It's the slow burn in a shot of whiskey that sets my mind to rewind. I raise the glass to the mutt. Then I play the same old, in my head movie, over and over. I smell the day. I feel the wind. I see the clouds. I think of the sound of roaring wings.
Decoys working against stretched tethers, feeling those cold shotgun hulls in my coat pocket. Water foaming out in the main lake driving ducks towards the shore. Rafts of feathers lifting off the water and sending my senses to a state of duck nirvana.
Under my breath I hope them to me, to lift high enough to wing over my set-up. Some do, many loft, held suspended, stalled, then fight for flight, catch the wind and disappear like pepper flakes off the far horizon.

The reds, blues, greens, yellows, pinks, and whites had no design just shapes, it was if someone dripped color down a piece of cloth and cut a three inch cross section then wrapped it around my hat to form a hat band. The hat was my mother’s idea for keeping the Texas sun off my head and neck. My mother doesn’t know about sun screen and I’m sure she doesn’t care to know about it, just as well. Her job as she sees it is to make me look like that kid all the other kids gave wedges too as he walks from gym class.

If you have been around Duck Junkies long enough you have heard the name Roy Boyd. Roy has always been someone that has stepped up and at the front of the line when we have asked for help from our staff, but a couple months ago I got a call from Roy, one of those calls you don’t want to get from a lead staffer. He told me that due to some health issues and the need to spend more time with family he needed to step down for a while as Prostaff here at Duck Junkies. One thing we have always told all our staff, Family, God and work come first, and in this case it was the truth.

            Earlier this week I received a message that Roy was in the Hospital in critical condition.

 "I decided at the moment of impact with Aransas Bay I had to have a retriever not to retrieve me so much, which might be a good idea, but to get my ducks."

             This saga begins in Aransas Bay, Texas one very cold January morning as a couple of hunting buddies and I were going to hunt the elusive ducks that winter on the many bays and inlets of the Gulf of Mexico.  We’d hired a guide to put us in just the right spot to see as many of the feathered speedsters as possible.