Memorable Christmas days spent afield
If things go close to plans — something personal history suggests seldom proves to be the case — dawn this Christmas Day finds me standing beside an aromatic tree, drinking a cup of hot coffee, thankfully admiring a couple of presents wrapped in shimmering shades of green, red, blue, purple, snowy white, chestnut and orange.
My feet are a little damp and cold. They always seem to be when standing in thigh-deep water despite being sheathed in a pair of allegedly waterproof chest-high waders.
That Christmas tree is a big, bell-bottomed cypress that stands on the edge of a shallow patch of open water in a flooded swamp in a Southeast Texas river bottom. If I’m lucky, by the time the sun broaches the horizon, I’ll have had a couple of opportunities at green-headed, chestnut-breasted, orange-legged mallards parachuting through the cypress and maybe one or two of the wood ducks that knuckleball through the flooded timber like the psychedelic feathered bat/birds they are.
And, inevitably, thoughts will turn to memories of past Christmas mornings spent afield. For some reason, Christmas hunts seem to have invariably produced more than their share of eventful and vividly recalled experiences.
Mostly, that’s because they almost always have been wonderfully successful in terms of quality of the hunting experience and quantity of game seen or taken. A lot of that has to do, I’m convinced, with us Christmas Day hunters pretty much having the world to ourselves. Few hunters — almost none who has young children and darned few who aren’t unmarried (or soon will be) — can get away with spending Christmas morning anywhere except at home or would want to. Fewer hunters afield means less competition for prime spots and a more natural movement of game. The result is a much higher quality hunting experience. Weather or not?
But Christmas hunts can be memorable for other reasons. Weather is the most common one. Christmas weather in Texas can range from still and sultry to stormy and fiercely cold, sometimes both on the same day. And some of my most memorable Christmas Day hunts have weather at their heart.
Any hunter afield in Texas on Christmas Day 1983 remembers it. It was the coldest day of the year, coming three days into what would be the most severe siege of freezing weather to hit the Texas coast in almost a century.
It was 18 degrees when we launched the aluminum boat that morning. There were no other trucks or trailers in the parking lot. We broke skim ice all the way down the bayou, and when we turned into the narrow ditch that cut through the coastal marsh, the boat rode up and onto the ice. Water in the ditch, protected from the moderating effects of wind, had frozen what looked to be 2 inches thick. We backed off and used the boat like an icebreaker, ramming our way down the ice-carpeted waterway.
The pond we hunted was covered by a solid sheet of ice. We used the butt of our shotguns to break a path across the pond to the tall clumps of cordgrass we used as a blind. To set decoys, we created a patch of open water by using gun butts to break a 20-yard-or-so circumference circle in the ice, then break chunks and slide them under the ice. The water began to refreeze almost immediately, and the slight slap of water on the decoys from the north began building “skirts” of ice on the plastic ducks. Through the morning, the decoys began to list and sink from the weight of the accumulating ice.
We sat hunkered in the cordgrass, shivering despite wearing everything we owned.
But the ducks! The massive arctic front had frozen everything to the north, forcing waterfowl to move south in search of open water and something to eat. I remember flocks of 30-40 mallards arcing out of the leaden sky, wings locked a half-mile out, aiming for the only semi-open water in the marsh. Squads of pintails and so many huge flocks green-winged teal that they seemed like those swarms of blackbirds that move like smoke over the prairie. Icebreaker to the rescue
We picked our shots. The Labrador tried to retrieve, but after a couple of episodes of slipping and skidding on the ice, she demurred. We had to bust paths through the ice to retrieve our birds.
When we got back to the boat after the hunt, we were dumbfounded to see the effects of our nighttime ice-breaking efforts — the edges of the boat’s aluminum hull had been gouged and scratched almost to the point of wearing through.
There have been other such Christmas hunts made memorable by the weather — 1989, when the temperature was even colder than ’83; 2004, when it snowed, and sleet one Christmas in the early ’70s. And dozens when we swatted mosquitoes on Christmas Day.
But if I had to pick the most memorable Christmas hunt, the choice would be easy.
Long ahead of dawn on that Christmas Day in the mid-1970s, two companions and I launched my 14foot aluminum flatbottom powered by a 9.5-horse Evinrude outboard down the ramp at Fort Anahuac Park and motored south, out of the mouth of the Trinity River and into the upper reaches of Trinity Bay. Our destination was one of several small sand bar/islands off the mouth of the river, where we set duck decoys in the wigeongrass-covered shallows — three-dozen or so snow goose and Canada goose decoys on the sand and used a huge dead tree that had washed onto the island as our blind.
We had a spectacular morning. Early, ducks poured into the decoys with abandon, and we soon had our 10-bird limits.
Then we waited on the geese. Snow geese and Canada geese would filter out of feeding fields and toward the bay around mid-morning, coming to the little islands to rest and ingest some of the islands’ grainy sand which the birds needed as grinding grit in their gizzards.
While waiting for the geese, an ominous black wall that had grown along the northern horizon swept over us, and a blasting north wind raked the island and churned the bay. Geese decoyed like they were on a string. The always did on those islands.
I got a little worried when we were loading the boat, noticing just how rough and windy it had gotten. I got a lot more worried when, with the boat crawling into the north wind, the out- board’s propeller clipped one of the jungle of sunken trees and other flood-carried flotsam littering the shallows at the mouth of the river. The impact broke the motor’s shear pin, the inch-long piece of metal rod designed to break to prevent damage to a prop or drive shaft when the prop hits an unyielding object.
No problem, I had a couple of spare shear pins. We threw out the anchor and secured the line to the bow so the boat would face into the wind and waves while I unbolted the little motor, hauled it aboard, removed the prop, replaced the shear pin and remounted the motor. It was hard, wet and unwieldy work in a pitching boat, and I feared dropping it over the side while wrestling with it.
I broke the second shear pin about 100 yards later.
Now, we were in trouble. No more shear pins, and there was no way we could paddle the overloaded boat flatbottom into the growing north wind and the increasingly rough waves. We were dead in the water. No chance for rescue by other boaters; there weren’t any out on Christmas Day. No one would miss us for hours. We already were having to bail water that was splashing into the boat.
We frantically searched for anything that might serve as a shear pin. A nail. Any piece of metal that might fit the slot in the prop and the hole in the drive shaft. Double duty for shotgun
My eyes fell on my shotgun — a Remington Model 870 Wingmaster. There are two pins that hold the trigger mechanism to the receiver. I punched them free with the tip of my pocket knife. The smaller of the two pins was a perfect fit.
We limped back to the ramp, where, once on safe ground, we agreed that we had just been part of a Christmas Miracle. At least it was our Christmas Miracle.
I still have that indestructible outboard motor. It powers the boat that transports me to the cypress-rimmed opening in the swamp, where I’m celebrating this Christmas morning.
In the boat, there is a brightly colored box. It holds about 20 shear pins.