Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/742011
102 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S could find, and just as heavy and difficult to transport. But they were duck magnets and well worth the toil. By that time, most wooden decoys had reached collector status and were priced well beyond the reach of my wallet. I read about rare wooden decoys selling at prestigious auction houses for $100,000 and more. Far out of my range. But I did buy books on them, studied the various carvers, and dreamed about waterfowling's golden age, when duck men poled skiffs with neatly stacked blocks over shallow river sloughs; rowed wooden boats on ponds and lakes to place large sets of dabblers; slid pirogues through tall marsh grass to toss blocks in secret honeyholes; and filled seaworthy craft with well- rigged strings of diver-duck decoys to ride the broad water of coastal inlets and bays around layout boats. All gone, now. Most blocks sharing the same fate as firewood. Lost forever to a plastic age of gas-powered and electronic convenience. As life always does, as it did with those hope-filled, Dirty Thirties prairie farmers, my plans to return to that long-lost decoy cache were interrupted by an unexpected job change, a devastating divorce, and a badly torn meniscus. Somewhere between all of that, I lost my hunting vest and the map. More than a dozen years passed before I returned to the lonely gravel road in Saskatchewan that was now bustling with big rigs hauling oversize equipment bound for Alberta's tar sands just across the border. The gravel road had been widened with deep borrowpits on each side, and the long shelterbelt where I had parked my truck all those years ago was gone. The roadside for miles was wiped as clean as my memory of where I was and where I needed to go. It was bird season again, almost as hot and dry as the last time I chased Huns across the Canadian prairie. Partridge and sharptails were plentiful, but I was really hunting for birds frozen in time. Two mesh decoy bags were tucked in the game pouch of my stiff Filson vest. I spent three long days crisscrossing the vast countryside trying to relocate that desolate farmstead, its haunting image indelibly imprinted on my mind. There were others painfully similar, but I could not find the stately Victorian with its weathered-gray shed and its burlap treasure of wooden blocks. Perhaps it had been bulldozed and burned to make more room for the diesel-drawn gang plows that cultivated the monotonous fields of wheat. Or maybe it was all just an apparition, the phantom imagination of a duck hunter who longed to be a part of those good old days when waterfowl once darkened the sun. I still hope against hope that someday I will once again stumble upon that forlorn, windblown farmstead. If it's still there. If the decoys are still hiding in the shed. But as the years dull my senses and erode my strength, I may have to be content to rediscover those treasured old blocks only in my dreams. n long walk back. Darkness soon overtook me. I managed to survive an encounter with the remnants of a rusted barbed- wire fence and an awkward fall over a pile of field rocks concealed in the tall grass along a drainage ditch. More than a few thousand steps were behind me when my small Maglite reflected the license plate on what I hoped was my truck a half-mile or so down the gravel road I was about to cross. I took a chance and strode toward the reflection. It was my truck all right, and the left front tire was flat. I skinned knuckles changing the tire in the dark. I always had a good sense of direction, but never the good sense to know when to stop hunting. Praying the gravel road didn't flatten another tire, I drove slowly back to the highway, then down to the crossroads that harbored an automated gas pump and the humble motel where I was staying. During the long drive back, I tried to fix the location of that ill-fated farmstead in my memory. In my room that evening I penciled a crude map on a scrap of paper I found on the rickety nightstand next to what passed for a bed. I circled the number of footsteps I took from the farmstead to the gravel road, put an X where I had parked my truck, then wrote down the mileage back to the crossroads. I tucked the map in the buttoned pocket of my blood-stained hunting vest and packed it with my gear. I would be returning home to Montana early in the morning, some 500 miles to the southwest. That night, as I tossed in restless sleep, I was haunted by wooden wraiths. Rafts of Premier Grade Masons, regal Evans, hollow-bodied Ellistons, and hand-painted Perdews bobbed and weaved on the dark and tortured waters of my subconscious. Specter-like Havre de Grace Mitchells and glass-eyed Crowells peered out at me through thread-bare burlap hidden away on dark rafters. When dawn filtered through the drapes, my eyes were as blood-red as those of the canvasback blocks I discovered the afternoon before. I was 11 when I began hunting ducks. It took me another 15 years to learn how to call them with confidence. And more years still to read the wind and water to know how to place blinds and set decoys that worked birds in close. During that time I accumulated an eclectic assortment of Tenite and other plastic decoys, mostly mallards, that were battered by hard use and in constant need of paint. In the off-season I mixed hardware-store flat latex in my attempt to match the original decoy colors. Mallard drakes challenged my meager artistic ability. At best, it was a rag-tag bunch of birds that followed me through high school, college, and well into my marriage before I replaced them with a set of oversize cork- bodied Beans. They were as close to wooden blocks as I That night I was haunted by wooden wraiths. Rafts of Premier Grade Masons, regal Evans, hollow-bodied Ellistons, and hand-painted Perdews bobbed and weaved on the dark and tortured waters of my subconscious. Specter-like Havre de Grace Mitchells and glass-eyed Crowells peered out at me through thread-bare burlap hidden away on dark rafters.