasants. My uncle had been a tail gunner in an airplane in World War II. He sat in the back seat behind Dad, who was in the front passenger seat. I was driving along a quiet dirt road amidst rows and rows of cornfields, when all of a sudden a torrent of excited, unrepeatable words ushered forth from the back seat. My uncle demanded that I stop the car, then he raised the shotgun out the window of the car, and shot to death a pheasant who was minding his business at the edge of a cornfield.

That experience made a lasting impression on me, and the memory is still vivid many years later. The geese in these pictures I took yesterday are smarter than those ducks and pheasants my dad used to hunt. They know that if they hang around lakes and ponds in metro Denver, no one will have a license to shoot them!