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Photo by Alan D. Wilson via Wikimedia Commons
We were laying there on our backs in the stubble of a barley field, staring at the fading stars of dawn, when they arrived: Long strings of Canada geese, cackling and yodeling to each other on their way to the river.
The strings grew into great clouds of geese, flying this way and that over the field. They were here to eat waste grain left by the farmer. We were here for them.
A gaggle of lifelike decoys perched all around our coffin blinds, and Tony, our guide, chortled and barked up at the live geese with his calls. “Out in front! Down low,” Tony hissed. Jim and I saw them, a line of about a dozen geese sailing in toward the decoys, wings locked.
Tony shouted, “Take ‘em, boys!” and Jim and I let loose. Still smarting from my sharptail grouse hunt two days before — I’d become flustered at a flock and shot wildly — I calmed down and chose one goose, tracked it with the barrel and killed it with one shot. Mild surprise. I looked up. The other geese were still in range! I tracked another and killed that one with a single shot as well. A double — and it was just barely dawn!
The hunting remained hot the whole morning, and I wound up shooting five geese, including my first-ever giant Canada goose, which weighed nearly 13 pounds. I could have killed my limit of eight, but whiffed on a few gimme shots. Even so, I’d never shot five geese in a day before.
Photo by Hank Shaw
Welcome back to Silverback Lodge.
A year ago, I said I would not return to Canada to hunt ducks and geese. While the hunting had been good and lodge comfortable, it was just too tough to transport the birds back home to my kitchen. And, then as now, I view myself as a cook who hunts, not a hunter who cooks. So why the change of heart?
This time I decided to drive from California to Manitoba, not fly. United Airlines was the root of my frustration in last year’s trip, and Holly just had a wallet-wrenching experience taking birds back from her hunt in North Dakota. Besides, I’d been due for a long road trip anyhow. My friend Jim, who hunted with me in Canada last year, went with me, making the drive a lot easier.
We started with a hunt for sharptail grouse in North Dakota, and by the time we headed north to Canada, we’d already driven more than 1,600 miles. Ever wonder what happens to the front of your car when you drive that long?
Photo by Hank Shaw
That’s Bud. He was a grasshopper before he met his end at the front of Jim’s Tundra, no doubt while we were driving 80 miles an hour somewhere. If you look closely, you will see Charlie, also a grasshopper, behind him. We lost Charlie somewhere around Nebraska, but Bud may still be stuck in the grill. Suffice to say we killed a lot of bugs on this trip.
Once we got into Canada, we soon learned that Canadians don’t drive like we do. Their speed limits are impossibly slow — 62 miles per hour on a highway?! How to they get anywhere? I made sure Jim drove, as I think my head would have exploded had I driven even close to that pace.
Finally, we got to the lodge. It was as we left it last year. Gail and Tony Ducharme were there, as was their daughter Chantelle and uncle Reggie and the whole crew. We met our hunting companions right away — two pairs of guys from Illinois, all serious hunters and good people. Thankfully there would be no repeat of the arrogant aristocrats from last year.
That goose hunt we started with fulfilled a wish Jim and I had had the previous year: We all shoot plenty of ducks in California each season, but neither Jim nor Holly nor I see many Canada geese where we hunt. And I definitely wanted to take some home to mess around with in the kitchen.
We did of course hunt ducks with Silverback, and for the most part the shooting was spectacular. Jim and I both shot our limits the second day, and we even managed to bring down some canvasbacks and redheads — two ducks I rarely see in California. Jim got himself a blue-winged teal, too, while I shot the only drake mallard of the trip.
Interestingly, this mallard had plenty of fat on it, almost like the California birds we’re used to. Last year we shot clouds of mallards, but they were all so scrawny they were pretty much useless in the kitchen. Those, apparently, were Northern mallards that had just arrived. Starving, they descended on our decoys desperate for food. My mallard this year was a resident. Big difference.
The last day was slow, but I still managed to kill four birds, including a nice redhead. The highlight of that day, however, was our “pet” hen teal. She landed in our decoys before shooting time, and we decided to let her live because we wanted larger ducks. At one point, right around dawn, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.
Photo by Hank Shaw
Sorry it’s blurry, but what you are seeing is the live hen teal hanging around with a hen teal decoy — the live bird is on the right. Very cute. With such a quiet morning, it was nice to have someone wandering around in our decoys, quacking all the while. A hen teal’s quack sounds disturbingly like the laugh of Salacious Crumb, the icky little creature that sat on Jabba the Hut’s shoulder. (There’s audio of teal here.) Pretty funny.
All told, Jim and I had a great time. The Ducharmes even resolved my nitpick about handling the birds by building a plucking shed, complete with sink, big pot of wax and a plucking machine. Way better than last year.
Everything about this experience was better, and I really think being on the road, and not in the air, had much to do with it. A road trip is a journey, a getaway, an experience where you slough off your daily routine, and, hopefully, your constant connection to the electronic world. It forces you to slow down.
On the road you see both the seasons and the terrain change as you travel mile after mile — the Great Basin, the Rockies, the Great Plains. Last year we stepped from Sacramento to St. Ambroise in a matter of hours. It was jarring, to say the least.
Yes, driving so far does take time. We covered 4,500 miles in all, mostly because an oil boom in Montana and the Dakotas has every motel booked every night all along a 400-mile stretch of highway; on the way home, Jim and I drove underneath it all, down to Omaha, Nebraska. It took us two nights to get to North Dakota, and two nights back, although it might have taken us three nights had we not ground through 1,1oo miles from Sioux City, Iowa, to Salt Lake City, Utah, in one day.
We were away from home for 11 days. That’s a long time in this day and age. But I’d better get used to it. I just got a look at the first draft of my book’s cover. We now have an official title: “Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast.” And God willing, the book should be out in spring. That means a book tour, and that means I’ll be on the road again.
I can’t wait.
Hank,
Awesome on the double. Goose is a good thing.
Have you ever thought of shipping the geese overnite
FedEx. We have shipped other things no problem.. As
long as you are in the US there seems to be no problem.
A bit, but I think better than the airline fees.
Congrats on the book. Can’t wait to see it. Haven’t been out
hunting yet as the kids have the run of the roost right now. Looking
forward to some pheasant and maybe a boar.
Great fun!!
Alan
In Canada I think its a km versus mph thing… Great road trip tale.
I’m looking for some new Canada goose recipes, so, I’m eager to read what you concoct. Hope you kept at least one whole!
Brian
LoL. Odd to see a Candian goose doing anything but stopping traffic. Around here, they waddle wherever they want…usually wherever it’s most inconvenient. There’s a particularly bothersome gaggle/flock/whatever that dominates a small puddle near on off-ramp of I10 in Tallahassee that make their way into the center of traffic now and then. No duck casualties. Just lots of P.O.ed drivers honking their horns and getting nothing but a sashaying of tail feathers for their efforts.
I, like many Americans, have never had goose, so I’ll be relying on your descriptive powers to allow me to taste them vicariously.
Hank:
Ditto on the merits of driving versus flying. I put something like 5K miles on our truck this summer to get from NY to AZ to train dogs. It was a real treat putting together a bunch of pieces that had only been connected by plane flights — as well as visiting a couple of states I don’t think I’d ever visited before: KS, OK. It was a weird coincidence to be driving through these places as I listened to audiobooks about Custer (Nathaniel Philbrick’s very good ‘Last Stand’) and Quanah Parker (S.C. Gwynne’s also very good ‘Empire of the Sun’).
Glad the waterfowl fest was a success, too!
Andrew
Congrats on the book… I can’t wait since it will be great to have all your great game info in one convenient book (is that hopelessly old fashioned?).
One question, can you eat a Canadian goose when they live in populated, polluted areas? There is talk about killing hundreds of thousands of them in NYC because of the threat they cause to aviation and then feeding them to the homeless… what do they eat and is it safe???
A 13-pound goose, damn.
Great story. My favorite hunting memories have often involved a road trip. It doesn’t even have to be a long one – just rolling out with the boys with nothing but beautiful countryside and anticipation in front of you.
Great job on the honkers, Hank! I’ll take a Canada over a duck any day and personally refer to them as “filet mignon on the wing,” and cook them as such.
My ideal is to be laying out in a barley field, or a lush green pasture, in amongst a set of full-body dekes and silohuettes, a Remington SP-10 in my hand; as they come in like B52s, making sure not to mess their wonderful breast meat by completing headshots at 10-20 yards with modified steel through a 28″ barrel…nice dry fields, no wet duck pond muck, my dear departed Chessie, buried in the hay next to me, except for his eyes, ready for the retrieve: fond memories!
re: “…complete with sink, big pot of wax and a plucking machine.”
That’s pretty cush, Hank: most of the time it’s just some stinky, heavily used plucking machine…
Alan. FedEx ing overnight works, but is more expensive than the airlines. Good luck thhis season!
Brian: Sorry, I broke down all of the geese. But stay tuned for some new Canada goose recipes…
Sandy: It would be a terrible misfortune should anything befall those poor, poor geese in Tallahassee…
Andrew: Sorry I could not make the grouse hunt in Maine this year — next year let’s try harder to make that happen!
Deanna: It’s all in what they eat. I suspect the livers of those geese might be loaded with heavy metals, and because they don’t really eat a lot of grain, those NYC geese might be pretty iffy tasting. That said, if you grind them into hamburger and spice ‘em up, you’d be OK.
Cork: What’s funny is that in layout blinds you actually *can* contemplate head shots, like you mention. Had I not done this myself, I would have thought you were being overly optimistic. But if you’re well hidden, the geese really do come in very, very close. I shot that giant Canada goose in the eye…
Sounds like a great trip, Hank! I hadn’t had a chance to check in and see how it went, but obviously it went gangbusters!
I absolutely second you on the road trip aspect too, by the way. It SO beats flying, both for the experience and for the convenience when you’re dealing with meat and guns. Packing a couple hundred pounds of meat on an airliner is pretty much an excercise in unwarranted, blind faith to begin with (When will it arrive? Where will it arrive? Will it arrive at all?). Add in baggage fees, overweight fees, and hazardous material fees (if you use dry ice), it gets pretty stupid. And you still have to worry about the luggage apes proving that there is no such thing as an indestructible gun case.
Driving costs a bit in time and fuel, so the cost savings over flying is nominal, but it’s hard to beat a long drive through beautiful country. With someone riding along to share costs, however, it can become a really economical alternative.
I’ve always driven to CO for elk, and after flying to TX for exotics once, I have driven there ever since. I’d drive back to NC for my whitetail hunts if I could, but that’s tough to do over a long weekend. I suspect the grasshoppers in the grill could tell some tales… if they could talk.
As a Canadian I can say I’m particularily partial to the Canadian Goose. I’ll definitely be interested in some new recipes as we currently have 30 geese in our freezer. Some will be jerky, some sausage, but always looking for some new ideas.
As a Manitoban who has since moved to California, I’ll say this: Manitobans are typically bad drivers, so be glad they drive slowly
That said, not all Canadians drive like this. Having lived in upstate NY for a while, I’ll say that frequent trips into southern Ontario involved a 10mph increase in speed from the heavily cop-infested upstate roads.