Through the past brightly
Ducks on a pond, ducks on a pond Very pretty swimming round — The Incredible String Band from “Ducks on a Pond”
I like ducks. They sport beautiful plumage, they swim, they have lots of cute babies that trail behind them in the water and they fly really fast — 60 mph. The only predator they have to fear (besides humans), are Peregrine falcons because they can dive at 240 mph. They slam into their quarry, midair, like a brick traveling at 200 mph.
When I was a kid, my father hunted gamebirds My father didn’t hunt pheasants because he thought they were too easy and he didn’t deer hunt because some damn fool fired off a round in his direction one time even though he was a sixfoot tall biped dressed in hunter’s plaid. His favorite targets were ruffed grouse (“pats”)— and ducks.
My father was a WW2 combat vet. After the war, my mother gave him a silver ID bracelet that read: “Don Negus VFW.” I was sitting on his lap one day when I was 4 and I asked him what VFW stood for.
He didn’t skip a beat. “Very Fine Wing-shot.”
Which, coincidentally is the title of his biography that appeared in this paper, in serial form, six years ago. He liked hunting “pats” because they burst out of thickets like they’d been fired out of a mortar and he liked ducks because they flew so god-awful fast. My dad appreciated a challenge.
My father took me fishing many times but only a few times hunting. I accompanied him on one partridge expedition. My father carried his 12 gauge and I, my Crossman air rifle. At one point. as we stalked through a cedar swamp, a wood cock, also known as a timber doodle, burst from cover in front of me.
“Take him!” my father shouted.
“Oh, right, ” I replied. “I’m shooting a lead pellet the size of a match head at a bird not much larger than a robin that’s corkscrewing through the air like a drunken butterfly on speed.”
Or something like that.
He only took me duck hunting once. I remember slogging behind him through acres of brackish water. The trees were stark and black and the water was covered in a pale green, almost luminescent film. “Duck weed,” he explained..
“Duck weed,” I repeated to myself. Given our watery environment, it could easily have been called “beaver weed,” “muskrat weed” or even “turtle weed,” but we were hunting ducks.
Usually when my father went duck hunting, it was with a gang of his miscreant friends in either one of two large wetlands know as “Ducks Delirious” or “Ducks Ridiculous.” It was in the latter that he met Harvey.
My father had planted himself in a copes of black willow, waiting for sunrise. Suddenly he tripped on a submerged root and sank to his knees in chest-high bog, holding his shotgun over his head. He was wondering how he was ever going to stand up when he heard a gruff voice from out of the gloam.
“Do you enjoy lounging in the water in that manner?”
“Not one bit,” my father answered.
“Then allow me to give you a hand,” and a man in his late 60s, in tweed hunter’s livery, stepped up and effected the rescue..
“Thanks — Don Negus,” my father said, shaking the fellow’s hand.
“Harvey Chalmers,” answered. the gentleman. They became fast friends.
Harvey was an Amsterdam author, historian and raconteur whose family had owned the largest button factory in the state of New York. Among his many books were “Last Stand of the Nez Perce.” and “Drums Against Frontenac.”
Many years later, when Harvey died, was the only time I saw my father weep.
And so it went.