The Long Ride Home by Geryl Mortensen

The Long Ride Home

Many times last year Jessie Dog, the world’s greatest Lab according to me, and I returned home after scouting or hunting waterfowl without any luck while afield…. While our closest lease was only fifty miles from home several favorite spots were two hours away….

The long drive home more often than not allowed for an hour or two of reflection on years past and how the drought was so dramatically impacting the season as few waterfowl graced our leased tanks or even the sky above…. The long drive home, which by the way, is noticeably much longer when my Benelli is as clean as she was when I left for the hunt. While my shoulder is not sore from her recoil, it is sore from all the time spent throwing a duck sized bumper to Jessie in an attempt to please her since she had no game to retrieve….Yes, the long drive home gave me time to decide that the ducks must still be north or maybe they stayed on wing and flew to where food and water was more abundant…

I will remember last year as my first and hopefully my last drought to hunt waterfowl… It was memorable in many ways…. After spending hours driving to leases and then home again, and having thoroughly proven that no amount of money spent on the finest leases available, or having the best assembled set of decoys, both ancient and new – including motorized and bubbling decoys, nor being able to work a duck call to sound as natural as any species of waterfowl that has ever flown the Central Flyway, would matter one bit if the drought prevented the migration from landing in my decoys…

All this reflection during the long drive home would lead to the same conclusion; there simply are not ducks in the great state of my birth due to the drought… My spirit found comfort in this conclusion knowing that my time, money and effort were not wasted as no other result was possible…This feeling of well being usually lasted until I pulled into my neighborhood after driving for hours arriving home just in time to see a flight of two hundred set wings and land in the protected waters of my neighborhood pond….

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