Cupped Wings: Riding Around

If there’s a piece of water with a duck on it, he’s going to stop and take a look. Or back up his truck or turn the quad around or pull over to the side of the road or, just as likely, stop smack-dab in the middle of the blacktop for a gander. Every time. He’s not going to pass a duck up. You can bank on that.

If there’s a piece of water without a duck on it, empty and lifeless and sad looking, he’s most likely going to stop as well. Pull out his binoculars and scan the skies and wonder where the ducks are and why they’re not here yet, and wonder if they’re coming and what’s the best play if they do show up. Fred Silverstein has been hunting this neck of Arkansas duck country since 2007. He’s been hunting Arkansas and Tennessee since 1948. You read that right. The same year NASCAR was formed, if you’re keeping up. He hunted Reelfoot Lake in the post–World War II years. Bayou DeView and Hurricane Lake before timber hunting was called timber hunting.

And he’s been like this forever—he likes to ride around. Hunt in the morning, quick nap, snack of whatever’s left over in the duck camp fridge, and then it’s time to hit the road. “Come on with me,” he’ll say, but he’s going whether anyone comes or not. He wants to know what’s on this land he has loved for so long. Silverstein is the Gandalf of east-central Arkansas—gray-headed and clear-eyed, sage and wise, and with a grasp of waterfowling history that seems to reach back to creation. Maybe before.

We pull up to a flooded rice field he calls Eagle’s Nest, for obvious reasons. Except the nest hasn’t been occupied for a few years.

“I wonder where those eagles went,” he says.

“There were ducks on this field the last time I drove out here,” he says.

“When was that?” I ask.

“Yesterday.”

He looks out across the dike to a corner of the field where three tall trees lord over the water, barren of leaves.

“The ducks really like that back corner,” he says, binoculars to his eyes, voice muffled with the sleeves of coat. “They always have. I don’t know why.”

And it occurs to me at that very moment that it is good to know where the ducks like to be, and how a south wind makes the ducks act differently than a wind with a bit of north in it. Not because it leads to good hunting, necessarily, but because to know a place so deeply is to know yourself in profoundly meaningful ways. Fred knows this piece of duck country so well because he knows what matters most to him: Time with family. Time with his Maker. Time with a place whose pull he cannot resist.

 And it’s good to never think you have the ducks figured out.

Scouting is hunting. In most duck areas, if you’re not scouting, you’re wishing and hoping, not hunting. In the rice fields and flooded timber country of Arkansas, ducks have more choices than you’ll find at a meat-and-three country diner. And the varying impacts of wind, moon phase, water levels, hunting pressure, and even the signs of the zodiakos kyklos all conspire to confound the duck hunter. Many hunters rely on stuff to even out the odds. Motion stuff and calling stuff and camouflage stuff. Ice eaters and mud motors. Gear galore.

Fred heads down the road. When it comes to figuring out the ducks, there’s not a squirt-butt decoy ever made that can beat a pair of eyeballs.

After scratching over Eagle’s Nest, we make the rounds. We had hit Big Field before Eagle’s Nest, so now we run down the levee to Pop’s Field, then Harvey’s Flat. Sometimes he checks out the flooded timber by the road at the Magnum 12 club. When the birds are in thick, they love the spot.

We ride and reminisce, ride and philosophize, ride and talk about how grateful we are to be in such a place. Solvitur ambulando, a phrase often attributed to the first-century Algerian priest Saint Augustine, translates to: “It can be solved by walking.” Fred’s version involves an internal combustion engine and mud tires, but if the good saint were alive today, I bet he’d be a duck hunter.

And I bet he and Fred would be fast friends.

Later that afternoon, Jemison Rice, Nathan Ganus, and my son, Jack, head out from the duck camp with a generator and irrigation pump to pump out a flooded pit blind on the edge of a rice field. A couple hundred mallards had flushed from that field on our ride in from the timber this morning, and we don’t need a war council to decide where we’re going to hunt tomorrow. I’ve been in the picking shed, working over a strap of specklebelly geese. When I walk into the camp to warm my frozen hands, Fred is standing in the kitchen, dressed in a heavy coat and knee boots. He’s pulling on his gloves. Before he can get a word in, I know what he’s up to.

“You want to take a ride?” he asks. “See what they’re up to?”

I grin. If there’s anything Fred can’t stand as much as not knowing where the ducks are, it’s being left out of the fun. He’s a poster child for FOMO, with hearing aids and curly gray hair.

Falling in line behind Fred as we shuffle to his side-by-side, I send Jack a text: Fred was wearing his coat and waiting on me when I walked inside. We’re on our way.

No one is surprised. Eighty-four years strong, and Fred Silverstein is on the road again.