You ready, pal?

If you’d asked me ten years ago whether I’d ever hunt ducks, I’d have scoffed. There’s a certain undesirable stereotype that accompanies waterfowlers and, truth be told, it’s not without some merit. The first time I went duck hunting, it was in North Idaho, on the Kootanai National Wildlife Refuge. (Yes, most refuges are open to hunting.) We got skunked, but on the way home the fellow who was giving me my intro to the sport noticed a few mallards in a farmer’s pond on the side of the road. He rolled down the window, popped in a three-and-a-half-inch shell—the heaviest 12 gauge load—and fired. The roar inside the cab of the pickup left me nearly deaf for two days. The shot crippled every duck on that pond and confirmed my every expectation.

A year later, the French Filmmaker Jacques Perrin released his award-winning documentary Winged Migration. This probably wasn’t Perrin’s intent, but the hunting scenes in that film were what inspired me to try again. In them, the sun rises over Southwest marshland and the calm morning is broken up gunfire and all manner of waterfowl twirling out of the sky. Those few minutes were raw and brutal, but also beautiful—in short, how things really are. Hunting magazines—yes, I read them by the dozen—are fond of the struggle between man and nature. This struggle is most overtly summed up in the chestnut scenario that is both the hunter’s worst nightmare and wettest dream: The (choose one) _bear, lion, moose, rabid raccoon_ is charging and you only have a split second to raise your weapon, fire, and save your friends’ lives. Seriously, some variation on this theme is in virtually every issue of every hook-and-bullet rag. In reality, the man-vs.-beast storyline rings hollow these days because the beasts have been pretty well subjugated. But in the process of subduing nature, we also removed ourselves from it. We outsourced our slaughter and hid and sanitized the whole process to the point where eating meat no longer requires the acknowledgment of an animal’s death. And in essence, that’s why I hunt: Not to struggle against nature, but against the banality of modern artifice. And because it’s damn tasty. And because I like sitting next to Danger and watching the sun come up.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying, Duck season opens on Saturday. From now until January, we’ll be including more on bird hunting than you probably care to know. Hopefully you’ll come along for the ride, or at least ogle curiously from the sidelines like my vegetarian girlfriend. Give us that much and we’ll do our best not to sound or act crazy.