The Blind I Built on Our Farm Pond

But I could hear one motor coughing and dying and coughing again, and somebody yelling something about a spark plug, and I knew they were still out in the reeds setting decoys.

Nothing came into our pond for that first half hour. Not a thing.

The sky went gray, then pink in the east, and a few blackbirds got up out of the cattails, and that was all.

I started to think about how it would be if nothing came at all.

If I had built this thing and talked my son into it and then nothing came. I started to feel sick about it.

Grady did not say a word. He sat with his hands on the gun and his eyes on the sky over the cottonwood, the same as he used to as a boy, and he waited.

Then the sun came up over the tree line behind us, and the whole pond turned gold in one second.

The cattails, the decoys, the cottonwood log, all of it. I have seen a lot of sunrises and that one stopped me.

And out of that light, low over the cattails to the northwest, exactly where Grady said they would come, a pair of mallards came in with their wings set.

“Don’t move,” Grady whispered. I had Dovie by the collar. I could feel her shaking under my hand like a motor running. I was shaking too, if I’m honest.

The pair came over the cottonwood, swung once out over the decoys, and came back around with their feet down. The drake was in front, his green head flashing in the sun.

Grady raised the gun and swung left. One shot.

The drake folded and fell into the decoys with a splash that threw up gold water.

The hen flared off to the east, and Grady let her go. He did not even put the second shell up.

That shot rolled out across the section like a door slamming. It was the first shot of the opener for a mile in every direction. Everyone on Ronnie’s marsh heard it.

And everyone on Ronnie’s marsh knew exactly where it came from, because every one of them knew there was nobody hunting our pond but us.

“Back,” Grady said, and I let go of the collar.

Dovie hit the water in one long jump off the end of the floor and swam straight out to that drake.

She took him up gentle, the way she was trained, and turned and swam back.

She came out of the pond and up onto the end of the ramp, streaming water, and walked straight into the blind and put that greenhead into Grady’s lap like she was handing him a present.

Grady laughed. He put both hands in the wet fur on her neck and laughed out loud, and I had not heard him laugh like that since before the accident. Not once in fourteen months.

I reached over and took hold of Dovie and pulled her against me, wet as she was, and I put my face down into her neck so my son would not see mine. She smelled like pond water. She let me.

I held that dog a long time. Grady did not say anything about it.

He sat there holding his drake and turning it in the light, looking at the curled tail feathers and the white ring on its neck.

“First one of the year,” he said finally. “Dad. That’s the first duck of the opener.”

“I heard,” I said into the dog.