A Dream Comes True

When I was pretty young, we were driving up to Indian Lake to hunt. Right about where we passed by Kiser Lake we saw a nice sized flock of Snow and Blue Geese. They were beautiful. Flying fairly low and not going too fast. We stopped the car and watched, and listened to them pass. It was fantastic. They were the first ones I had ever seen. I hunted Indian Lake for several years and never saw any. Dad saw a migration of Snows one time and a friend of ours actually killed a pair out of a little flock of 6 that decoyed to him out in the Reed Patch blind.

I never saw another Snow Goose until I was hunting up in Maryland. Most days I just saw thousands of Canada Geese, but every now and then I'd see a flock of Snows. One day Winston Chance took me hunting on his family's property down near Queen Anne. They had a large decoy spread of Snow Goose decoys, and a couple hundred Snows spent the entire afternoon on a pond just across the road, but we didn't have any action.

Toward the end of my first season I got a shot at a single Snow Goose and I killed it. The following year I killed another single. But not any real Snow Goose shooting like I had read about. In the mid-80's we had a single Snow Goose fly by our blind on the Pamlico River and I killed it. A couple years later Whit killed a Blue out of #74 and another in a Swan field over in Hyde County. So we were pecking away at them, but not really Snow Goose hunting.

Then in 1999 (I think) I got invited to Saskatchewan by an old friend of my Father. About a half hour into our second morning I finally got the Snow Goose shooting I had dreamed of ever since that Kiser Lake flock 30 some years before.

We had some really great Snow, Blue, and Ross' Goose shoots in Saskatchewan. Loved every minute of it. I have killed one more Snow here in NC since then. Maybe I'll get to shoot them again someday, sure hope to have that dream come true again.