The High Plains Offer Good Canada Goose Shooting -- If You're Willing To Work Through the Distractions To Get To Them
By Dave Carty
We had been hunting Canadas on several hundred acres of corn stubble, land opened by an agreement between the state and the landowner specifically for hunting. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of similar plots stretching across Montana and North Dakota, and, despite the inevitable grumbling that follows any government program, I've found such plots good more often than not. In this case, my friend Bill had done all the legwork, scouting flights and lining up access ahead of time. All the better for lazy me.
We'd driven in on the far side of the field, towing Bill's trailer full of silhouette decoys behind us. Two hours later, we decided to exit through a different gate, one that was closer to the county road. I walked down to open the gate while Bill finished loading decoys, camo netting and a pile of dead geese.
Wire gates are a study in shade-tree engineering. They're ubiquitous out West. Although I've probably opened ten thousand, I've yet to find one I liked. I didn't like this one, either.
It was almost as high as I am tall, stretched taut as a violin string, and 20 feet across, bad news from every angle. The worst thing you can do with a wire gate is let it get away; but the moment I pried off the wire latch, it shot out of my hands like a giant slinky, windmilling through the air and landing in a jumble of hopelessly twisted wire and wooden fence posts.
Fifteen minutes of futile detangling attempts later, we heard a door slam and the farmer stalked up, his feed cap yanked angrily over his eyes. He waved me out of the way and began sorting through the strands of barbed wire with his thick fingers, picking them apart one by one. Then he stretched out the gate, jerked his thumb at Bill to drive through and shoved the gate back in my hands before stomping away.
"Sorry," I called after him.
So much for hospitality in the Wild West. Not all the locals are as lively as that guy, but there are plenty of geese that will talk to you if you hit the right notes. The major drainages of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, which run through Montana and merge just over the border in North Dakota, provide natural staging areas in both states. North Dakota has the added advantage of several huge Missouri River impoundments. But it is corn that draws Canadas.
In the west, water is the lifeblood of agriculture. Rivers provide irrigation for water-loving crops like corn and sugar beets, and in December, when the crops have been harvested, the geese arrive -- first by the hundreds, then by the tens of thousands. Of course, they don't all arrive at once and they don't all arrive in the same place, which means that, no matter how many geese there may potentially be, you have to find them first.
Bill and I have an agreement: I take him bird hunting over my pointers and he takes me waterfowl hunting over his retrievers. But Bill isn't living up to his end, because he doesn't own a retriever. I milk his sense of guilt and get one or two goose trips and a handful of duck hunts out of him every season.
Instead, Bill has a pointer, Jimmy, who is about as useless in a goose blind as I am in a one-legged sack race. But Lord, Jimmy loves to run. A day or so after the gate incident we drove onto a vast plateau of alfalfa stubble which Bill had determined the birds were flying over on their way to nearby cornfields. Bill dropped the tail gate, threw our sacks of decoys on the ground and let Jimmy out to stretch his legs. Jimmy poked around the truck, peed on a bush and seemed to be behaving himself. But by the time we had set out the last of our silhouettes, he had disappeared.
I stared at the horizon, extending across miles of pool-table-flat crop land in every direction. How could he have run out of sight so quickly?
"Damn!" Bill explained.
I volunteered to look for him, but 20 minutes of driving produced not a glimpse of the pure-white dog. I drove back shaking my head and handed Bill the keys. Bill tore off in a cloud of dust, and a few minutes later I watched his truck stop at a distant spread another group of hunters had set up, then intermittently disappear into one ravine, only to appear in the next ravine over. From time to time I'd hear the faint, furious blast of a whistle. Finally, Bill chugged back up again. Jimmy was in the front seat, as pleased as he can be. Bill shot out of the truck and started barking orders, then pointed to the west. Sure enough, I could see several dark, wavering lines of geese. I grabbed my gun and trotted over to my coffin blind, zipped myself in and started flagging while Bill ditched his truck in a ravine and then raced back to his blind, the calls around his neck jangling.
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But the first flock flared just on the edge of range. Here, a half day's flight from the Canadian border, you'd think the geese would be gullible, but that's rarely the case. I don't know how many times they'd been shot at before they got to us, but they certainly saw something they didn't like and decided to take the high road -- 80 yards up, much too far for a shot. Flock after flock veered away and to the south, where from time to time we heard the distant pop of gunfire. Finally, a small flock came in low over the stubble and Bill dumped a pair of them. The remaining birds balled up in panic and then slid away, honking mournfully.
On the high prairies, where what passes for cover might be grass or corn stubble a scant few inches high, camouflage is everything. Bill, who has an anal streak to begin with, is obsessive about grassing in his ground blinds and coffins, but as much as I hate to agree with him, he's probably right. A blind has to look like a small and insignificant rise in the topography, not a sudden hump surrounded by plastic dekes, no matter how photographically precise their plumage. Bill has a bag of prairie grass he's painstakingly tied in clumps and dyed in shades or brown, gray and black, which we tie to his coffin blinds and intersperse with any other vegetation that's handy. Sometimes there's not much to work with. But when done right, the effect is amazing -- the blinds virtually melt into the ground. On one trip, a magpie landed on Bill's coffin, hopped up his chest and peered, perplexed, under the brim of his camo hat before Bill took a swipe at it, a split second too late.
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