ESPN Hunting

"And they whirled and they twirled and they tangoed
Singin' and jingin' the jango
Floatin' like the heavens above
It looks like muskrat love."
— "Muskrat Love" written by Willis Alan Ramsey, copyright 1971; the song as performed by Captain & Tennille climbed to No. 4 on the pop/rock charts in 1976

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CLINTON, Iowa — It was the ducks that were "floatin' like the heavens above" as Mike Donahue and I practiced a hunters' version of "muskrat love" on this windy day in the Mississippi River marsh.

Between the boot-sucking mud of the marsh and the 25 mph northwest wind howling down Pool 13 of the river, this was no place for country club duck hunters.

When Donahue had said on the telephone the night before that we'd probably hunt out of "rat huts," I had flashbacks to some of the dumps I'd lived in after moving out of the fraternity house and finishing my English degree at the University of Arkansas.

When Donahue, 35, further explained that we would be using muskrat huts as duck blinds — "some are big enough for two people; some are just one-man huts" — frankly, I didn't have any idea what to expect as the ESPNOutdoors.com Duck Trek headed to the Tall Corn State.

James Overstreet and I followed Donahue into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Bulgers Hollow Access Area about 8:30 a.m. the day of our hunt. Overstreet had barely dodged an eight-point, cow-sized whitetail deer during our late-night drive to Clinton. We were both relieved to hear that a 3 a.m. wake-up call wouldn't be necessary for this hunt.

As we turned off the highway onto a gravel road that dropped down into the Mississippi River bottoms, the small limestone bluffs on both sides of the winding road reminded me of the Ozarks. But the Ozarks were the furthest thing from my mind as the terrain flattened and we parked near a boat ramp at the Bulgers Hollow access. The Mississippi looked more like a small sea than a river.

"This place has silted in so much that now it looks like an ocean," said Donahue, who first started hunting this area as an 8-year-old, accompanying his father, Tom.

For the past year-and-a-half, Donahue has been a fish out of water. After owning three pizza places and an ice cream shop near the Clinton "suburb" of Camanche, where he attended high school, Donahue had sold them all — "I saw that the economy was going south five years ago" — and enrolled at the Iowa police academy. His first law enforcement job sent him to Laurens, Iowa, a five-hour drive west of the Mississippi. Now a sergeant for the police department there, Donahue loves his new job, but hates being so far from the river he grew up on.

After backing an aluminum johnboat into the water, Donahue explained the Mud Buddy outboard motor attached to the stern was the only way to navigate this shallow marsh that was 10 feet deep when he'd first started hunting it with his dad.

This area of the Mississippi is also known as Elk River Junction, and it is the widest part of the upper river.

"Those trees weren't there not that long ago," said Donahue, pointing to an island covered in 30-foot-tall willow trees.

Much of the marsh remains thick with the now-brown stalks of this year's lily pads. Donahue explained that floods in the mid to late '90s had completely eliminated acres of lily pads — much to the detriment of both game and fish. Only recently have the aquatic plants begun to reestablish themselves.

A high-density population of coots did their comical "I'm-moving-my-feet-as-fast-as-I-can" lift off the water as we boated up-river, still within sight of Bulgers Hollow.

That's when I started noticing muskrat huts.

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Muskrats are a native North American species of rodents like lemmings and voles. They're not part of the "rattus" genus; muskrats are like sewer rats only in the general sense of being highly adaptable, omnivorous feeders.

The gray skies over the Mississippi that morning contained enough flying waterfowl to encourage us as Donahue steered us until even his swamp-running mud-motor couldn't push us any further. The three of us stepped out into the six-inch-deep water and pushed the johnboat closer to a pair of rat huts.

When that effort quit producing significant movement, Donahue and I each grabbed a sack of decoys and a spinning-wing motorized decoy and trudged over to the first muskrat hut, where we started tossing out decoys. Donahue had explained that this was a "two-man hut," and it would be all we'd need, since Overstreet would stay in the boat, several yards away, with the camouflage of a boat blind lifted up around him, shooting photographs.

From a distance, a muskrat hut appears just like a beaver den. But closer inspection reveals a distinct difference. Rather than the various-sized tree limbs and twigs assembled by beavers, muskrat hut materials are mostly mud and aquatic plants.

It's that preference for mud that made the muskrat a legendary creature in the "creation story" of various Native American tribes.

The general theme common to these various tribal stories is that "The Great One" was floating on a log in a water-covered Earth, accompanied by several animals, all of whom failed to swim deep enough to return to The Great One with a morsel of mud from below. Finally, the muskrat took its turn at the task and, after being under water for an extended period of time, surfaced with two paws-worth of mud.

It was from this, that The Great One was able to begin forming land masses in what was once only water, according to the myths.

All I know is that a mud-based muskrat hut makes a fairly comfortable hiding place as you lay against it, waiting for ducks to respond to decoys and calling. "Fairly comfortable" are the key words there. Nothing can be La-Z-Boy cozy in the middle of a Mississippi River marsh rippling with hard north winds, occasionally blowing sleet against your back, with temperatures just this side of freezing. [NEXT PAGE]

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