CHIPPING AWAY AT THE OLD BLOCKS

I of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Gunning ringbills, mallard, wigeon, and woodies mostly, from palmetto-frond blinds in the Combahee marsh or by jumping the black-water ponds behind the barrier-island dunes on Capers, Pritchards, and Fripp. Other duck hunters out there somewhere. In the hush of the high-tide slack wind, in the crystalline frost that comes with it, you could hear the gabble of duck calls and a dog rattle his collar a mile or more away.

We called the decoys blocks, an easier word when whispering in the predawn can’t-see. They were indeed blocks in duck hunting’s early days, lovingly and artfully carved from cedar, magnolia, or pine, but by the time I came to the gun in the sixties, most of mine were plastic, outside of a few treasured hand-me-down L.L. Bean coastal corks.

I’M A DUCK HUNTER, STRICKEN EARLY AND STRICKEN HARD, AS A LAD OF SIXTEEN, CAST LOOSE UPON THE WATERS

Then I ran off to