Mild weather for Thanksgiving in MD is typical. My brother, father and a few other close friends always hunted TG morning. We leased farm blinds around the lower Eastern shore every winter. Tradition. But this Thanksgiving was a different, unusually harsh day.
We were all in a pit blind before dawn that morning. A pit blind is about a 4-1/2 foot deep box, about 12 feet long, with benches, buried in the field and the top of the pit is level with the ground. The roof is simply cattle fencing wire, covered with brush and mounted on garage door tracks level with the ground. It can be slid open to allow the hunters to stand up and fire. We leased that particular blind every year for about 8-10 years. Expensive at 1k per person, but it was prime hunting land, just east of the Chesapeake Bay and south of Route 50. The farm was only about a two hour drive from home.
When we arrived in the predawn darkness, the duck pond was frozen. The jon boat had been left in the pond and the engine wouldn't go into gear because the lower unit was a block of ice. So breaking up the pond ice and setting out duck decoys wasn't an option. We could only put out 3-D goose decoys with straw spread around them in the field behind the blind, on the opposite side from the pond. The ground was frozen, the wind was blowing and It was snowing.
For those who don't hunt waterfowl, ducks fly at dawn and geese fly at 10am. You can set your watch by them. I swear this to be fact. Anyway, with a frozen pond, we knew the ducks weren't coming. We would have to tough out the wait for the geese to get up off of Chesapeake in a few hours and fly in looking for food. The straw around our decoys was the right setup to mimic open feeding ground.
Inside a blind with friends is not boring. The wait is half the fun. Jokes, stories and all sorts of mischief was normal. I took my Buddy heater on hunts and there was always an option of firing off a shell and warming your hands on the barrel if you wanted. And food and hot coffee. But this particular morning, there was a frozen slab of water in the bottom of the blind and it was thicker than the pallets used for flooring. So ice cold feet below and blowing snow over the sparse roof' above. We were COLD.
We took turns keeping watch over the goose decoys through a hole in the blind roof. The wind and blowing snow in your face made turns short. My thick beard and leather hat helped, but dang it stung. I turned away from the wind to wipe the snow off my face and there were geese that had snuck in quietly, on the ground right there by the pond. Ho. Ree. Sheet! I alerted the group to get ready, then slid open the blind roof. We had to spin around but still dropped three out of six or seven as they tried to jump up and disappear into the falling snow. Good enough for us, plenty for dinner, so we packed up quickly and got out of there.
We retold that TG hunt story for many years afterward. Maybe embellished it bit here and there, but the above is the cleaned up truth. Half of those hunters have gone on to Glory and are missed.
So one more time, that's the story of our hunt, a rare White Thanksgiving, in1989.
Savor your many Blessings today and Happy Thanksgiving!
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