Good Sports

Back a few years when Paul Gettys and his friends invited me to Saskatchewan with them, they really treated me good. Even though they normally sort of shared some responsibilities, that year they bent the rules a little so I could hunt all the time and didn't have to spend any of the time scouting. Not that I could have been all that productive out scouting, since I didn't know where I was most of the time, and didn't know any of the farmers. But it was really nice of those guys to let me hunt morning and evening.

They made sure I was set to get decent shooting wherever we hunted. One morning Paul had picked out a goose field that was a good ways from the area where we had been goose shooting. He said their were birds there in the evening, so we set up there the following morning. The field we were in was pretty much rectangular, with a big pond at one corner and a small pond on the opposite corner. We got some goose shooting, although not a lot. The good sportsmanship showed up when a Specklebelly came from the right side of the spread all the way across to where I was on the far left edge. None of them shot at it, let me kill my first ever Specklebelly. That same morning a lot of Mallards were moving back and forth between the two ponds. Not really coming to our decoys, but just skirting the far left edge of the decoys - my corner. When I had killed my duck limit, I volunteered to switch places with one of them. They said no, for me just to fire away. I killed 26 out of our 32 duck limit. That was true friendship and sportsmanship.

On a couple of things they snagged me, but it was out of humor, not selfishness. The first week we were there, Sand Hill Cranes were everywhere. But, those guys told me not to shoot one. Said they were a horrible looking bird and not fit to eat. So I let many of them pass by me. After about a week of hunting, Rich Kasunic asked me if I had killed a Crane yet and I told him no, that I wasn't going to bother with one. He said that I should kill one just to add to my 'big list'. So, I was all for it. Never saw another one for the rest of the trip. They told me later that they had all killed one, and that they were not a great prize, but that it was a shame I had gone all the way to Saskatchewan and not gotten one.

Another time they got me we were in a good goose field. They normally hunted in 2 pairs out in the middle of the decoy spread. If one pair or the other got the lion's share of the shooting, they would trade off every hour or so. Well, this one morning Paul and I were paired together and were getting the majority of the shooting so he told me that we would go switch with the other guys. They said no. I think it was just because they wanted me to have the shooting. But anyhow, as Paul and I were standing there trying to convince them to swap out, a flock of Ross' Geese came right to the decoys. They were only about 20 yards high, but they were doing that strange flipping over in flight. The entire flock was flipping over and over, it was crazy. When they got to about 35 yards Paul hollered "Shoot!" So I did. Missed clean. But the birds all straightened out and the four us killed the entire flock. 11 birds down, it was awesome. I asked Paul, why did he say to shoot when the birds were doing all that flipping around, and he said that firing a shot was the only way to get them to stop and start flying normally. Being the "new" man, I had been elected to be the one to give up that first shot. Didn't need it, really. There were only 11 birds in the flock.

All in all, those guys could not have treated me any better for that 2 week trip. True Sportsmen.