Ramblings of a Lowcountry Game Warden: A Memoir

The Duck Hunters

The Duck Hunters uck hunting is the annual reenactment of an ancient tradition, one with many devotees along the South Carolina coast and waterways. Although my early experiences with the sport were few, I grew to like duck hunting and duck hunters. Some of my colleagues wryly observed that I really preferred hunting duck hunters, especially the ones who violated the law. The duck-patrol scene included the salt marshes of the coast and the brackish-to-freshwater rivers that pierce the coastal plain. Scattered around that landscape were managed plantation impoundments, broken rice fields, and riverine swamps. At night many of those areas appear to the uninitiated as formidable darkened mazes. In duck season the gloom may eventually give way to one of those incendiary fall sunrises and reveal the full extent of the coastal panorama. During twenty-four waterfowl seasons I probably met most of the duck hunters who plied the rice fields, salt marshes, and rivers along the coast. They covered the widest social range imaginable, from wealthy plantation owners to day laborers from the mills around Georgetown. Duck hunting, I think, is one of the real exemplars of American democracy. The short season of the duck patrols wound my clock every year, and I eagerly looked forward to duck season every fall. I prepared my decrepit, but serviceable, 1976 johnboat and thirty-horsepower Evinrude motor with new camouflage designs and arranged a marsh-reed lining around the sides. Sometimes midway through the season, I repainted the boat in a different D 138 Ramblings of a Lowcountry Game Warden pattern and replaced the marsh reed with palmetto fronds so I wouldn’t be instantly recognizable as I approached coastal duck hunters. I had found my johnboat sitting forlornly in the fenced lot at the Styx facility in Columbia, which held all the old patrol cars, trucks, and boats awaiting auction. The compound was also used to store equipment seized in night-hunting or drug offenses. I was told that the old johnboat had been confiscated from a convicted night hunter apprehended on the Congaree River. The story goes that two game wardens returning from a late-night patrol near Orangeburg stopped in the middle of the I-77 bridge over the Congaree to answer the call of nature. As they were standing there, they noticed the glow of a light moving in the treetops at some distance down the river. They finished their business and drove their car to the other side of the Camouflaged and ready for action on duck patrol in Hope Creek near the South Edisto River The Duck Hunters 139 bridge. They walked back onto the bridge and were watching for activity down the river when they heard a gunshot coming from the direction of the light. They knew that the nearest landing was behind them some distance up the river. They began to hear the sound of an outboard engine and soon saw the boat pass under the bridge, running with no lights. The officers ran to their car and headed to the landing upriver. When they arrived they saw an old pickup with an empty boat trailer. They backed out of the landing, keeping their car out of sight. When the driver came around the bend in the road heading out of the landing, he was suddenly confronted by bright headlights and a flashing blue light. The officers jumped from their car and ordered the man out of his truck. They found a freshly killed doe in the floor of the boat. That violator ’s boat became my favorite marsh-hen and duck-patrol boat. It was not uncommon in some areas to be able to see as many as seven boatloads of duck hunters from the position where I was sitting. Sometimes there were hunters to the left and right of me and across the river, all in clear view. I found out early in the game that the best way to see what was actually going on was to be right in the middle of the action. I wore camouflage and had a camouflaged boat. I took along my wonderful Boykin, Belle, and I threw out a set of cork decoys wherever I stopped to set up. I wore a leather lanyard that held several duck calls, a concealed badge, and a small ring magnet. I used the magnet to...