Yesterday was the most astonishingly beautiful January day Cape Cod has ever seen. Temperatures rose into the high 50s, and there was a light breeze out of the southwest. We outfitted our oyster boat, a 17-foot Carolina Skiff, for duck hunting, by which I mean we put three chairs in it. Three, because Bob was going with us.

You may remember Bob as the guy who’s taught us just about everything we know about Cape Cod fishing. Well, turns out Bob hunts, too. He used to hunt ducks a lot, but he hasn’t been out in a while. Okay, 27 years. But the jacket still fit him.

We met at the ramp yesterday morning, and set out into Barnstable Harbor. Our plan was to go fairly deep into the harbor, set out decoys and then drift east, toward the mouth. We knew we’d be at a disadvantage because we don’t have a camouflaged boat but, hey, ducks make mistakes.

Don’t they?

All our ducks were in a row

It’s easy to tell which birds are hunted and which birds aren’t by the alacrity with which they avoid a boat full of people with guns. Ducks fly away when they’re still way out of range. Seagulls, you can practically run over. Terns circle over your head, laughing because they know the song:

To every tern,
Turn, turn, turn,
There is no season,
Turn, turn, turn,
And no time you may send it
To tern heaven.

Occasionally, though, a duck would make a mistake and come within range. Bob or I would take a shot, or maybe two, and miss. (Kevin, who’s never cared for duck hunting, was driving the boat.) While it’s not surprising that I would miss, Bob is an excellent shot, and it’s very surprising that he would miss.

The problem, I think, is that the kind of shot we use for ducks is so expensive (up to $25. a box) that it’s hard to bring yourself to practice with it much. So you practice with the other, cheaper stuff and the trajectory is just not the same.

I have a 20-gauge, which is arguably not enough gun for sea ducks. I tried to make up for last season’s wrong-shot fiasco by getting 3-inch cartridges of #2 shot. Out of a 20-gauge, that should do the job.

But only if you actually hit the duck.

I don’t know how different the trajectory of the shot I was using was, but I do know I was consistently behind and below the target. Part of this, no doubt, is that I was making various other mistakes, including not swinging through properly, but part of it was that I wasn’t sure by how much to lead the duck or how quickly the shot would fall.

There was one duck, in particular, that haunts me. I had not one, but two chances as it flew by the boat’s broadside, a mere twenty yards out. It was big and meaty, and I missed it twice, low and behind.

“Big and meaty?” you may be asking. “Don’t you even know what kind of duck it was?”

The answer, sadly, is “no.” When they’re flying, all ducks just look like ducks to the inexperienced eye, which mine most definitely is.

The night before, I’d spent a couple of hours studying pictures of ducks, in the hopes that I would be able to tell one from the other. Fortunately, there’s only one kind of duck we’re not allowed to take, and it’s the easily (?) identifiable harlequin duck. You’re allowed to take at least one of every other kind, so identification only becomes an issue once you have one in the boat.

I was pretty sure I could identify eiders, scoters, and long-tailed ducks, which are the three sea ducks you’re allowed to take seven of, and I figured I’d simply limit myself to one of any kind of puddle duck I couldn’t ID; I’d have to be content with a boat full of one-offs. Yeah, like that’d happen.

After we’d drifted around the harbor for a while, missing ducks, we went out toward the end of Sandy Neck, where the harbor turns into Cape Cod Bay. There were more sea ducks and fewer puddle ducks, and the sea ducks weren’t quite as skittish as their inland brethren. Two eiders let us get quite close before they flew, and then went by right in front of me.

My first shot missed, and I thought my second did, too, but after a couple of wingbeats the eider dropped to the water, wounded. Before I could shoot it again it dove, and it came up on the other side of the boat. That was Bob’s side, and Bob finished it off when he had the chance. We didn’t want the poor bird to get away, wounded, and die a long, hard death, which it might have if we had waited for me to get over there to take the shot.

So I didn’t even kill my first duck. I only winged it.

We were out on the water for about six hours, and that was the only duck we had to show for it. Despite its being a beautiful day, it was a profoundly unsatisfying hunt.

I took the eider home, and turned to the world’s leading expert on preparing wild ducks, Hank Shaw, for advice. Hank, who’s known for eating “everything but the quack,” makes an exception for sea ducks. Roasted whole, they taste like low tide, so he skins them and takes the breast and legs. I watched his video, and did the same.

I was left with ten ounces of duck meat, plus a heart and gizzard that I added to duck stock I was making out of one of our ducks. It wasn’t much.

Had we been properly equipped and more skilled, it probably would have been much more. But to be properly equipped and more skilled takes both time and money. The boat needs to be painted, and it needs one of those hula skirts you put around the gunwales so it looks like a patch of reeds. We need more decoys, more realistically deployed. And I need to spend a lot of time at the range, shooting shells that can cost a dollar a pop.

I’m just not sure about duck hunting. A successful hunt yields something very delicious, but also very time-consuming. I’ve processed ducks, and it isn’t much fun. And Kevin and I have taken on so much that we have to start thinking about what we don’t want to do.

I realize that all this doubt may be the byproduct of a profoundly unsatisfying hunt, so I’m going to wait until I do well, at least once, before I make up my mind. But hell mayhave to freeze over first, so I suspect I’ll be in limbo for a good long time.

While I’m there, I do intend to enjoy some eider-pork sausages with caraway and sage.

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On deer hunting itself, McGraw says that responsibility to keep the deer population in check, in the absence of virtually all wild predators, falls to humans and he’s doing his part. I think that’s perfectly reasonable, but he goes on to justify using his flintlock. He admits that it’s unreliable and difficult to use, and that it sometimes fails altogether. He admits that it’s more likely to wound than a modern weapon, and tells a story of wounding a deer and having to kill her with knife.

Why use it? Here’s why:

[W]hen I took up hunting, I eschewed all the technological gadgets designed to give modern hunters an extra edge over their prey. I like to believe that there’s something primitive and existential about the art of hunting, and that somehow, stripping the act of hunting to its basics makes it purer.

There you have it. Mr. McGraw wounded a deer in the name of purity. He wanted to give that poor deer a sporting chance. Never mind that, if he really wanted primitive and existential he would have dispensed with the firearm altogether and gone out with a pointy stick.

What he really wanted to do was philosophize. He wanted to have his venison, but also to make it clear that his thoughtfulness sets him apart from his fellow hunters, those Neanderthals who use things like rifles that make a clean kill easier and more likely.

The more time I spend in the woods with a gun, the more I think that hunting and philosophy don’t mix. Recently, my friend Tovar at A Mindful Carnivore wrote a post called, “Hunting philosophies in ten words or less,” I found that all I had to say on the subject fit into five: Hunt, with care, to eat.

Okay, it’s not literally all I have to say on the subject, but it’s everything important, and certainly everything that could be called “philosophy.” I’ll take a life only if it sustains me (because I eat the animal or because the animal is a threat to what I’m planning to eat or, ideally, both), and I’ll take it in such a way as to minimize its suffering as best I can.

The only ancillary issue worth mentioning is which animals I’ll kill. Because hunting isn’t a necessity for me, I prefer to hunt overpopulated, non-endangered animals, but I’ll take the last dodo if it stands between me and starvation.

While McGraw claims that using a flintlock makes hunting more primitive, I’ll go out on a limb and posit that what he really likes is that it makes it less primitive. It gives him a reason to engage his higher faculties, and it means he has enough to say about it to get himself on the Times Op-Ed page. It means that hunting is a whole-man, cerebral pursuit. So what if a doe dies a slow death?

And that’s what irritates me about so much hunting philosophy. It’s narcissism masquerading as concern for the purity of the hunt. The idea of “fair chase” is at the heart of most of it; it’s supposed to be about giving the animal a sporting chance but is really about making the hunter feel better about himself because the hunt was more challenging. The sense of accomplishment is seriously lessened if you take a deer over bait, but the deer who dies instantly at your corn feeder has it way better than the one you wound and track through the woods for hours.

McGraw’s doe would have taken the Neanderthal with the rifle, any day, even if it meant she wouldn’t have made the Times op-ed page.

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Being in the woods, the reasoning goes, is an end in itself. You learn the animal’s habits and habitat. You learn how to make sense of the signs and the noises around you. You learn the value of taking time off from civilization.

This is stuff and nonsense. What you really learn is how uncomfortable it is to sit in one spot for a very long time. You learn how adept deer are at giving you a wide berth. You learn that your own thoughts aren’t such great company.

Other commitments prevented me from spending more than about five days out in the woods this deer season, but only part of me would have wanted more. The other part definitely had to wash my hair.

Normally, I use audiobooks to enliven tedious tasks (and there are a lot of them around here). Give me a good book, and I can face just about anything. Hunting deer, though, you’re supposed to be attuned to every noise. I tried an audiobook, at low volume, with only one ear plugged in, but it became clear that I wouldn’t notice a deer until I took an antler in the gut. So I had to leave Anthony Bourdain at home.

Which left just me and my brainwaves. Earlier in the season, in Vermont, Kevin and I were hunting a patch in our friend Dave’s back yard, so we could stay out for a few hours, come in for a bit, and go back again. Last week, though, we went to opening day of the annual hunt at Otis Air Force Base, and it was sun-up to sun-down.

The Otis hunt is one of the best deer bets on Cape Cod, which has an abysmal deer-to-hunter ratio (abysmal, oddly, for both hunters and deer). The base is closed to civilians all year, and opens for one week to allow hunters to cull their substantial white-tail herd.

Lt. Frank Otis (d. 1937), pilot and surgeon, for whom the base is named

Otis is 22,000 acres, but not all of them are open. Since it’s an active military base, there are areas with unexploded ordnance, clearly marked with scary signs and definitely off-limits. This should please any hunter committed to the idea of fair chase, as it creates vast safe havens for the animals you’re trying to hunt. Although deer only read at a third-grade level and ‘ordnance’ probably trips them up, they get the gist and go running for those areas at the first sound of shotguns.

Still, opening day is usually a good day. So we went.

Kevin and I arrived pre-dawn, but hadn’t counted on the long line of trucks waiting to register. By the time we got to our chosen spot, the sun had been up for almost half an hour, and we paid the price. As we hiked into the woods, we saw two bucks, already on the run from the chaos that was descending on them. We didn’t have a shot.

And those were the only deer we saw. We were in the woods for eight hours, with a break for lunch, and all we had to do was think.

I cycled through just about everything I could think of to think about, and it was still only mid-morning. So I cycled through it again. I thought about the looming due date of the magazine article I wasn’t working on. I thought about whether we really want to get two Scottish deerhounds. I considered whether a post about not shooting a deer could possibly be interesting. I wondered what Kevin was thinking.

All that took about fifteen minutes, so I did some work on my all-purpose acceptance speech (Pulitzer, Nobel, Oscar, whatever), which is getting pretty good. I planned what I’d make for dinner. I figured out what I’d jury-rig to try to get the chickens to stop roosting on the nest box dividers. I wondered what problems Kevin was solving.

Then, having run through everything practical, I fantasized about actually getting a deer. I wondered out what we’d do with it, given that it was a little too warm to hang it in the garage. I developed some venison recipes. What could Kevin be thinking?

We packed it in a little after sunset, when there was just enough light to get us out of the woods. As we hiked back to the truck, Kevin said, “So, were you thinking about sex that whole time, too?”

“The whole time?”

“Sure,” he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. And then paused. “Well, I also thought about that boat for a couple minutes.” (We’d gone to look at a bigger boat the day before.)

Maybe that’s a consolation prize for not getting a deer, but I can’t imagine it’s enough of one to elevate the experience to “successful hunt.”

Although there are things to be learned in the woods, no one in his right mind would go out in the freezing cold and sit in a tree stand, or behind a rock, or in a blind, for hours on end if there were no prospect of venison. I gotta believe that a successful hunt is one in which you bring home dinner.

Luckily, the idea can’t make me a killer until I actually kill something. Which won’t be this year.

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We don’t have a trap, but our friend Les does. And the only reason it isn’t sitting outside our chicken coop, baited with raw meat, is that we’re not quite sure how to dispatch the raccoon once we get one.

Your days are numbered

My idea of a humane kill is one shot through the heart, but we can’t discharge firearms on our property. Taking a trapped raccoon somewhere else to kill it would just prolong the poor thing’s agony. Besides, I don’t think shooting an animal in a cage is particularly safe, or particularly easy.

There is drowning, which would be easy, but I suspect there’s a lot of suffering involved. At the moment, we’re leaning toward carbon monoxide – put the trap in a box and attach the tailpipe of our catalytic-converter-free Land Rover. In the movies, people who die this way just drift off to sleep.

Before we do anything, though, I’m soliciting input. Many of you have much more experience killing things than I do, and I’d like to hear your ideas.

Anyone?

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I’m not overly susceptible to the Siren Song of Stuff – sloth and gluttony are my vices of choice – but I’m not deaf, either. I heard the call this morning, when, for the first time in months, maybe years, I had to go stuff shopping.

Kevin and I are visiting our friends Dave and Bonnie, who live on the outskirts of Manchester, Vermont, in the Green Mountains. We’re here to hunt deer, and there were a couple of items I needed. First on the list was a pair of pants. Last year, I made do with a pair of beige wool slacks. They were the dress-up kind – Ann Taylor, I think – not the outdoorsy kind, but I figured once I had a coat and boots on, they would look just like those old-fashioned wool pants they sell for the purpose. And they were fine. They were warm, they were beige, they were fine. Then, at the end of the season, I put them in the laundry, in open defiance of the “dry clean only” tag. “Shrink” doesn’t begin to describe it.

Next on the list was a pair of hiking boots. I own a pair of outstanding boots – Lowas – that are about eight years old. I hadn’t worn them in a couple of years, and they were in a plastic box in the basement. I took them out, dusted them off, and wore them to the range last week.

They fit as well as I remembered, and as Kevin and I walked down-range to hang targets, I was congratulating myself for having sprung for the expensive boots, boots that give proper support, have the right kind of cushioning, and last a lifetime. Then I felt a weird kind of drag on my right heel, like I had stepped on something that was trailing behind me. When we got to the bench, I found that the heel had essentially rotted in half, and the bottom of the sole had separated from the rest of the boot.

Next trip to the targets, the whole damn sole came off, and I was flapping around like something out of Mad magazine.

If there is any place on earth where you want to look competent and in-control, it’s the rifle range. Everyone there has loaded guns, and we all know our lives depend on our fellow-shooters’ ability to handle weapons safely. You simply do not want to look like an idiot.

As a rule, Kevin helps protect me from doing really stupid things. The first time we went to the range, he told me to bring earplugs, since we didn’t have any of those big earmuffs people use to muffle sound. But I had a better idea, and I packed the Bose noise-canceling headphones. When we got there, I was about to put them on, and he stopped me.

“You can’t use those,” he said, taking them out of my hands.

“Why not?” I asked. “They’re noise-canceling.”

He pointed to the long curly cord. “What are you going to do with that?”

I considered. “I’ll tuck it in my sweater.”

“No.”

He didn’t say it then, but I know it now. You don’t want to look like an idiot at the rifle range. So the whole flapping sold thing was extremely unfortunate. Back at the bench, I held my boot up, and Kevin pulled the sole completely off. And then he did the other one, which had also started to go.

That’s why I was shopping this morning. And Mission: Acquisition took me to H.N. Williams General Store, in Dorset, where Dave sent me.

H.N. Williams General Store

You have to love H.N. Williams General Store. On the outside, it looks like just what you think a Vermont general store should look like. On the inside, it has a complete supply of hardware, hunting and fishing gear, and outdoor clothing. The salespeople are suitably laconic. There’s a little café.

But it’s a diabolical little place. Just when you’re feeling all salt-of-the-earth, browsing the full Carhartt line, you get distracted by an extremely attractive line of jackets. Turns out they’re from a company called Ibex, which makes high-end merino wool clothing. Not just jackets, but base layers and socks and sweaters and pants.

It’s soft and beautiful and expensive. I have a soft spot for fine-spun wool, and I was hearing its call, loud and clear. I had to stand in front of the rack and take mental inventory of the clothing I already had that would serve the same function. (Silk base layer and a couple of ratty cashmere sweaters that are great for hunting.) I walked away, only to run into the rack of Gore-Tex hunting pants, with a price tag north of $200. And the boots …

I walked out with a pair of brown Carhartts with reinforced front panels (for crashing through brush), and a pair of hiking boots that were on super sale, made by a company called Irish Setter. But I could easily have spent many hundreds of dollars. This, despite the fact that I’ve been hunting for about seven seconds and have succeeded only in irritating some ducks.

There’s something disconcerting about using an activity that’s supposed to help you provide for yourself as an opportunity to buy. But it happens to me, over and over. There’s the super groovy Shimano composite fishing pole Kevin got me for my birthday. There’s my Ribb clam rake. And then there’s this rifle – a Marlin .308 with a 24-inch barrel, in stainless steel, thank you very much. I don’t have it yet, but I want it.

My friend Amanda lives in Portland, Oregon, and she told me that there is an entire store there devoted to homesteading supplies. You can buy greenhouse frames and solar set-ups and all-in-one canning kits – in stainless steel, thank you very much. Shop O Pioneer: The Homesteading Super Store!

On the one hand, as has been discussed here before, good tools and clothing and supplies outperform bad tools and clothing and supplies. But at some point the purchase is less about the incremental advantage than about the fun of owning really cool stuff.

Rifle season for deer opens tomorrow, and I’ll be hunting in a second-hand coat, with a sixty-year-old gun. I’ll be kept warm by a motley array of layers accommodated by pants that are a size too big. And I’m fine with that. I am. But there’s an Orvis outlet in this town, and if we happen to pass it, you’d better tie me to the mast.

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The basic operation of firearms hasn’t changed in the eight hundred years or so we’ve had them, and the principle is beautifully simple. The pressure created by burning propellant pushes a projectile through a tube. That’s it.

Image borrowed from howstuffworks.com

Over those eight hundred years, the propellant has changed (although the black powder of the old days isn’t so far removed from the smokeless powder we use now), the loading method has changed (we generally don’t load from the muzzle), and the way the powder is ignited has changed (flint-on-steel has been replaced by primer made of pressure-sensitive explosive and triggered by a firing pin). The basic idea, though, is the same.

This is why guns that had a career robbing stagecoaches are still in circulation and also why Kevin and I, last week, ended up buying a gun older than we are.

We had three guns already – all shotguns. Kevin owned a .410 Remington and a 12-gauge Browning Citori when I met him, and he bought me a Remington 870 20-gauge for my birthday two years ago. Unfortunately, none of those guns was able to get us a deer last season.

Deer hunting on Cape Cod is difficult, partly because there are many hunters and not many deer, and partly because we’re prohibited from using rifles. Instead, we load shotguns with slugs (preferably using a rifled barrel, which my 20-gauge has), and wait for a close-range opportunity.

This year, we’re going to try our luck in Vermont, in the woods behind our friend Dave’s house. Unlike Massachusetts, Vermont allows rifles, but that’s helpful only if you have one.

Last week found us meandering through the backroads of North Carolina, on our way home from the wedding of our good friend Allison Fishman and our new friend Aaron Task, and we kept seeing billboards for the world’s largest gun store. Mackey’s, it was called. We’d been considering buying a rifle, and we talked about maybe going to find the store. But we had a long drive ahead of us, and neither of us made a move for the GPS.

We continued the meander.

And then we saw a sign we did stop for. “Boiled Peanuts.”

I’d never had a boiled peanut, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. We pulled in and got ourselves a pint.

Now, having tasted them, I have a theory. Boiled peanuts are yet another manifestation of the inferiority complex that the South has had ever since it lost the Civil War. By insisting that a product that is clearly inferior to its roasted Northern counterpart, and arguably inedible, is actually a regional delicacy, the appreciation of which separates the men (that would be them) from the boys (obviously us), they are holding on to their sense of separateness in the feeble hope that, some day, they will rise again.

I’m thinking boiled peanuts should go the way of slavery, although I stop short of supporting a Constitutional amendment.

As we stood in the parking lot, marveling at the watery taste and cardboard texture of this Southern taste treat, we took a moment to look around. Right there, across the street, was the world’s largest gun shop.

I have no idea whether it really is the world’s largest gun shop, not having been in all the others. I can say, though, that it’s definitely a really big gun shop.

When you walk in, the first thing that hits you is the smell of cigarette smoke, which transports you back to about 1978, which was the last time you were in a store where someone was smoking. A very nice woman looked up from her paperwork. “Shotguns to the left,” she said, gesturing to a cavernous room filled with racks, “Rifles to the right.”

The rifle room was as big as the shotgun room, and there were hundreds of guns, new and used. I know next to nothing about rifles and browsed aimlessly, but Kevin looked with a purpose.

He found a gun he liked, and he called me over to show me.

“It’s a Marlin .30-30,” he said. “An old one, but it’s in great condition.”

“How old?” I asked.

“Probably from the sixties.”

He asked to see it, and they unlocked it. He worked the action and mounted it to see how it felt. It felt good, and he decided to buy it. After ascertaining that he wasn’t a felon or a fugitive from justice, they sold it to him.

When we got home, we checked the serial number and found out it was made in 1950. I couldn’t help but be a little leery of a sixty-year-old gun, but Kevin assured me that guns like that get passed down through generations, and that the new ones are almost identical to the one we’d just bought.

Still, when we brought it to the range, I was a little apprehensive. I asked him to shoot it first. Nice, eh?

We put targets at fifty yards, and he shot it. A little low, a little left, but only a couple inches from the bulls-eye. After a couple more shots, he handed it to me.

I was still apprehensive. My experience shooting a slug through my 20-gauge had me braced for a big bang and a strong kick. But this gun was entirely different. It wasn’t nearly as loud or as boisterous, and the sights were such that I felt I could aim it with confidence. At fifty yards, all my shots were in a one-foot circle, which isn’t great but is probably acceptable. At a hundred yards, I had more trouble, but I’ll go back and practice.

Beyond how it feels to hold and to shoot, it’s the action I like. It’s got a lever that ejects the spent cartridge as you pull it out, and loads the new cartridge when you push it back. It has a smooth, solid, mechanical feel, like all the parts mesh together exactly the way they’re supposed to. It feels like a well-made tool.

Before we took the rifle to the range, I was having some trouble mustering enthusiasm for deer-hunting. (I wasn’t the only one – NorCal Cazadora wrote about the self-same problem.) But the rifle makes a difference, and it’s hard to explain why. I’ve practiced with my 20-gauge, and I’m reasonably accurate at fifty yards, the longest shot I’d take. But it feels like the wrong tool for the job. It’s a shotgun that’s been jury-rigged to imitate a rifle. I feel better being in the woods with a firearm that’s designed to do the job at hand, particularly if feels right in my hands and against my shoulder.

Which is a problem, given that the Marlin is Kevin’s gun, and he likes it as much as I do.

Luckily, our friend Tim offered to lend us his Winchester .30-06 (a somewhat more powerful rifle of the same caliber). Maybe we’ll trade off.

I’ve known, in other parts of life, what it feels like to use a tool that suits you. I have a Cleveland five-wood that must have been made for me. My chef’s knife fits in my hand and rocks on the cutting board just the way I want it to. While I’m perfectly capable of using other clubs, and other knives, those are the ones I’m happiest with.

So why do I feel like the Marlin .30-30 is poised atop the slippery slope that has “gun nut” at the bottom?

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I blame Tovar. He started it, in a post at A Mindful Carnivore about wounding animals.

In search of pheasant

Every hunter I know believes it is a hunter’s responsibility to kill an animal cleanly. Ideally, you drop it with one shot. If you hit an animal but don’t kill it, it’s your job to track it and finish the job.

Although even the most conscientious hunter will sometimes lose a wounded animal, I think it’s fair to say that making that happen as infrequently as possible is the single most important guiding principle of hunting. (Okay, there’s don’t shoot people, but that’s a little different.)

Yet deeply ingrained in the loose collection of principles that is hunting ethics we have the concept of “fair chase.”

Different people have different definitions, but it boils down to giving an animal a sporting chance. Many hunters frown on shooting a duck in the water, taking a turkey off a roost, or luring a deer in with bait. What it boils down to is that those strategies most likely to yield a clean kill are considered off limits to the “ethical” hunter.

I have no objection to going into the thickest part of the woods and pitting your wits against a deer by trying to get it to come into range. Making hunting difficult is not incompatible with a commitment to a clean kill. But what, exactly, is the objection to making hunting easier?

It’s not sporting, it’s not fair, it somehow violates a fundamental sense of justice to take an animal that’s sleeping, stunned by sudden light, or baited.

As Holly at NorCal Cazadora has pointed out, if you’re concerned about having an unfair advantage over an animal, what’s with the gun? Seems to me that firearms irrevocably tipped the scales in favor of humans as predators. If you really want to give your deer a sporting chance, go into the woods unarmed and see how well you do with a pointy stick.

The problem with “fair chase” is that the more you level the playing field, the more likely you are to wound an animal. There’s evidence that the deer wounding rate for archery is higher than that for firearms, yet I have heard bowhunters talk about the authenticity of the experience and the satisfaction of taking a deer without a firearm.

And I understand that. To be perfectly clear, I do not oppose bowhunting, or any strategy that makes hunting more difficult. I just think that, the more likely your hunting method is to wound, the more committed you have to be to developing your skills and the more careful you have to be about deciding which shots to take. Responsible bowhunters are very skilled and very careful, and their feeling of accomplishment when they take an animal successfully must be commensurate.

I respect skill. I know some very experienced, responsible, successful hunters, hunters who wouldn’t dream of baiting a deer, and my hat is off to them for having gotten good at something difficult. I hope to learn from them and become more skillful myself.

My point here (and I do have one) is that what’s “sporting” is arbitrary. And I think a commitment to a clean kill trumps any consideration of fair chase. While I appreciate the challenge of hunting, the need to understand an animal in order to get close enough to it to kill it, and the connection to wildlife that many hunters feel, the primary reason I hunt is for food. If I can take an animal easily, I will.

The deer doesn’t care whether you shoot it over a feeder or you take it in the wild. The deer does care that you kill it in such a way as to minimize its suffering. Anything that makes that more likely is okay in my book.

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When you hunt deer, you have to go to great lengths to become part of the woods. You have to wash your clothes in special detergent to avoid smelling either like a human or like detergent. You have to sit motionless to avoid making any noise that would spook a deer. You have to be in the woods at the crack of dawn because that’s when deer are active.

So why is it that, at mid-day, you can roar down the Taconic Parkway, in a car belching exhaust, and get within twenty yards of a deer every time?

Now that my hunting experience has extended to waterfowl, and I’ve determined that ducks are just like deer, I’m ready to generalize up and down the food chain. Animals understand hunting.

Eric's decoys. They looked convincing to me.

Take this morning. At 5:00, when the thermometer read 19 degrees (which was a pleasant surprise since the overnight temperatures had been predicted to drop to single digits), I woke up and dressed for ducks. I had my clothes laid out, and I pulled them on, layer after layer. I had a quick cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and headed out to meet Eric.

Eric is a duck hunter. If there’s a line where avid crosses over to rabid, Eric probably walks it. Despite having a responsible job and a young family, he manages to go out for waterfowl twice a week, all season long. He loves ducks.

And he graciously agreed to take me hunting.

Our spot was just off Rick’s backyard. Rick, the mutual friend who introduced us, lives on one of the Cape’s many brackish ponds, and there’s a little promontory near his property that meets the requirement of being 500 feet from any dwelling.

When I got there, about an hour before sunrise, Eric was almost all set up. He had broken through the ice, and set up about two dozen decoys – mallards, mergansers, Canada geese – in a surprisingly lifelike tableau. His golden retriever, Hank, was suited up and ready to retrieve. His duck calls were around his neck.

He pulled his canoe into the brush at the edge of the marsh, and pulled out two stools. We sat down behind some brush and waited.

And that’s mostly what we did. Waited. We saw ducks – black ducks, mostly – but there weren’t many and they weren’t close. Eric tried to call them in, but they weren’t having it. “Black ducks aren’t very user friendly,” he said. At one point, he saw one land just to the right of us, and went over and rousted it. He had one shot as it flew away, and that was the only shot fired that morning. We bagged zero ducks between us.

Collecting, after the hunt

“This isn’t the script I wrote for you,” he said, apologetic as we rounded up his decoys so he could get to work on time. He’d really wanted me to at least get some shots, if not some actual ducks.

“Funny about ducks and scripts,” I said. “They don’t seem to like to read.”

Although I certainly would have liked it if the ducks had been more cooperative, it was very good simply being out with an experienced hunter. It helps you go from knowing nothing to knowing something, and that’s a big step. You learn what a duck hunt looks like, what to expect, what to look for, what to listen for, and how to dress. I started to learn about decoys and calls, and a couple of interactions with actual, genuine ducks taught me the value of sitting still until the very last moment, when you’re ready to shoot.

That last one was tough. The couple of times a duck headed our way, and looked like it might come in range, I mounted the gun too early and it veered off.

Eric had warned me about motion, and also about keeping my head down because upturned faces scare ducks away.

So why was it that, later in the day, as I went for a run along the Cape Cod Canal, the ducks didn’t give a damn? There were brigades of eiders and mergansers and brants, swimming and diving and flying. They were unperturbed as I ran by and looked them full in the face, a mere twenty yards away. Okay, I’m a slow runner, but not so slow that they’d think I was motionless.

They knew. Just as the black ducks in the morning knew. How the hell do they know? How can a duck, or a deer, learn to recognize when humans pose a threat and when they don’t? It’s awfully tempting to conclude that they can read the regulations, but even the most generous estimation of animal wherewithal doesn’t extend quite that far.

Some of it, of course, is confirmation bias – that tendency all us humans have to see what we believe to be true. Once you get it in your head that ducks come close when you can’t shoot them, and stay away when you can, that’s what you notice. But that can’t account for all of it.

Can they figure out that it’s safe near a house? Or in the summer? Or around someone who isn’t carrying a funny stick that makes a loud noise?

As I write, there are mergansers and coots in the water out my back door. Several times today, big Vs of Canada geese have flown low over the house. I find I’m looking at them with new eyes.

Ducks napping in our backyard

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I know there are ducks in Barnstable Harbor. I see them every time I go out to work the oysters, or to fish. I have a gun, I have my shiny new 2011 hunting license, I have all my waterfowl stamps. Nothing was preventing me from going out and trying to shoot a duck.

Kevin, while not keen on duck hunting, was willing to aid and abet. He called our friend Tim, also a novice duck hunter, and recruited him to join us. Then he called Les, whose boat is still in the water, and asked to borrow it. And yesterday afternoon, on the tail of the ebb tide, the three of us headed out for my very first duck hunt.

The plan was to take the boat out into the middle of harbor, and then drift (you’re not allowed to shoot a duck from a boat under power). Kevin, who wasn’t going to hunt, took the helm, and Tim and I settled into the bow, on the lookout for ducks.

We didn’t have to look far. It was duck central out there. Tim peered through his binoculars and spotted eiders, black ducks, pintails, and buffleheads. All we had to do was to get them in close enough.

I’d seen hunters out in the harbor before. Standard operating procedure seems to be to get a greenish boat, dress in camouflage, and set a string of decoys out behind you. We had neither the right color boat nor the decoys, so we motored out to where the ducks seemed to be, cut the motor, and hoped for the best.

Within the first five minutes, a bufflehead flew about thirty yards in front of us. Tim took aim and fired. He was a little behind – buffleheads are fast – and he tried again. It was the third shot that brought down the bird. We motored over and Tim reached over to retrieve it.

Tim and his bufflehead

This was Tim’s first duck ever, and although he joked about its rather diminutive size, he was obviously excited. I was excited for him. I’ve been out in the field with a gun enough to understand the satisfaction of success.

Tim stowed his bird, and we went a little farther east in the harbor. The wind was out of the west, and we were drifting east at a pretty good clip when a male eider crossed the bow, heading south, about twenty yards out.

An eider is bigger and slower than a bufflehead, and is reputed to be one of the worst-tasting ducks on the planet. But I wasn’t thinking about how I’d cook it as I mounted my gun and followed the duck’s flight.

It was close in, and flying across the wind, so I stayed only a little bit ahead of it. When the distance between the duck and the muzzle seemed right, and the gun felt solid on my shoulder, I took my first ever shot at a living creature.

Eider down!

I was astonished. My first shot, my first duck. Beneath the adrenaline and surprise, I felt so big and bad.

Until I noticed that the duck wasn’t dead. He didn’t even look hurt, just startled and irritated. And then he dove.

We drove over and, as we waited for him to resurface, my big badness turned to dismay. I was doing the single worst thing you can do in hunting – wound an animal and then not be able to track it and take it.

And then he popped up, twenty yards out. I took aim, but I’m unaccustomed to shooting a stationary object – a sitting duck – with the regular shotgun barrel. The deer barrel is made for that, and has a notched sight to line up, but the bird barrel only has a bead on the end. I did my best, but I missed him low. He dove again. Damn!

We waited, and waited some more. He came up again, this time just feet off the bow. But I wasn’t expecting him to be in so close, and I wasn’t ready. I didn’t even get a shot off before he dove again.

And then he simply vanished. We waited, all three of us scanning the water, for longer than any duck should be able to dive. No eider.

On the plus side, that may have meant that he wasn’t seriously hurt – or even hurt at all – and he’d live to outwit another hunter. On the minus side, that was my duck. My very first duck! And it just bloody swam away!

It wasn’t long, though, before I had another chance. Tim, secure in the knowledge that he wasn’t going home empty-handed, generously gave me the shot at the next duck to come in range, another eider. This time, a female.

My first shot missed, but the second, as the duck was flying away from us, didn’t. She dropped right out of the sky.

Redemption, I thought.

We drove over to collect my duck.

No duck. No trace of duck. No feathers, no nothing. She simply disappeared.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Barnstable Harbor is the Bermuda Triangle of ducks. You shoot them, and Neptune calls them home rather than letting you have them. Even eiders, which are reputed to taste like low tide.

I had one more shot before sunset closed in, but it was on the outside of my range and I flat-out missed. We went in, I congratulated Tim on his trophy bufflehead, and we went home, duckless.

It was only when I got home that I realized my mistake. It’s such an embarrassing mistake that I’m reluctant to tell you about it, but I suppose it’s just possible that someone, somewhere, might be prevented from making the same mistake if I go public.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m accustomed to making mistakes, and my various blunders have, at various times, resulted in deerlessness, clamlessness, beetlessness, and root beerlessness. Lessness seems to be a way of life around here.

But this. This was class-A stupid.

It stemmed from My Consult with Andre.

Our friend Andre is pushing eighty, and has a lifetime of hunting experience. When I decided I wanted to go out and try for a duck, I stopped by his house with a dozen eggs in the hopes that he’d give me some good advice. Which he did.

One of the things we talked about was shot size. What should I use, I asked. “Five,” he said, and then ticked off on his fingers, “Or four, three, two, one, or BB. Use what you have.”

And here’s where I went wrong. I assumed that, since a BB gun was a little baby air gun, that BBs were the smallest shot. Therefore, number five had to be the biggest of the sizes Andre ticked off. When I checked our armory, I found that the size I had was seven. Well, that would be just fine, I figured. Large shot might be appropriate for someone whose shotgun skills aren’t all they could be.

Those of you who hunt are undoubtedly now shaking your heads in dismay and disbelief because you know perfectly well that any bonehead with Google and an IQ over room temperature can look up shot size and find out that larger numbers correspond to smaller shot.

There is an upside here. Those two ducks I shot are almost assuredly flying, swimming, and quacking in perfect health. It’s unlikely that number seven shot, at twenty or thirty yards, can even penetrate an eider’s underlayer of down, let alone do serious damage. The only injury was to my big, bad hunter ego.

I have twelve duck-hunting days left to see if I can repair the damage.

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