The Good Life – November-December 2019

I almost thanked them as I walked out. It was time for
something new. It was time to get back to what my family
spent most of their free time doing. But it wasn’t just
a knee-jerk response to my newfound freedom; it was
something inside me that was affected by a few hunting
trips across the state Teddy Roosevelt fell in love with.
The Badlands
I had a few friends that made yearly trips to western
North Dakota to hunt mule deer. Knowing that drawing
a muley buck tag for rifle was a long shot, I went into
Scheels and picked out a new bow. Soon I was walking
butte ridges in fresh snowfall, staring wide-eyed at the
beautiful expanse around me. I wouldn’t shoot a mule
deer that year, but the first-timer bow hunting experience
in that landscape caused me to leave the 30.06 at home
– by choice – ever since.
The Waterfowl
Duck hunting was what I enjoyed most growing up. I
even have a class ring from high school with a mallard
and shotgun shells on it. I bet you’d get expelled for
something like that now. Anyway, I loved hunting ducks.
I just wasn’t very good at it. I also didn’t hunt in a great
flyway and didn’t have many friends that did it either.
Most of my family had given up on green wings and
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focused on whitetails. So it was usually just me trudging
out to the slough and hoping to see something come
into range.
Then I moved to North Dakota.
I knew a few guys that hunted hard and were very good
at it. They had these crazy contraptions called “layout
blinds”. Us water hunters from Minnesota and Wisconsin
didn’t use them often, but in the prairie pothole regions,
you have more options for field hunting.
Dick Voight at KFGO lent me a blind the next morning I
was peering through the mesh top wondering what was
about to happen. As the sun crept over the horizon the
air filled with more ducks and geese than I’d seen in all
my falls. Again, my eyes were as wide as a wheat field
and as I shot holes in the sky, I thought to myself, “I need
to get one of these layout blinds.”
The Snow Geese
When people ask me what my favorite thing to do is,
I usually answer with “Snows.” They can be absolute
jerks 99% of the time, but when they do it right, there’s
nothing else like it. They’re the only waterfowl around
that can number in the thousands when they bomb into
your decoys. Their noise can drown out an ambulance