I recently glanced at a photo taken earlier this fall and was immediately flooded with good feelings. It was a picture of me and Creede, by 11-year-old black lab, sitting in a make-shift duck blind. It wasn't a particularly good day for duck hunting because it was too warm and almost dead calm. The ducks didn't fly, but my cousin and me and the Big Black Dog had a great time. We enjoyed being miles from town on a special piece of land lush with a flowing spring, especially noteworthy during the prolonged drought. While calm winds didn't keep the ducks moving, the quiet allowed us to hear quail whistle just before dawn. We heard geese honking in an apparent territorial dispute a quarter mile to the south, and we heard the crunching footsteps of a white-tailed buck that cruised through the creek bottom behind us checking for does. I'll admit we were a little frustrated with the lack of ducks, but viewing the photo gave me only positive feelings. Hunting starts as a past-time or hobby, but if you stay with it long enough, it becomes part of your being. It's not so much that you go hunting but that you are a hunter, and you learn to enjoy every minute of every day in the field. It's an old cliche, but it really does boil down to just being there. Being there was important and it fuels the memory today and will fuel the memory 20 years from now. There aren't a lot of things in my life that impact me that way. I'm really glad Dad took me hunting 40 years ago.
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