Patience: A goose hunter’s friend

By DENNIS ANDERSON

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

LINO LAKES, Minn. — The geese, three flocks numbering a dozen or more each, showed themselves early, at dawn’s first blush, adjacent initially to a distant water tower, then closer, over a subdivision, and finally, lower still, over a few hundred apartments. Or perhaps they were condos.

Such are the types of questions that await metro Minneapolis goose hunters. Are the birds flying over apartments or condos? Also: Will we awaken nearby residents when we shoot? And: With so many restaurants nearby, where will we eat breakfast after the hunt?

Minnesota’s early goose season opened Saturday a half-hour before sunrise, and six of us pondered these and other important matters. Don (Duckman) Helmeke and Wendell Diller were our leaders, with Christy Hurley, 31, and Nicholas Flesland, 12, the newcomers. My son Cole, 11, and I tagged along.

Had we been sufficiently prepared, the geese that overflew us at dawn would have taken some losses. Close enough that their necks could be seen craning side to side, the birds would have been easy pickings.

Not ready

But we weren’t quite ready.

In our defense, Canada geese typically don’t fly at sunrise. Often they wait an hour or more past that time to take wing and look for food. So even with the lost opportunity that the morning’s first geese presented, we were confident more birds would come, and perhaps more still.

At least that’s what Duckman — hunting mentor to Christy, a Department of Natural Resources fisheries section employee, and Nicholas, the son of one of Christy’s co-workers — passed on to his eager students.

Wendell and Duckman are among the relative handful of sportsmen and women concerned enough about the decline in hunter numbers to attempt to reverse the trend. Their call to the DNR for names of wingshooting novices who would like to try goose hunting on the season’s first day yielded those of Christy and Nicholas, and a date for Saturday was made.

“I hunted turkeys once in the DNR youth program,” Nicholas said. “I really like hunting.”

Similarly, Christy had hunted deer with her dad and her husband, Jim. But never birds.

“It seemed like fun and something I wanted to try,” she said.

Thursday, Wendell, Duckman, Christy and Nicholas met at Metro Gun Club in Blaine for a little target practice. Because we would hunt Saturday near condos (or whatever), we would use Wendell’s “long guns,” or shotguns outfitted with 7-foot-long barrels.

Heavily ported, the barrels hush a gun’s report, making it sound more like a loud handclap than a typical 12 gauge blast.

The barrels aren’t heavy, and the guns swing easily. Christy and Nicholas would have no problems.

“You guys want doughnuts?”

This was about an hour or so into Saturday’s hunt, and Duckman was braying to Wendell, Cole and me from a nearby blind.

Veteran wingshooters know that while duck or goose hunting, Doughnut Eating should be paced such that a group’s allotment of bismarcks, long johns, crullers and fritters lasts the duration of an outing.

Experienced sportsmen also know the exercise of eating these pastries and also pouring coffee can be used as a feint, or attempt to trick game as yet unseen into believing the hunters are distracted and therefore passage near them can be made safely.

In waterfowling, this is high-wire brinksmanship in which hunters pit their brains against those of birds, occasionally prevailing.

Saturday morning, responding to Duckman, Wendell and I played along.

“Sure, we’ll have doughnuts,” I said, setting up, we hoped, a scenario in which we not only got breakfast but in which geese would suddenly appear.

If that occurred, our doughy snacks would be discarded for the ruses they were, and our guns shouldered.

All talk

But alas, we ate only doughnuts, drank coffee and talked.

About hunting, yes. And life.

Metro-area Canada goose populations are believed to be lower this year than last, because of a poor hatch, and we saw no geese after those early flocks.

Christy and Nicholas, therefore, learned nothing about tracking and dropping winged fowl.

But with luck they picked up on something equally important about the hunt: That good times afield among people of shared interests needn’t be defined solely by the amount of game killed.

“We’ll get you out again,” Wendell said to Christy and Nicholas. “Next time, there will be more geese.”