Goosees

While I was living at the MJB Home for Wayward Men (MJBHWM), I did some goose hunting. The MJBHWM was taters house. While all the rest of us we perfectly happy to just pay rent, Tater bought a house and rented out rooms to his friends. He also worked 2 jobs. Im sure he was a millionaire before he was 30. This house full of men without girlfriends and many of them technical professionals was much like Big Bang Theory with guns. We enjoyed all the things that single men, having escaped from relationships with women, enjoyed. Hunting, fishing, and video games. 

Across from MJBHWM was an empty cornfield. This was in the neighborhood that was transitioning from farmland to suburbs. There were no homes on this land but there were a lot of geese. Resident geese in the Chicagoland suburbs live on golf courses and feed in the surrounding cornfields. They move from field to field as they are harvested. We would drive to work and watch swarms of geese descend like locus on the fields surrounding MJBHWM. There we no signs on the fields telling us we couldn’t hunt there and there were no homes to go to in order to ask for permission so we figured it must be ok. But also knowing that the neighbors may have a problem with our hunting adventures we needed to be covert.

Now these geese had some sixth sense that told them that I had a gun. While golfing I literally had to shoo them away so I could hit a ball. There is even a rumor that while hitting my tee shot my ball may have collided with a goose. This goose may have been overcome with the magnificence of my golfing and died of a heart attack. Said goose was present in the greens keeper's golf cart when he drove up on my foursome. Since there were no witnesses to testify and the goose was dead I asked if I could have it. No go.

But when present in a corn field even me crossing the busy road between our house and the field they began to move away from me. Crossing this road was a special delight. Dressed in camo we would hide our shotguns under our coat and scamper across the road. The morning commuters were a bit alarmed by camo covered men wielding shotguns crossing before them but the cops never showed so I guess we were all right. Anyway, once in the field the geese would move maddeningly away from us, just out of shotgun range. After trying to sneak up on them Slug (me) gave up. However, one day I came home to the MJBHWM and saw a pair of bloody goose wings hanging from the garage light fixture, and a floor full of feathers put there by none other than Mr Tater himself. Now among single men of this tribe this was a challenge of the highest sort. Kinda like chugging a pitcher of beer and slamming it down on the table and daring anyone to top his feat, the Tater had thrown down the gauntlet. We renewed our efforts to bag our own goose in response to his challenge. I reasoned that if I could not sneak up on them, perhaps I could ambush them. I found a nice thick stand of trees along the field and waited for them to come in. Now sitting in a tree strip on a bucket with cars passing by not 100ft, what is the legal distance again?, say maybe 300 feet for safety and with nothing to do I decided to light up a cigar. Now cigar smoking is one of those manly rituals that we adopted because it seemed manly. It was normally confined to poker games, golf and fishing. I figured that since they were flying in they wouldn’t be put off by the smell and decided to combine cigars and goose hunting. This would be mistake 1. Now I see several geese coming into range about 1 hr later. By then I have a long ash on my cigar, one that would make Arnold S proud and I raise my Remington 870 with 3 in magnum goose loads to my shoulder. I take aim, setting the proper lead for a goose not 20 years away and pull the trigger. Bang, suddenly I can’t see a thing and my eyes are leaking. Am I blind? I know people who have eye problems from shooting large caliber weapons over time. No thats not it, the muzzle blast blew the nice 2in long ash from my cigar directly into my eyes. Wiping my eyes I peer into the field and to my surprise I see a big Canada honker flopping about 50 yards out. Now its commonly known that with one shot is very hard to locate the shooter, two shots give you a good idea where it came from and 3 shots pretty much nails it down. Not wanting to take any chance of someone showing up with flashing lights on his car I don’t take a second shot, this would be mistake 2. I proceed out to the freshly plowed field. For you city slickers a plowed field has chunks of dirt about the size of bowling balls all unevenly stacked. In the spring the farmer will come through with a disc and make these small for planting but for now think of an open field with slippery clods of dirt. I slip and slide my way to the goose. It appears that I have broken a wing but he is not dying anytime soon. Being raised a city slicker myself my field knowledge comes from tales from my father and my imaginary friend Phil. Per my fathers tales of pheasant hunting,  I grab the goose by the neck and attempt to brain it against my muddy boots, no luck. Next the stock of my trusty shotgun, again no joy. Meanwhile this goose is attempting to beat me to death with its wings, I can only imagine the wonder of people driving by and me wrestling my pet goose. I then reach for my knife (mistake 3), seeing that I had been going to this field every day in a vain attempt to kill a goose and answer Mr Tater’s challenge, I steadily had been reducing what I took with me into the field, first extra ammo, then goose decoys and calls, along the way my knife bit the dust. Now I’m in a field holding onto this gooses neck, he is flapping furiously and I’m trying to figure out how to kill him quietly. Thinking how like a hose this neck is I try the bending in half trick I use to stop water flow. In this case airflow. Well short answer, I succeed in getting it bent in half but still the beating continued. Very desperate I put one foot on the goose and stand on it. I use the butt of my gun in an attempt to kill it but remember this is a plowed field. I end up putting one boot under the goose and one on it and using the gun against my foot I succeed. By now it was dark but rest assured there was another pair of wings on the light that night. Lesson learned was never leave home without a knife, unless you are going to the airport.

In the beginning

In the beginning, there was light, and it was good…….because it meant we could now shoot that damn diving duck that has been taunting us in our decoys for 30 minutes now!
That pretty much defines our typical hunting day, peppered with coffee, cold pop tarts, a few futile shots at high passers, diving ducks that refuse to fly, and the occasional ticket or trip to the ER to add spice to our hunting trips.  In the following meandering, often detoured trip down memory lane, you will relive our entertaining, never boring, attempts to kill the elusive duck, pheasant, goose, turkey, or in most cases, just the unfortunate tree, paper target, grapefruit, or shaken soda can……
“A Boil on the Butt of Pistakee Lake”- January 13, 2016
It started, at least as far as my hunting in IL, with the story shared by Jim (aka Slug) in his “Get your own gun” post of last month…. I was an early recipient of the SPAS-12 life lesson…..  I became a much more active, and willing participant in our hunting adventures in the following years, with a story that begun with a big blue boat, gray tarps, law enforcement, and shotgun plugs….. or the absence thereof.  The details are fuzzy, but in general, I think the discussion went something like….
BUFFALO- “I sure hear a lot of shooting going on at Pistakee Lake in the morning.” (it was duck season, and I had recently moved within a stone’s-throw of the mentioned lake).  “perhaps we should investigate”
SLUG- “Sounds like a PLAN” (our plans were always PLANS, all CAPS, with much discussion- we were all still single at this point, so had much free time to PLAN).  “Lets see if the other Usual Suspects are interested”.
The cast of the Usual Suspects would swell and dwindle with our failures and successes, but almost always included our US#1- Mike (who we will refer to as “Tator” to protect his identity..). in later years and stories, he remains as US “Only”, as all others disappear from the role call.
TATOR and others- “We’re in…..How do we get to the Happy Hunting Grounds?”
It was here that we were stymied….. none of us had a hunting boat, and the public areas to hunt required a boat to get to.  BUT, Buffalo did have a girlfriend (fiancée, and fellow homeowner, at that point) who had a very fine 17 ft bright blue and white Crestliner open-bow runabout.  Very fine for water skiing and general water fun, but did seem to pose a problem when it came to being indistinguishable from the general rushes and cattails of the Pistakee Lake shoreline.  
We were undeterred, however, as Buffalo had large gray tarps.  On a cloudy, low light morning in Johnsburg in the Fall, the water of said lake were very gray looking, and we reckoned that it would appear so for an overhead duck…….. so we, Slug, Buffalo, Tator, and a couple stray US’s unloaded the BBB (“Big Blue Boat”), loaded all the hunters onboard, and headed for Terra Incognito…..
We had everything covered…… including the boat with said gray tarps- all we needed were DUCKS!  Or, as we found out, shotgun plugs, and in the case of Tator, a waterfowl stamp, which he was unable to secure.  Our attempts to hide from waterfowl with our clever camo did not fool the local DNR law enforcement.  I can only guess (by the periodic snickers as we were interrogated) at the conversation that went on as the DNR officers, in their also shiny (with flashing lights) boat, as they pulled up to us…
DNR #1- another quiet day on Pistakee Lake, not many hunters out.
DNR#2- I wonder what that big blue boat is doing over there in the shallow, cattail infested bay over there- perhaps they are in distress, better go check it out.
DNR#1- Hello?  They are wearing camo and sporting guns, are they DUCK HUNTING?!?!?  Oh, we HAVE to check this out….
Anyway, we learned, after getting tickets for the 2 guns without the required 2-shell limiting plug in the magazine, that just throwing a pencil or pen in the magazine will suffice, and also found that ducks are indeed not fooled by gray tarps, and future hunting trips included a canoe provided by a regular US, one Dale “Sequences”, for his quite well thought-out Sequence Theory on hunting prep- a topic for another story later.








That story also will have to wait- Chapter Two of the Book entitled “How Pistakee Lake Kicked Our Hiney”…….