Living live in Mississippi
Tommy Sanders experiences a live duck hunt on a cold, November day
By Tommy Sanders
Photo gallery
As has been mentioned in these pages, the last time a network televised a duck hunt live was in 1956. NBC's Wide Wide World, hosted by Dave Garroway, came to famous Claypool's Reservoir in Arkansas and made a bit of early television history.
Bowman will be Garroway. I will be J. Fred Muggs (Garroway's chimpanzee companion). Overstreet will take pictures and offer other entertainments.
The place is called the Bullpen, a prime spot operated by duck hunting outfitter and farmer David Melton. It's situated at the western end of a long point of hardwoods extending into a corn field. The blind is tucked into the very end of the hardwoods, so it's perfectly shaded throughout the morning. The view to the west is an open water flooded field rimmed by corn stalks.
It's a great setup; a massive shooting deck with spots for at least 10 hunters and a 260-degree view of the water and decoys. Other amenities include an attached kitchen with stove, running water and electricity. It's a 1,000-plus square foot luxury box, no doubt about it.
But its prime attraction, at least for our purposes, is the array of five video cameras that David has permanently set up — two with a view of the field from the blind, two from the water with a decoy's view of the blind, and one camera directed toward the deck with a view of the hunters.
The deck is also wired for sound. The cameras are routed to a central computer in the kitchen, then uplinked to the web from a satellite dish in the woods behind the blind. The home viewer can choose to watch any of the five cameras. So, watch where you scratch.
We drive to the location, suit up and take the short ATV ride to the blind. We then find our spots and just before 10 a.m. ET, we load the guns and the switch is flipped to go live on ESPNOutdoors.com.
It's a beautiful day with clear blue skies, but there is a NNW breeze blowing that has absolutely no quit in it. It's a manageable 33 degrees or so, but this is a wind that searches your clothes for body heat, grabs it, and then heads in the direction of Tupelo at about 25 mph.
On the other hand, all you have to do is walk about 10 feet to the kitchen and pour yourself a cup of hot coffee from the stove and you're instantly warm again, so no one complains about the cold. It's sort of like the old Ring Lardner quote: "I've known what it is to be hungry, but then I always went straight to a restaurant."
The action is a bit slow to begin with, a few flights of snow geese passing over and some faint, high flying ducks spotted once in a while. So we do what most hunters do. We stand around and shoot the bull, always with an eye on the horizon. We stomp around the shooting deck a bit because of the cold and because we can. We check on the dog. Normal stuff. And then comes a text message from our compadres who are watching back at the office.
"Don't just stand around and talk!! Do something!!!"
But it stays slow for a while longer.
Steve Bowman knows we need content, so he and I pull up a couple of chairs next to a microphone and we talk about the place, and about ducks and hunters. Bowman is bringing the good stuff like he usually does.
And then comes another text message: "the wind is too loud and we can't hear you. Do something else!!!"
Luckily, some duck action breaks out — a flight of 40 or 50 teal come out of nowhere and blur past us, downwind at full speed right over the decoys. They make the turn and fly right back over. No shots. We'd seen the last of them. Then 45 seconds later, they fly back over the decoys again and light in the field, just out of range.
Who knows why no one shot. Probably no one wanted to make the first miss, and these were definitely not floaters, even into the stiff breeze. I should have gone ahead and made the first whiff. Lord knows, I'm the most qualified for that job. We all jaw about it and resolve that if they ever come back again, we'll pile 'em up. They never come back again.
Back to waiting and more talk. Overstreet gives us some good stories from the Duck Trek so far. Our guide tells us more about this place and north Mississippi hunting in general. It's fun to talk with David Melton and see his enthusiasm for televising duck hunts. For him it's all about reaching folks who've never been on a hunt. He wants them to see and experience the real thing and uses the phrase "invite everyone to come along with us" without it sounding trite or commercial at all.
The whole idea, he says, started when he put a duck quack recording on his web site more than five years ago. Soon after, he got an email from a teacher two states away who said that her class liked the quacking so much that they listened to it almost every day.
Things stay pretty slow for the remainder of the afternoon. And as the sun starts heading for the Mississippi River over the horizon, we're all wishing we could have provided a bit more show for the cameras. But James Overstreet says that such has been the nature of the duck trek; some blowout hunts, but more hunts like this one. And when you think about it, that's the nature of the season. If you get 60 days with, say, 12 monster hunts scattered through them, you call it a pretty good year. But that means 80 percent of the days are much like today.
That's why, as we start to unload the guns and wrap things up, everyone offers up their "I thoroughly enjoyed the day," or "beats the hell out of anything else I could have been doing" comments. David Melton hears them and says something to the effect that those are more lines for the book.
And I know exactly what book he's talking about — the big book of phrases that are always delivered sincerely and with a smile, meant to make everyone feel better, but always containing a half teaspoon of regret. And every phrase in the book really means, "I wish we'd have gotten more ducks today, but man I can't wait to do it again."
