The Wives Blind in the Flooded Timber

Limits

Five guns went up together. When it was over, there were five greenheads on the water and one hen, and Dixie was already off her stand and swimming. Sherri lowered her gun and stood there with her breath smoking in the cold air. She did not say anything for a long time.

Then she sat down hard on the bench and put her hand over her mouth. “Thirty-one years,” she said through her fingers.

Nobody said anything. Pam put her arm around her. Donna poured her a cup of coffee out of the big thermos and set it in her hands.

The Arkansas limit is six ducks a person, no more than four mallards, and only two of those can be hens. We shot our limit, all five of us, by eight fifteen.

I want to be fair about that. I do not want it told that the women in my blind were better shots than the men in the club. Some of them were and some of them weren’t. Carla missed every bird she shot at for the first hour and laughed about it the whole time.

What happened was simpler than that. We sat still. We did not overcall. I had set the decoys with an open landing hole in the wind, the way my grandfather taught me. And the ducks that morning wanted water that had not been shot over since November. The club shot eleven birds that morning among nine men. I know because Danny told me.

We walked out at eight-thirty with our ducks on straps over our shoulders. Sherri carried hers in front of her like she was bringing in a casserole. When we got to the trucks on the levee, there was a man standing at the fence line across the ditch, in his waders, watching us.

It was Gene Whitley. Pam’s husband. He looked at her for a long time, and she looked back at him.

“Morning, Gene,” she said.

“Morning,” he said. He looked at her strap of ducks. “You get your limit?”

“I did.”

He nodded slowly. Then he did something none of us expected. He touched the brim of his cap to her. “Your granddaddy would be proud,” he said, and he turned and waded back into the club timber.

Pam stood there with her mouth open. Then she put her ducks in the back of her truck and got in and sat there a long time with the engine off.

Nobody said a word about the club on the drive out. Not that morning and not any morning after. We had agreed on it in my kitchen, all six of us, before the season ever started. We were not going to gloat. We were going to hunt.