Hard Bottom

The O-540 Lycoming aircraft motor coughed at the thirty-one-degree Florida morning. The first Tuesday of the year brought the first frost of the winter. A warm duck season held birds to the north of Central Florida, but Van and I were hopeful the front pushed Snipe the remaining stretch of their journey from Canada. After a few primes and cranks the Hamant ultra-light airboat came to an idle and we prepared for the five mile run north on the St. John’s River to a stretch of hard bottom.

The pasture’s low spots had gone white overnight, and the boat’s polymer bottom slipped effortlessly across the marsh. Van sat next to me, his gaze forward, locked in by his layers. The sun split the horizon and its palette of orange and yellow reflected off the water like it was still.

The airboat settled and it felt warm for a moment. Dalva jumped off the front deck and went straight into the ditch coming out black to the shoulders. I had become immune to Van’s comments about little brown dogs being an aperitif for the marsh’s scaled gatekeepers. When his Lab, Ruby, passed I opted to get our next dog. Weston and Mel had been begging for a puppy, but Mel wanted something smaller than a lab — Boykin Spaniel was the compromise. She’s the best dog we’ve ever hunted over, though Van won’t admit it.

The mud grabs at the boots’ heel and hands it back a half second later than you want it. You learn to walk from the hip. Three steps, stand, three steps, stand, until you find the hard bottom. Dalva remains unaffected as she floats in front of us. Snipe wait until they decide you have seen them, then they fly, cursing, like a man arguing with himself. Van insisted you had to shoot them before they shit, or else save the shell. Dalva flushed the first bird at eleven yards. I shot behind it twice.

“Good start,” Van said.

“It’s early.”

“It’s eight-thirty.”

Cattle had been through in December and the trails were cut to soup, with the ground firmer between them. The birds were holding in the firm parts where the maidencane thinned. Two Sandhill Cranes flushed out of the pickerelweed and complained on their way out. Dalva worked close. She turned nine in November, is deaf on the left side and likes to range close enough I can see her, which suits me fine.

Mel filled the thermos at five while I packed my blind bag at the kitchen table. She watched in the doorway wearing my sweatshirt with her arms crossed and told me Weston had set his boots out next to mine the night before, hoping. Weston is twelve. He asked me Thursday, and I promised next weekend. His expression said he knew there was no next weekend, and I told him to go finish his math.

I left my phone, face down, in the console under a few cans of Copenhagen. That is where I keep it now.

We took the long way in from the south, off 192, which is nine miles longer than the Duda road past the sod farms. I said the sod trucks tear the road to pieces. Van has a paperback of Ninety-two in the Shade on the dash of his truck, swollen from the rain. He’s never got past the part where Skelton burns the skiff. He has been reading it since his divorce. He says he likes to know the book is there.

By eleven we had six to hand. Snipe come apart in the hand if you are rough with them. Van shot a double out of a brush pile and hollered about it like a man half his age. Dalva walked back with a mouthful of both birds. I gave her my open hand and she dropped them at my feet, then went and stood in the ditch to cool off. Van said she was the only thing on the river with any sense.

We ate sitting on the deck of the airboat. Mel put two sandwiches in the bag when I only ever eat one.

“Van, I have got myself into something.”

He didn’t stop chewing and looked out over the marsh. Two cabbage palms leaned in opposite directions and frame the sunset in the summer.

“Money,” he said.

“No.”

He nodded like I said yes, then told me about his brother Ray, who put his new Chittum Skiff on a second mortgage in 2019 and then listed his house to cover the boat, and how their mother had to be told, and how Ray sat in the kitchen and cried. A grown man of fifty-one with a Burt Reynolds mustache.

“You’ll figure it out,” he said, “you always do.”

He whistled the dog up. I said Van’s name again, but he was already fifty feet out and did not turn around. I let it go and loaded two shells and went after him.

I winged a bird and it sailed towards the horizon. Dalva brought it in alive. It lay in my hand, warm through the glove. The long bill and the eye set back so far it looks to be assembled wrong. Four ounces of bird flown from Canada on its own steam, twice a year, every year all its life, and it looked at me sideways. I stood in the muck longer than I needed to and put the bird in the game bag with the others.

Van watched from the fence line.

“You okay?”

“Cold.”

At three the wind laid down and the birds got jumpy and started flushing outside of our twenty gauge’s range, which is their way of telling you the day is over. Ten birds. A good day, but neither of us said so.

The truck turned two hundred thousand miles in September. Mel keeps the service log in the glovebox in her handwriting. Oil changes, dates, tire rotations going back to when we bought it. I have taken to doing the oil myself in the driveway. She says it saves us forty dollars. It saves us forty dollars.

I pulled in at dark. Weston’s bike was on its side blocking the driveway where he leaves it, and the porch light was on. The kitchen window glowed yellow through the blinds. I cleaned the birds on the tailgate of the truck with Dalva leaning wet against my leg, shaking, pleased with herself. Ten birds is hardly a meal. I breasted them and placed them in a row.

Mel came out in a lobster-patterned apron she stole from her grandmother years ago and stood on the step.

“You find them?”

“Found them.”

She counted the pile on the truck bed nodding her head from bird to bird, and said that Weston had waited up and was pretending not to have waited up. I put the cleaned birds in a gallon Ziploc bag, handed them to her and she went inside and the door shut. After a few minutes the yellow went black.

I ran the hose over my hands until I could no longer feel anything. I stood there for a while longer, and the dog leaned on my leg, and up the road someone was burning a brush pile and you could smell it coming across the yards

.

Want to fish? Book a fly fishing trip with me. Dates available now.
Want to hunt? Book a snipe hunting trip with me. November-February.
Message me directly for details.