Duck Hunter Diaries

Kind of written out with the turning of the year. Unwilling so far to join the twittering class in carrying on about this or that contemporary event. So I turn to posting chapters from previous work. Drafts of an unpublished novel, State of Control. Excerpts from the second and third…

Nisqually River Delta, Washington State December 1979. Ducks jumped ahead of my boat, not fifty yards away. I got a blurred glimpse of flat-black puddle duck silhouette against the grey of the predawn water, straining for altitude. Then they were swallowed in the vaster black of the land beyond. I cut the outboard motor. My…

Duck Hunter Diaries: December 31, 1979. State employees are required take their personal holiday each year or lose it, so I asked for New Year’s Eve. By the time I normally wake up I was buying gas in Mount Vernon, almost a hundred miles from home… On Skagit Flats, there were too many hunters on a narrow wedge of drift-wood piled tide flat. Signs on both sides of the parking lot claimed they were private tide flats but a Game Department sign said all tidelands are public access. Who to believe?

A story (well, a rant) by a writer I like mentioned LinkedIn, stirring memories of positive interactions. One was reconnecting through the platform with a good-looking wildlife biologist from a long-ago job with the Arizona Game and Fish Department. In my reply I briefly described the memorable 1970s encounter when…

November 25, 1989 — Mar-Don Resort, Eastern Washington. In Georgia, Mama finally died, at age 87, in her sleep last Friday, four years after I last saw her; a mercy for Frances, who tended her during her decline into Alzheimer’s since it began over seven years ago. …

Monday, February 22, 1971. My Nassau Cash Book was out of pages and I missed some entries. It is past midnight and mild. The ice is breaking up on the Susquehanna, jamming in spots and causing local flooding. The little creek at the foot of the Crestview Manor hill is…

October 11, 1981 — something new this year: violently ill Friday before opening day, then lying weak and emptied on Saturday, hearing the occasional far-off ka-POW of a deer rifle from the foothills. It just doesn’t seem like the season can have opened without me. A signal that reminds me…

November is my favorite month. Despite its association with politics, which largely bore me. November is for hunting. A literate old South Carolina college professor who loved quail-hunting famously wrote “My Health is Better in November.” Cold wet weather, cutting winds, and the smell of gunsmoke restoreth my soul. — In this, my 77th November, I am too crippled-up to get out there. Mostly experience the joy of November weather from my sheltered back porch, snuggled in memories of Novembers past. None having to do with politics. Re-reading hand-scrawled hunting logs against my published Duck Hunter Diaries, I paused over…