The Blind I Built on Our Farm Pond

Grady had gone up to the house by then. Marcy came down the bank and sat beside me on the ramp.

We sat there with the frogs starting up and the pond going pink and still in front of us.

“He’ll go,” she said. “He wants to go. He was in his room cleaning his shotgun just now. He hasn’t touched that gun since he came home.”

I nodded. I could not have said anything just then if I had wanted to.

“I’m going to have to talk to my brother,” she said after a while. “You know that. Not tonight. But I’m going to.”

“I know,” I said. “Just not before we hunt.”

We set the decoys out right after that, while the sun was still on the water, a dozen mallards and a few teal, off the point in front of the blind where the ducks had been landing.

I took Grady’s waders out of the closet that night and set them by the door, then I stood there and looked at them.

Then I put them back in the closet. He would not need them.

I set the alarm for four o’clock. I did not need it.

I was awake at three-thirty, lying there listening to the house, and at a quarter to four I heard Grady moving in his room.

The Minnesota duck opener is the last Saturday in September. On opening day shooting starts a half hour before sunrise.

That morning sunrise was a little after seven, so legal time was a little after six-thirty.

Marcy had the coffee on when I came into the kitchen. Grady was at the table in his camouflage jacket, with his shotgun cased across his knees and Dovie’s head in his lap.

Dovie knew. A dog always knows. She had seen the gun case and the jacket, and she was trembling all over, her tail going against the table leg.

We went down to the pond together in the dark. I walked and Grady rolled, and Dovie ran ahead and came back and ran ahead.

I carried the shells and a thermos. Grady carried his own gun.

At the top of the ramp he stopped. He put his hands on the rims and sat there a second.

Then he pushed off and went down the sixteen feet of ramp into that blind on his own.

He did not need the rail going down. Coming back up he would.

But going down he just rolled, slow and steady, and turned the chair at the bottom and backed into the corner where the opening was.

I sat on the bucket beside him with Dovie between my knees. We loaded up.

Grady’s gun is an old pump twelve gauge, plugged to three shells the way the law says, loaded with steel shot.

He laid the barrel across the front of the blind, over the cattails, and settled in. Then we waited, the way you always wait on opening morning, with the sky going from black to gray.

At six-thirty-five I looked at my watch and said, “That’s legal.” Grady nodded. Across the section to the west I could hear the family hunt on Ronnie’s marsh, a mile off. Motors, and somebody calling.

There was no shooting from over there yet. That surprised me. Usually by legal time the whole marsh opens up all at once, like the Fourth of July.