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

I have some very fond memories of the family and friends that we shared our fortune with back then. My Mom had two long-legged uncles from Brainerd, MN that came down every year for mebbe 20 years for 3 weeks at a time to hunt MO's bounty. They hunted for geese, ducks, deer and quail the entire time. NOBODY could keep up with these fellas and they were somewhere in their fifties when we did all that. Ron and Lenard Lundbergh were their names. Lenard was my favorite great uncle on my Mom's side.

Uncle Hugh on my Dads side, his uncle, my great uncle. These two men went out of their way to teach me and take me hunting. I was so young when Uncle Hugh first came down to hunt I called him "Uncle Human." That was not far off the mark my friends. He was prolly 60+ years older than me. He hunted until his eyes warn't no good anymore.

Lenard, my Dad and my bro K-Mac witnessed my 2 buddies and septuple a flock of geese one morning. While we fired 9 shots, they only heard 7, and all the geese fell to the ground. Scout1, you and I hunted that same field that Merle Young owned.

I recall hunting after I worked a night shift at John Graves Foods back in '72 and hunting with Uncle Lenard. We would hunt until mebbe 10-11 AM and then I had to get some sleep. Dad had flooded a pool adjacent to FG refuge which he had planted in corn. So we had standing flooded corn, and Lenard and I would take turns shooting singles as the mallets pitched in. Like clockwork, every 10-15 mintues a single would cup and we'd fire one shot to take the bird. Screw FG, we had the best hunting you could imagine back then.

I could tell you dozens of stories of the times we hunted those birds and that magic place. My Dad, who eventually became a victim of Aldzheimer's, so enjoyed in his later years sitting around with us boys on the holidays re-telling all those stories of the days of the goose and duck hunting we did back then. The wimmen folk just left us alone as we recanted the same stories over and over.

KMac, aka Kevin, who was a little younger than Scout1 was even more ate up than me. We called him the "Indian." Forker could run 5 miles after a deer, wrestle it to the ground and "try" to cut it's throat...but that's another story entirely.

Scout1, I am who I am because of all this.

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