Fog

I went out to get old-fashioned hamburgers from an old-fashioned drive-in and on the way home noticed that fog was rolling in.

I've never seen fog roll, and I know it forms when the air temperature equals the dewpoint, but fog is more than that. It's my experience that fog forms under clear skies. That is, when the fog goes away, the remaining day is a beautiful, bluebird day.

I remember a morning, it must have been 1965 or 67. I was 12 or thirteen years old and hunting ducks with my Dad on Catfish Prairie, in LaSalle parish, LA. It was foggy that morning, lordy was that a thick fog. One of Dad's coworkers, Max, came on his first duck hunt with us. It wasn't a particularly cold morning, just foggy. Very foggy. So foggy that we couldn't see the blind in the morning darkness. Dad found it through dead reckoning and years of knowing where the blind stood in the marsh. As we settled in, arranging shotguns and thermoses, we could hear wings slapping in the fog overhead.

When the legal time to shoot came and went, the fog seemed to intensify. We heard ducks in the decoys, but couldn't see far enough to know where the ducks were located. Dad knew that when the fog lifted, we'd have a beautiful day and the ducks would raft out on the open water of the big lake. He surmised that if we were going to have any luck, we'd have to shoot ducks in the fog. That year, the limit was four ducks, of any category.

Dad knew that the decoys were arrayed around the blind, with the nearest twenty yards from the blind and the furthest thirty yards from the blind. He studied the water rippling toward the blind and the sound of the ducks in the water. We stood, shoulder-to-shoulder and fired into the decoys.

We heard the scramble of ducks lifting off, then silence. Before long, we heard the sounds of ducks landing in the water, so we stood shoulder-to-shoulder and fired into the fog. We did this three or four times.

The fog lifted at about 8:00 and we walked out to collect our ducks. There were eleven dead in the water, a mixture of scaup, teal, and mallards. One additional teal came over the blocks while we were picking up ducks and Dad scratched him down.

As we were walking out of the lake, our bags heavy with ducks, Max said, "I've just shot a limit of ducks, and haven't seen the first one in the air. This isn't so hard." Dad just chuckled.