Integrity
You’ll know it when the time comes. There won’t be any need for official regulations or the posting of seasons—those things take care of themselves, and they always manage to make things legal for you. The time comes late in the season, every year. It will come again this year.
The week before, it will snow. Hard. For three days. And the northeast wind will push drifts deep into the troughs of the sand dunes along the barrier beach. At the height of the storm the crests of the dunes will shed spumes of sand into the wind, hard stinging grit that rides in the snow across the channel and onto the marsh.
Then the snow will taper, clouds thin, and the tides will rework their sculpture on the hardened edges of the little creeks. Salt ice cover, a foot thick, will crack and fall in the draining marsh to lie like collapsed tunnels before the rising neap floats them again. Hardened spartina will bend up under the crusting snow, trapped by the weight until group pressure pops a jagged hole and the grasses rise in a mat above the lumpy white.
That night the clouds will blow to sea, and by midnight a hard starry sky will blink down on the subdued marsh. Cold northern night, quiet radiational chiller from the land of tapered meridians, this will be the dark that comes before the time.
False dawn, light without heat, faint hint of the eastern horizon, will find you, shadows moving on the marsh. Three of you, moving slowly, bent and bundled, stepping cautiously on the grass and snow mat, picking your way along the edge and moving toward the silver twinkle of open water.
At the point of the marsh, where two of the little creeks come together to form a small bay, you will stop, thump wet burlap heavily on the snow crust. The dog, still dry and carwarm, tail-high and excited, will prance and sniff at the decoy bags, then slide down the muck to the sludge ice edge of the creek.
Your partner will drag a line of decoys—cork bodies and pine heads, black, gray and tan, big Canadas—out into the water while you scrape at the snow on the grass, looking for beaten plywood that covers the pit.
The pit. You had found the spot earlier, in the high summer when you were pramming the creek with the little guys, scouting for periwinkles and cherrystones, and you had come back in bright September with your partner to dig the pit. Four feet down, three feet back, seven wide, lined with plywood; bench and shelf, drainage hose, hinged cover and woven grassing. Hours. Hammered thumb. Fishing time given up. The pit.
Now it’s here. Ice cracks when you open the lid; inside the mud is frozen hard, like dark brown plaster spilled badly, and the bench is slick and crinkly when you step down on it. Your partner comes back for another string of blocks as you set out the gear in the blind.
Guns out of the canvas, thermos on the shelf, ammunition in utility boxes—a faint Army memory, bad, gone quickly—and then out of the pit to check the grassing. Snow has covered the storm-blown bare spots. No problem today.
It’s coming on real dawn now, and with it the wind, cold beyond gradation, a solid pressure on your chest and pure pain in your face. You can’t look into it. Look away.
Your partner is back and the decoys are all out, 19 pitching geese grouped according to his view of the order of things. Other days you’d need more silhouettes on sticks out in the flats, but not today, not this late and cold. Today is the time.
In the pit and waiting, you watch the sky. The rising wind brings clouds, gathering gray smothering the early yellow and red of the dawn and cutting off the sun before it can show itself. The cold flows deep, a dark sensation heightened by the shivering dog sitting between you. He’ll be okay; underneath he’s a furnace burning with focussed and retained energy.
So you focus yourself. You know where they will come from, and you have to look into the wind to stay with it. Up in the wind, over the little bay and the breadth of marsh, are the sand dunes, shields against the winter sea, low cover for the homing birds. They may be there right now, just outside the barrier, three feet off the water, fanned out and winging steady, coming fast and smooth downwind.
Look for them. Look for them on this last day. Hold fast into the bite of the wind, don’t miss any of it. Any of it.
For now it has come down to the simple—the clean, hard end of it. No more ducks, no more shore birds, gulls; no more easy autumn, late sails up in the harbor; no other hunters, blue herons, distant horns or light planes overhead. No more days. One more chance, two tracks on a sure vector. The time. Take all of it. Look hard, don’t turn.
There they come.
Over the dunes, half a dozen, rising. Ten, fifteen now, wings steadily beating. Twenty. Thirty, fanned out, coming in off the ocean, winging easily. More coming, fifty now.
There they come . . . there they come . . .
Here they come. Half a mile, straight at you. It had to be. You knew it, you knew it. Get your head down.
Hold now in the pit of winter, in the ending cold of it; hold now and watch them as they slide down the wind and spread out, twenty feet off the ground, coming at you. Three hundred yards. Look at them . . .
The wings set. A hundred and fifty yards and coasting. Now you must look down and count the seconds. Count them. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . .
Now. This is the time. This is the time.
Look up.