Tough winter, wasn’t it? Seems to me they’re all tough nowadays, but of course it may be that I’m getting tender. Anyway, most of the things I like to do just aren’t done in winter, not in the so-called Temperate Zone.
The Old Man used to reckon that one man’s weather is another man’s poison. “The only way to handle weather,” he said once, “is to know what you want to do with it and use it accordingly. Quit complaining about it and put up with it for what it’s worth. And be prepared for it. The trouble with city people is that they freeze when it’s cold and boil when it’s hot because they dress the same way for all seasons. An Eskimo knows it’s going to be cold, so he stokes himself up on boiled walrus or blubber, builds a house to match his mood and only interrupts the long dark winter to thaw out another chunk of seal. The African savage knows it’s going to be hot the year round, so he wears a strip of banana leaf to hide his nakedness and seeks his coolness under a palm.
“You get a big unseasonable snow, and the man who owns a pair of long-handled red-flannel drawers hollers hooray and goes for a sleigh ride. The fellow that’s still stuck into T-shirt and shorts whimpers and wails that the weatherman’s betrayed him personally. There ain’t no such thing as bad weather, if you come right down to it. Some’s just better than others, as there ain’t no such thing as a real ugly woman. Some are just prettier than others.”
This scholarly lecture was delivered, as I recall, on the worst day I can remember. Horrible was a kind word for it. It doesn’t snow much where I came from in the Carolinas, but this day it had snowed enough to make a New Hampshire athlete search for his mackinaw and wear his skis. The gray skies were as sad as a Sunday funeral, and the wind howled as the downy snowflakes switched over into scudding sleet. It was the kind of day to toss another pine knot on the fire and hope that no catastrophe short of an earthquake would haul you out of the house.
The Old Man stomped in with his pipe frozen solid, rime on his mustache, and his nose a brilliant cherry red. He seemed as bright as a boxful of birds at a time when the dogs were indistinguishable from the logs on the fire, they were that close to the blaze.
“It’s a lovely day today, ain’t it?” said he, shaking the snow from his overcoat and warming his chapped hands before the fire. “And by all indications it’ll be lovelier tomorrow.”
Grandma regarded her mate with disapproval. “Quit dripping all over my rugs,” Miss Caroline said. “A lovely day for what? Pneumonia? Hang that wet coat on the back porch.”
The Old Man smiled. “It’s a lovely day for ducks,” he said. “I never saw a nicer day for ducks. The wind will break up the rafts, and the snow and ice will freeze up the big ponds. The ducks’ll fly low and come into any little pothole that isn’t frozen tight. They’ll decoy to anything that looks free of wind. If I was a meat hunter I’d make fine a fortune in the morning. Just creeping up on a few unfrozen patches and letting fly with a 10-gauge or some other murderous weapon. Slay ’em by the hundreds.”
The Old Man scowled at the idea. “Fortunately,” he said, “I ain’t a pothunter, and I don’t own no 10-gauge shotgun. But all the same I intend to take advantage of the weather and shoot rather selectively with that old pump gun that’s standing in the corner. Tomorrow I shoot nothing but canvasbacks, bar the occasional pintail and a Canada goose or so. Have I got any takers or are you just going to sit here and shiver and feel sorry because it ain’t April?”
I had seen that pointed pipestem before. He strictly wasn’t aiming it at Grandma.
“What time do we get up?” I asked. “Before dawn, as usual?”
“Let’s don’t overdo it,” the old buzzard grinned. “It’ll be black night until 7 o’clock, and they’ll fly all day in this wind anyhow. I should remark that if you had breakfast ready by 6:30 we’d have ample time to cope with all the necessities. But dress warm, boy, dress warm, and don’t bother to get me up till the coffee’s boiling. I aim to sleep in my long drawers, too. That way you start off warm.
One thing the Old Man taught me – you dress warm from the inside out, not the outside in. You start with a hot breakfast – ham and eggs and toast and a lot of coffee – and then you surrounded the breakfast with long drawers and a soft sweater and a couple of flannel shirts and two pairs of socks. A pair of woolly britches over that, and hip boots to keep the wind and water off you, and an oilskin jacket and a cap with earmuffs, and you don’t need a bearskin coat. Once that inside furnace starts working, you find you can sweat in a blizzard.
“I know it sounds kind of sissy,” the Old Man said as we mopped up the remains of the eggs with the toast, “but certain creature comforts can make a power of difference in how good you shoot. You go get that little kerosene stove we used on the beach this fall while I tend to the coffee thermos.”
He tended to another kind of thermos, too, but I suspect it contained no coffee. It didn’t sound like coffee. It sounded thinner to the naked ear, and possibly contained a vitamin tonic whose sale, at the time, was highly illegal. In any case, it was too special for boys.
We had two or three blinds, to be used according to wind and weather, and this freezing morning we chose a nearby one, with me poling the boat and freezing my fingers through the mittens, my nose running droplets onto the scarf around my neck, the marshes cold and gray and windswept, as only salt marshes can be on a day like this. As I shoved the skiff up the little avenues of what was water day before yesterday the boat’s keel made a crackling noise as it forced its way through the thin crusting of last night’s ice. The narrow lanes were frozen bank to bank, but when we hove onto a semisweet-water pond, it was only iced around the edges. A mighty flock of mallards took off with irritable quacks when we approached the blind, and the darting squish-wish of frustrated teal swept low as we shoved the skiff into the little tunnel behind it. The Old Man more or less slung a dozen decoys into the water helter-skelter, with nothing of his usual attention to meticulous placement.
“Today,” he said blandly, “they’ll decoy to a couple of old tin cans and some milk bottles. Fire up that stove, sonny, and hand me the jug – the other thermos.”
I swear, we could have gotten a limit of anything with a couple of old brooms and a slingshot that day. It was almost as if – but not quite – the ducks were trying to come into the blind to get warm. You know Canada geese as wary birds. We collected our limit of the old honkers in two flights, and didn’t even bother to change to goose loads, they came in that close.
The roaring wind had filled the skies with disturbed birds, all looking for a place to set. None of the usual artifices which the Old Man employed, and which I knew by now, were necessary. It was a mere matter of choice of breed. We got so persnickety at one time that we made a bargain: I would shoot only canvasbacks and the Old Man would specialize in pintails. We sneered at mallards – as it was late in the season, and we suspected a tendency to fish-eating – and simply stood up and shooed away the teal and the golden-eyes and broadbills and trash ducks that fought their way to the little space.
Time has passed, but I would swear we were out of that blind with the boat loaded to the gunwales and the special jug only a quarter diminished before an hour was up. I have only seen it that way once since, when an old friend named Joe Turner, a Washington rasslin’-boxing promoter, and I dared a snowstorm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. You had to look between the snowflakes to see the ducks, but, Lord save us, there were more ducks than snowflakes.
Well, the Old Man and I snuffed out the little kerosene stove, broke the skiff free of the ice that bound her and shoved happily off for home and fire. The snow had started again but the wind had dropped, and the sky was still filled with enough low-flying ducks to have provided a hundred years’ imprisonment for a man who wished to overshoot his quota. When we dragged the boat up on the shingle and shouldered the strings of fowl and the guns, the Old Man smiled sort of sardonically at the putty-gray skies.
“Your grandma ain’t going to believe it,” he said, “but I think this was one of the prettiest days I ever saw in my life. Any argument?”
“No, sir,” I said. “You can have them bluebird days.”
I don’t ski, as I would rather contract pneumonia without breaking my back in the process, but I can see now where a snowfall that wrecks a city’s transportation can be a thing of beauty to a man who straps staves on his feet and goes hurtling down a hill to sudden dissolution.
The average muggy day – semi-hot, with a promise of drizzle – can be heaven to a quail shooter, because the bobwhites seem to come out of their beds on the swamp-sides and leave a track of scent that makes the dogs’ noses more acute. The other extreme is the classic golden day, dry and fit for a calendar illustration, when the birds don’t seem to move and the pointer’s smeller is hot and he runs through the covey or falls flat on his belly just before the quail erupt.
Of all the quail-shooting days I can remember, the two best were conducted in a driving downpour, when a sane man would have hovered over the fire and waited until tomorrow. Ely Wilson of Kingstree, South Carolina, will recall that on one rainy day, when a semi-mongrel named Joe was making a bum out of his hotly blooded friends, we shot the limit of 15 bobwhites inside of 45 minutes, and took only three birds from each covey. Birds were all over the place, leaving a musk as heady as any skunk’s. I was back on the same terrain later on that year, on one of those sunny bluebird days, and barely raised a feather.
Apart from accepting the weather, the Old man early instilled another truism that has kept me nonulcerated for many a year. If you can’t work the weather to your will, don’t fight it. There is nothing nicer than a roaring blaze inside a snug house when things are really impossible outside. Let it rain, let it pour, let it snow, let it roar; a tidy fire and a noggin of something to half-sole your spirit is not a bad way to spend a day, especially if there is a book handy or a record on the machine.
“The best thing about a real bad day,” the Old Man said, “is that you can sit by the fire and tell lies which sound so convincing that they eventually become truth and part of the legend.”
Editor’s Note: “If You Can’t Lick the Weather, Join It” is © 1958 by Robert Ruark. Reprinted by permission of Harold Matson Co. Inc. All rights reserved.