A Duck Hunting Story – True

Teal, Pintails, Mud and More Mud

By Tony Killinger

Okay, so maybe it sounded too good to be true, but you had to be there at the time. There we were, in Northern Germany, in the mid 1960’s, smack in the center of one of the busiest duck flyways in the world. There were all kinds of ducks, teal, mallards and pintails by the thousands. Occasionally the sky would be black as hundreds of Eider Geese made their way down from Siberia, spent a day or two resting and fattening on the muddy waters of the Weser River, and then they would lift off again, headed for Greece or Italy, wherever Eider’s spend their winters. All we knew is that if we could somehow negotiate a hunting lease on the banks of that nasty old river, we would be in duck-hunters heaven.

There were three of us, Jim, Ron and myself. We were all pretty good scatter-gunners and we had two young Labrador Retrievers, but we desperately needed a lease, as there was no public hunting land along the river. We belonged to the Rod and Gun Club on the Army Base in Bremerhaven, but Generals who came up from the South to hunt usually occupied the Club’s lease. Jim and I were called on regularly to accompany these bigwigs because of our dogs, but we wanted something a little better.

The prime activity of the Rod and Gun Club was our skeet range. We did a lot of shooting and we had an open invitation for locals to come out and shoot with us on weekends. Consequently, we got to rub shoulders with a lot of German hunters and they were pretty high-classed people. One of them was a Veterinarian, but his name escapes me at the moment. We asked him if he might be able to help us out and he went right to work on it. A week or so later he called Jim with the name of a guy who said he would be willing to rent us a two hectare chunk of marsh, the problem was that it was on the far side of the river. Obstacles be damned, we had our lease.

I’d better take this opportunity to outline some of the limitations we had, something, which we didn’t do at the time. First of all, the Weser is tidal water. That means that about ten hours after the river is a rushing torrent of water, it becomes a small stream lined for hundreds of yards on either side with mud. We would need a boat to cross the river and once across we would have to spend about twelve hours over there before we could come back. Now, if you’ve ever consulted a tide table you know that although the tide is totally predictable and reliable, it often doesn’t come at a convenient time of the day for hunting. Secondly, we were all rotating shift workers, luckily enough all working the same shift at the Naval Communications Station in Bremerhaven, but we had limited time available to us. You know how the Armed Forces are; they expect you to put most of your time on the job. Inconsiderate of them to say the least, but that’s the way it was.

Well, we found an old boat for sale but it was only about 12 feet long. It used to belong to a scallop fisherman who had died and his widow had no use for the boat any longer. We never did find out how he died, but we speculated later he probably was swamped in that old boat and had drowned. But, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Before we could even get to the river we had to drive to a point about 20 miles from town, catch a ferry that took us to the other side of the river and then get to our boat which we than rowed back across the river to the near side again. Before you ask, no, we could not just stay on the near side and get to our boat. The ferry actually went quite a ways downstream in its 35-minute trip. And, of course, the ferry didn’t run 24 hours a day. The way it finally worked out was that over a duck season that was nearly five months long, we probably got to hunt our muddy little paradise about 8 or 10 times a year.

Are you starting to get the picture? You have three grown men, two Labs, guns, shells and decoys literally stuffed into a Volkswagen Beetle. Two of the guys could wear regular hip boots, but one guy had to wear waders as we would normally have to get him out to pull the boat over a couple of obstructing sand/mud bars. When we finally got to the boat we would pile all this stuff in, including the dogs, and head out into the river that was running at near full tide. Oh, I forgot to mention we had one set of wooden oars to propel this safari on its merry way. Usually, about mid-river, one or both of the dogs would realize that we were on the verge of disaster and leap out of the boat, nearly upsetting it, and head for the closest bank. After a few times of this we learned to hold the dogs until we were nearing the far bank and then encourage them to bail out. It was a lot easier rowing with 170 pounds of dogs making their own way. We toyed with the idea of teaching them to tow us with ropes, but it never developed.

Over the three years we had that lease we enjoyed some spectacular days but it is one particular hunt that I want to tell you about. Generally, things were pretty reasonable in Germany in those days, but one exception to that was shotgun shells. We could have ammo shipped in from the American Zone, but by the time you added shipping costs, hazardous materials limits, etc., it just was too pricey. We launched into one of our maximum efforts to solve this situation and we thought we had the perfect answer; reloading. As I mentioned before, we also did a lot of skeet shooting, so this new endeavor was going to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

Components were no trouble. We could buy Winchester AA hulls and primers from the big Rod and Gun Clubs down south. Gunpowder was a different story. Here we faced the same limitation we had with factory loaded shells. We tried finding local suppliers and finally did come up with a reasonable substitute for American powder. It was called Super Balastite M. We learned later it was the explosive agent for German torpedoes and it burned fast and hot. The problem was that we were using a Lyman Easy Loader and the amount of German gunpowder required for a three-dram equivalent shell was about half a teaspoon. We had to have a machinist turn us a special bushing on a lathe. About once a week the three of us would get together and load shells. If we hunted and didn’t shoot skeet, we could get by with about four boxes of shells each. The same was true if we shot skeet and didn’t hunt, but when we were able to do both we had to double up on our assembly line. To the uninitiated, that’s about 600 shells to reload. Usually we would set up shop in a storage room that was located in the basement of each apartment building. One guy would deprime and reprime each shell case, one guy would load the new components into the newly primed case and the third guy would keep the shot and powder hoppers full and open the beer. I probably should mention here that occasionally our assembly line would develop a glitch and some vital component would be overlooked. It is really disheartening when you have a flight of ducks coming in, heading straight for your decoys, wings locked, flaps down and the pull the trigger on your trusty old Remington only to hear a resounding click, or even worse, a slight pop. That meant you had forgot the powder and there was a plastic shot-cup lodged half way up the barrel. I think that is why the hunting God’s made cattails with such long, straight stems.

It was after one such evening had taken place in my own storage room that I was left to do the clean up. I had opened a window to let out the smoke and get rid of the telltale aroma of the local brewery’s finest that I had a fairly serious accident. The window opened inward and the outside was covered with a coarse mesh screen. I was pushing the window closed when my right hand slipped off the frame and onto the glass. The glass broke, my hand went through the jagged edge but could not go much further because of the steel mesh and my wrist just sort of bounced around on broken glass shards. Well, the result was that I cut the tendons to my right hand and lost a little blood before I could make it upstairs and give my wife the good news. The Army hospital was just up the street, so off we went. It was a fairly simple operation to stitch the tendons back together, but it was apparent there was going to be some significant bandaging required. I made a subtle suggestion to the doctor that he might consider leaving my index finger outside the cast, but I think he caught a stronger hint from my wife, who was standing behind me shaking her head in objection. He encased the entire forearm and hand.

Now, this left me in somewhat of a predicament. I couldn’t zip up my pants with one hand; say anything of firing a shotgun. At work I had to have one of the guys I worked with refasten my belt and make sure my fly was shut before returning to the shop. I remember we had some kind of an official dinner while I had that clumsy club attached to me, and the wife of my division officer, a world-class beauty, offered to cut my steak for me. Don’t think I didn’t take some razzing about that for a while either.

As fate would have it, we had one of those rare occurrences when work, time, tide and the ferry boat schedule all coincided and we all decided we would overcome this one, small inconvenience of my right hand being useless and go hunting. This was how it was going to work. I was going to take the near blind on the river. The ducks came in lower and slower there. I would shoot left handed with a 20 gauge instead of shooting right handed with my 12 gauge as I normally did. Jim and Ron would be in the far blind, thirty yards or so to my rear, but we would be virtually isolated for all practical purposes. The softer recoil of the 20 gauge would allow me to use my right arm as a simple cradle and all would go well, at least it sounded logical.

The inevitable fly in the ointment came as they unloaded me in the first blind. I had my dog, my lunch, my borrowed gun, a thermos of hot tea laced with rum and the guys even put out the decoys for me. Then, having secured me in my own little sanctuary, they left with the boat for the other blind. The ducks didn’t start to fly right away, but it couldn’t have been a half-hour later that the first flight showed up. It was then that the shock hit me; I had no shells. I had left them in the boat. We ended up spending most of that day tossing and retrieving shells from the water, the mud and the marsh grass. Ron and Jim would throw them as accurately as they could, but invariably I would end up slogging around grasping for that precious ammo while ducks flew so close to me I could have batted them down with the stock of the gun.

Believe it or not, we shot upwards of sixty ducks that day. Naturally, that is just the fun part of a duck hunt. We also had to pick and clean upwards of sixty ducks. I had a built-in excuse for not doing my share, but I did try to help.

About two weeks after that memorable hunt I had to report in to the doctor to have my cast replaced. The doctor immediately asked me if I had been doing any hunting or shooting and I boldface lied to him and said “no”. I said no just about the same time as he finished slicing through the old cast with one of those vibrating saws. The cast was full of duck feathers. He scowled at me; I suppose I looked sheepishly away, aware that I’d been caught. He must not have been too concerned, or perhaps he was just resigned that I was going to hunt anyway because when he put on the new cast he left my trigger finger exposed.

When we left Germany we were fortunate to be able to sail on the SS United States, which made regular stops in Bremerhaven. When she leaves port and heads for England, she makes her way into the Weser River estuary and finally out into the North Sea. You could see her quite well from the duck blind. I’m told that the day we sailed was an excellent duck day. Jim and Ron fired a salvo in honor of our departure, they said. More than likely it was a flight on pintails that received the honors.