Cafeoutdoors.com: Swan Lake-Fountain Grove memories...

Oh man... good stuff! Keep it coming! I decided while hunting doves this morning... I'm gonna move ahead with the Swan Lake memories book...

Locked... talking about the misses... I remember more than once, every man in the pit down at Wayne Foster's would shoot at a high crosser and MISS the SOB... then it would fly over the next pit (80 yards away) and ONE bastage would fire ONCE and down he'd come LMFAO!!!!

Of course, our pit did the same thing to the neighbors more than once, too... gotta be aggravating as hail to miss a goose 12 shots only to see it fall to one golden BB...

I also remember vividly the time we hunted across the way from our usual pit... in a pit that was right up against a woven wire/barb wire fence... it was about 15 yards in front of the pit... Jordan Coates, who shot an old Model 11 Remington VERY well despite being WELL up there in years... shot an old single goose about 40 yards straight up over the pit... that goose fell straight down and bisected the fence where his black neck met his gray body... sliced his head and neck CLEAN off... and the head flipped back up in the air maybe 25 feet!! Comical as hell!!

Well, Jordan (it was pronounced JUR-din) would stutter when he got excited... he laughed and looked at us kind of surprised and said, "tha tha tha tha old bull goo gooo gooose, he just plain lost lost his his his head, d d d didn't he??" Well, we all just about pizzed our britches laughing at him as much as the silly goose getting beheaded by that fence!

Jordan was a helluva lot of fun to have in the pit. He shot ducks for the market back in the day... told endless stories about "e-e-ENORMOUS" clouds of ducks "using" the pinoak flats along Locust Creek in the days before the MDC came along and forked it all up. Told about the days when 25 ducks became the limit and how a lot of the old guys said PISS ON IT and hung up their shotguns ... 25 ducks wasn't enough to even fool with... and I'll never forget stories Jordan told about using English caller live decoys.. he always told how they would say DUCKY DUCKY DUCKY when they fed corn to their llive decoys in the barnyard ... the ducks would get excited about getting fed, and start quacking their heads off... so... when they took em out and staked em out for hunting, they'd say DUCKY DUCKY DUCKY and throw em a handful of corn to set em to calling like crazy ... pretty damn cool...

My granddad Gordon also market-hunted until it was outlawed (and some afterwards LOL) also told me often about hunting over live decoys, and English caller hens that pulled flock after flock out of the sky... Granddad's brother-in-law Tom Holloway was his shooting pardner ... Uncle Tom had a series of mallard hens that he trained to fly up and toll the flocks back to where he and Granddad had their decoys set out... they called em Judas ducks, cause they betrayed the wild mallards. They'd fly up, quacking their ass off, and circle back down to the set-up, and of course the wild birds followed them down.

The Judas hens would have a ribbon or string tied on their legs so the men could see which one NOT to kill when the birds came in... the Judas ducks would hit the water swimming for the blind to get out of the way of the shoooting and the falling ducks, Granddad told me... They killed a sinful number of ducks that way.. shipped em by the barrel-ful to Chicago on the train... put a card with their name and address inside the barrels... and they would get money back in the mail in a few days from the game buyers in Chicago... Imagine the trust!

But that way of doing business on a handshake was commonplace then... after the ducks left, Granddad and Uncle Tom would start in on rabbits.. shoot rabbits all winter... shipped em by the hundreds in wooden barrels on the train ... and they shot foxes and shipped them to fur buyers in Chicago, too.. 25 bucks for a fox pelt was good money when you consider that folks worked all week for far less than that (in the 20s and 30s)

I tell ya... I was born 100 years too damn late! MAN I would have given anything to have been there for that kind of life...

Post Extras