J.A. Graves My Seventy Years in California, Los Angeles: The Times-Mirror Press, 1927, 478 pp.
[p. 193] [To illustrate his profound understanding of and relationship to with duck hunting, the author, Graves, writing in 1927, recounts his January 1911 article in McGroaty’s West Coast Magazine, where in or a] Walter Chansler, at 3:30 pm, Friday, November 11, 1910, picks the author up from his office: “Exchanging a ride on an electric car, to be followed by a two-mile drive in a wagon behind a slow team, in the dark, for a rapid auto drive, was a great joy for me. We shoot on the Saturday’s squad at the Westminister Gun Club in Orange County. Those of us who shoot on that day assemble at the club house on Friday night.
. . .
[p. 194] We went out Central Avenue, turned to the left, through Huntington Park, past Bell’s Station to Downey, and on towards Norwalk. A little beyond Downey, a flat tire held us up until a new inner tube was inserted. We again sped on, leaving Norwalk to the left, passed through Artesia, and on to the Alamitoes beet sugar factory. It was rapidly getting dark. Notwithstanding that fact, the road was full of teams, loaded with beets, going to the factory, or empty, or loaded with beet pulp, coming from it.
The best pulp is used for cattle feed. It smells to heaven-and a little further. I never learned where Limburger cheese gets its awful odor. After some experience with beet pulp, my guess is that after the cheese is made it is buried in that odoriferous product to cure. At any rate, if Limburger smells any worse than the beet pulp, I will acknowledge that I am not an expert on “odors.”
From here we sped along for about ten miles, and finally arrived at the club. A bountiful supper, well cooked and palatable, satisfied our appetites, sharpened as they were by the drive in the open air. Then we read and chatted and loafed away the evening, some of the younger members even indulging in a game of Old Maid and Solitaire until bedtime.
We were to be called at five o’clock. I went to sleep at once upon retiring, and it seemed but a few moments until the keeper rapped on my door. Up I jumped. We were soon in our hunting togs and at the breakfast table. The night before we had selected our blinds. No. 7 fell to me.
Breakfast over, each man took his gun and shells and hiked out in darkness to his blind. Reaching mine, I put out my decoys, arranged my shells for handy use, got into my blind, and awaited the call of “time.” This is [p. 195] done by the tolling of a bell hung on the top of our barn, which can be heard for miles around. Just thirty minutes before sunrise, the tolling of the bell broke the stillness. Usually at this hour the air is full of ducks, startled from the ponds by the hunters going to their blinds. This morning there was not a duck in sight. Not even a mudhen cluttered away in hurried alarm. South of us the surf beat upon the ocean’s shore with a dull roar. Chickens crowed, geese cackled, turkeys gobbled, the cows lowed and the horses neighed, at all the surrounding farms. In the shooting line—“nothing doing.” Piff! A poacher on the road shoots at something. Bang! Someone on the Blue Wing grounds gets a shot. Then someone on our grounds takes a long chance at a “sky-scraper” hurrying to the ocean. Presently a teal, flying low, almost ran into me. As he veered off, ducking, darting, twisting, turning, I reached him with my right barrel, and he fell, quite dead, a crumpled mass, the light of his joyous life gone.
We all waited, just a shot her and there breaking the stillness. Two more teal hurtled by. Rising quickly, I dropped one good and dead and crippled the other. He fell in No. 6, but I never got him.
It was a beautiful morning. Just the faintest sort of an east wind sprang up, raising little ripples on the placid waters of our ponds. The heavens were enveloped in dark gray masses of somber clouds. Catalina and the mountains north of Los Angeles were entirely shut out of view. Signal Hill, north of Long Beach, and the Palos Verdes hills, could be dimly seen. The air was as soft as the velvet cheek of a new-born babe, and as balmy as the breath of a midsummer morning.
Someone calls, “Look at the sunrise.!” The sun had really risen some time before, but was shut out by the [p. 196] clouds. About ten degrees above the horizon there was a circular rift in the cloud mass. Through this shafts of sunlight, like burnished gold, streamed, brilliantly illuminating the frayed edges of the cloud rift, and for a few moments the inner lining of the clouds, which darkened the sky, assumed a purple tinge of reflected light, which faded quickly away as the sun ascended. When the sung had completely passed the cloud rift, through that little break we could see the sky, miles beyond, clear, brilliant, radiant in the light. It was like looking into another world, another atmosphere. But soon the sullen cloud-blanket became a solid mass of frowning gray, and the rift of light was gone, for the day, and there hung all around us a water-laden mass of rough, tousled clouds, through which not a ray of sunlight penetrated.
We sat and waited. Not fifty shots had yet been fired on our grounds. How the memories of the past surged through my brain! All the joys of my life, and there have been many, were quickly reviewed. All my sorrows, and there have been enough, quickly followed. All my successes and my triumphs, my defeats and my failures, passed in quick review. The cobwebs of the brain were brushed aside, and the history of the past stood out clearly, bringing memories of pleasures past, of pain and sorrow, grief and woe.
The whirr of swiftly-beaten wings brought me back to the living reality of the present moment, and I missed a pair of sprig, which hurried on with frightened speed, to be bombarded by other guns along the way, until they disappeared towards the ocean.
The ducks were coming a little better now. Over in No. 8 I saw Chandler pick a black speck from the very clouds . . . The [p. 197] surrounding clubs kept up a pretty fusillade. Then all would be quiet for quite a time, when another small band of feathered wanderers would again arouse us to rapid action.
Far off toward the south, I saw the glad figures of eight big sprig, headed my way . . . they wheeled around and were off in the direction whence they came.
Now I got a widgeon, then a teal, then another teal, and finally a sprig. A few drops of rain fell, and I thought we were surely in for a soaking.
In a long lull in the shooting I went out and gathered up my kill. Nine I found. Sixteen more to make the limit. Would I get them? Coming from the north, high up in the air, I saw a band of sprig. They were so high, no one shot at them. Just as they came over me, I selected a leader, held well ahead of him and pulled the trigger. To my astonishment I saw him waver. I swung to another and crack went the gun. He, too, followed, and both of the crippled birds came whirling to the water. They were only crippled and I took no chance of losing them. Away I went through the mud and water, and soon I had wrung the neck of each of them. They were magnificent birds, and raised my count to eleven. I had, in getting them, stepped into a hole, going over my boot-top, and my right boot was full of water. Getting back to my blind, I lay down on my back, stuck my foot in the air and got rid of most of the water. Fortunately, it was a warm morning, and I suffered no inconvenience.
[p. 198] Turning my head I saw a very large sprig coming toward me, close to the water. He was already too close . . . Up he mounted higher and higher and higher, and finally sped out of sight.
Here I am, fifty-eight years old, following the game as I learned it in my younger days. I cannot see a letter in a page of coarse print without my glasses, but I could see a duck, even in that darkened atmosphere, miles away. and name the family to which it belonged.
. . . Let those who wonder why we do it try it once, then they will understand the fascination and joy of it . . . .
[back to 1910]