From our January/February 2026 Issue
A grandparent knows best just how far the apple falls from the tree. That’s why the morning my only grandkid took me duck hunting makes me smile whenever I think about it. It happened last January in Florida when I drove from my Michigan home to visit family in Tallahassee. Years earlier I had introduced my grandson to the joys of pheasant hunting with pointing dogs. I had shown him how to gut his first deer—a fine buck he had shot on my property. He’d been about 15 at the time. Now he was 25.
The intervening years had seen a rough patch when the boy had turned rebellious and his parents had turned to my wife and me for help. We had agreed to take him in, provided he lived up to the “code of conduct” he helped write and promised to honor. He hadn’t. A scant four months later when we’d sent him home, our strained relationship had been close to breaking. After that, the infrequent times together hadn’t included hunting, because the distance between us had been more than miles.
So imagine my delight when my grandson wanted to share a secret spot he had for hunting wood ducks while I was in Florida.
The swamp he took me to was his world—a special place he goes to with a buddy but more often hunts alone when pressure from work and graduate school overwhelms. It was pitch-dark at the public landing when we unloaded his camo-painted john-boat and GO-DEVIL engine. From my swivel seat, I watched the endless swamp unfold before a sealed-beam searchlight as my grandson pivoted his boat through a cypress forest of moss-bearded, ghostly sentinels. I hoped he knew where we were going, because there was no way I would have been able to find my way back to the landing.
Oh, he knew, which later prompted a memory of that long-ago day he’d handed back a compass I’d offered before stepping into the Michigan grouse woods. “Don’t need it,” I remembered him saying. “I’m with you.” With the GO-DEVIL now silenced, we sipped coffee while darkness receded and listened to the swamp: the whoosh of wingbeats from somewhere above, the owl-like booming of what I thought was a bittern.
“You have to be quick on these wood ducks,” he said. “They disappear fast in the timber.”
Did they ever! Singles and pairs whistled by in wing flashes too late for shots. When my grandson fired, I never saw the bird but heard its plop upon falling into the swamp.
“I see what you mean.”
“Told you,” he laughed.
The drake woodie he shot was the morning’s only reward. Except for the joy I experienced from knowing he had come back. All the way back.
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