ShareThisBy DENNIS ANDERSON
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
We were on Delta Marsh, Willy Smith and I. This was 20 years ago and the season was late. Ice ran out from shore a good long distance. On that October morning, in the dark, a hint of northern lights pulsed above. We headed out, and Willy was bent over the bow, breaking ice with an oar.
We had been on the marsh every morning for a week. This would be our last day. Even Jimmy Robinson's guides had mothballed their wooden boats for the season and were closing up the old camp in St. Ambrose, Manitoba.
We reached open water. Willy's Grumman Sport Boat was flush with decoys, also the two of us and my two Labrador retrievers. Riding a howling wind, snowflakes slanted into our faces like staples.
I was on the oars and Willy was in the stern, paddling. In an hour we broke ice again, and when shore came up beneath the boat, Willy walked into the path of broken ice, spreading decoys, some onto the ice itself and some farther out, bobbing in the foamy waves.
The sun was not yet up and already bluebills _ rockets of the north, Jimmy Robinson called them _ strafed our little spread.
I shot. Willy shot.
Our barrels soon would heat up, I knew, chasing the birds.
Then it was just me, tracking the ducks with my old Winchester.
"Willy!" I said. "Shoot!"
I knocked a bird down and sent a dog for the retrieve.
Still no Willy.
Turning, I saw him face down on the iced shoreline. Faintly over the wind I heard a yell. "My back! I can't move!"
Bluebills attacked from all angles. A duck hunter's day of days! But I had two dogs, the decoys and now Willy to row back, a feat perhaps not possible if the wind grew still stronger and the cold refroze the ice channels we had broken.
I dragged the boat from the rushes. Waves slammed the narrow craft as I refloated it along the shoreline. Ice was festooned upon the tall reeds among which we had hidden. I carried Willy over my shoulder, straddling him in the stern, across the decoys. I loaded the dogs and shipped us toward the broader marsh.
Pulling hard on the oars, I tried to maintain purchase among the waves, which were abeam. Pitching and yawing, our little boat seemed overmatched. When we finally reached shore, I struggled to carry Willy to the truck, started the engine and turned on the heater.
In the distance near and far, vast flocks of bluebills angled just above Delta Marsh.
But I had only one, and Willy none.
That night the marsh froze over, the season there ended.
