Rookie Mistake
Published in the Central Oregon Writers Guild 2024 Literary Collection, available on AmazonWhere I grew up in California, meat came from the supermarket wrapped snuggly in plastic wrap on Styrofoam trays. The only blood I was apt to see after Dad got done barbecuing would turn out to be A1 sauce.
I’d never fired a gun before finding myself in Alaska with a man who grew up hunting. My boyfriend Per was eight when he first went into the woods with his dad. Nine when he shot his first deer for the family freezer. Shortly after that, his dad—more comfortable on a boat than in the woods— didn’t see why he should traipse all over the hills when his young son was perfectly capable of shooting a deer and hauling it back himself. From then on, the Elderly Gentleman stayed at home or in the harbor while Per hunted happily on his own.
When Per was eleven, his mom died. Rather than stay in town alone all summer under the alleged supervision of his wild older sister—the one who became an unwed mother at sixteen—he started going out on the Zarembo, the halibut boat his dad skippered. His favorite job was sitting in the bow shooting seals with a .22. All the halibut fishermen hated them. The seals would lurk behind the boat and snatch halibut off the hooks as the men brought them laboriously up from the depths. Fishing was their livelihood. Stolen fish in the summer meant hard times ahead in the winter.
So, there I was, twenty-one years old, shooting his aunt’s vintage .16-guage shotgun in the general vicinity of a makeshift target in a gravel pit out the road. Love makes you do weird things. I used his aunt’s shotgun on my first duck hunt and learned the hard way why you never let mud get in the gun barrel before firing.
After destroying his aunt’s shotgun, may it rest in peace, and almost dying in the process, I was forced to lug around his old .12-gauge shotgun which was as long as I was tall and weighed almost as much. It had the uncanny ability to grow even heavier the longer I carried it, so by the time I was aiming toward real live ducks, I could barely lift that old cannon, much less hold it steady.
Unless I scared a duck to death with the gun’s loud blast, they were safe from me. Not so safe from the former Marine sharpshooter, dropping a bird with each shot as long as they were in range.
After several morning excursions during which I blasted more holes in the sky than ducks, I was excited to take the skiff out to Blackberry Bay for the weekend. We had permission to stay in an old cabin belonging to the descendants of bootleggers who used it as a waypoint in their smuggling operation. You could see why they liked it. Those hardy locals could dart in and out of the shallow waterways to escape the Coast Guard’s speedier boats and hide out in the cabin, tucked out of sight unless you knew where to look. The bootleggers had been gone for fifty-some years and the migrating waterfowl had taken over.
The next day, we woke in the cabin before dawn. Well, Per woke before dawn without the need for an alarm clock—and after he threw the covers off, I woke as well, the cold air slapping my warm body as effectively as a pail full of cold water. We didn’t light the Coleman lantern and spoke only in whispers. Ducks have sharp eyesight and sound carries over the water. There was no time to brew coffee but the cold air and adrenalin were a good substitute for caffeine. Closing the cabin door quietly behind us, we crunched stealthily across the frosted tide flats to a vantage point we’d reconnoitered the day before. A side channel took off from the slough and formed a shallow pond ringed by grass and brush. Ducks liked to spend the night there as they migrated south. We’d be waiting to ambush them at first light; save a few the arduous flight south.
We made ourselves comfortable in our makeshift duck blind, or as comfortable as one can be perched on slimy rocks nestled beside clumps of wet brush. Per figured we had fifteen or twenty minutes to wait until first light, when the ducks would take off and it was legal to shoot. We passed a flask of brandy back and forth, hoping the antifreeze would provide some warmth, or at least numb the discomfort.
The ducks felt no such distress. They didn’t care that it was still dark and the water barely above freezing. They performed their morning ablutions with abandon: splashing, eating, checking in with one another, debating the day’s intended flight path. They made as loud a racket as a bunch of youngsters roughhousing in a warm pool.
They had no idea we were there, listening and lying in wait.
It was so exciting!
I waited on pins and needles as slowly, imperceptibly, the sky lighted. Then all of a sudden, the ducks’ raucous cacophony erupted in a crescendo and they burst from the pond flying low as they passed. I raised my shotgun and heard Per fire.
Three shots. Three ducks plummeted from the sky. The rest gained elevation and flew south in a panic. As suddenly as it started, it was over.
Per had risen to his feet to take his last shot. Now in the sudden silence, he looked down at me, puzzled. “Why didn’t you shoot?”
I burst out crying. “I forgot to take the safety off.”
