The Off Button

I miss clean with the first shot, but I don’t give the cold cloud of doubt time to form before tapping the over barrel. The angled trajectory of a single pellet cuts through the breast and out the bird’s back. There’s a lot of important stuff between the entrance and exit wounds, so the bird flutters nearly straight downward, finally finishing his last 10 feet of air while completely limp.

The big bird, my first black duck, was everything I’d expected it would be. I picked him up and waded to the boat for closer study. The speculums were purple, just like the book. My “bird” books describe the American black duck as “burnt-toast brown”…yep. The white stripe on the trailing edge looks exactly like the early 1800’s Audubon painting. As I sat on the bow of my boat, the pleasantness of a mild November morning quietly seeped in. I am done with black ducks, but the overall daily bag is three, so I still had two birds to go. Then, I did something that even I didn’t expect. I continued sitting on the bow of the boat without moving.

I watched a small flight of greenwings throw out the air brakes and fall loosely into my decoys. A couple tasted the water lifting their bills to drain the water back in their throats, and several others stretched their wings while lifting their tiny chests into the air. Their motions are too purposeful and exaggerated to be anything other than some sort of display. The flock swims around anxiously in the decoy maze, meeting up somewhere in the middle before swimming out and disappearing into the grass where I had just been hiding. It would be an easy sneak along the grass line to finish up my limit, but I still didn’t move.

It was a perfect moment – the outdoor equivalent of having one of my kids put their pudgy arms around my neck and lay their head on my shoulder. I’m afraid if I move, it’ll break the spell, so I sit perfectly still.

All the hard work and lost sleep were worth these few minutes of complete and timeless serenity. I soak in the rest of the morning without interacting with the world around me before picking up my decoy spread and heading for home. That was the first time I ever experienced the involuntary state-of-mind that I now call “The Off Button.”

As I get older, it’s easier for the events of a routine duck hunt to hit the off button. Shooting a black always does it. So does shooting the second-to-the-last bird of a limit, especially on opening or closing day. A well-hunted pair of divers can do it, and sometimes just killing a trusting, unsuspecting bird does it.

Hunting with a kid can hit the off button even before things really start. The only difference is that I usually have to pretend to be still hunting to keep the youngster engaged.

As the triggers for the off button get more and more frequent, I sometimes have to purposefully keep it from happening. I wait for two or three years for a draw hunt, so I don’t want the off button getting hit too early in the morning. I’ve learned to psych myself up with a pre-dawn pep talk to ensure that I stay in the game until the end or risk regretting it the whole time I’m building up my next batch of preference points.