Technical Guy

 

I am not a technical guy. Often, I cannot properly turn on my cell phone, nor my computer. As a consequence, I frequently leave both off for days and days at a time.

Text? Send photos with my cell? I'd as soon send smoke signals, and could actually do it much, much better.

For years and years I wrote this column longhand on yellow legal notepads, turned it in to the office secretary (thank you, Harriet), hoped for the best where deciphering of my handwriting was concerned, and learned the intoxicating aroma of darkroom chemicals developing my own column pictures before the Digital Age arrived.

My old friend, Bryon Test of Guymon, way out in No Man's Land, called me on his cell one day last week. I took his call at home using the old "landline". He was calling me from his hiding place behind an irrigation pipe, pivot wheel way out yonder in the middle of a harvested cornfield. He was getting in a few last licks on the geese before the closing of the "regular" goose season Feb. 16.

"Hey, Bryon, what's up?"

"Hey, Conrad. I'm out here in a cornfield waitin' for some geese to get up off Guymon City Lake and fly over me."

"Maybe."

"Well, yeah, but they've been comin' to this field every night for about a week. Jake (Bryon's teenage son) knocked down two monsters a couple 'a days ago. One twelve pounds, the other thirteen."

"Who's with you?"

"Just me. Jacob's got basketball practice."

It was about forty-five minutes before dark, Guymon time, which is almost Rocky Mountain Standard time, so I knew that if Bryon was to get some shooting into an evening flock, or two, things were going to be happening within close proximity to our phone call; possibly within a minute or two, and I mentioned that.

"It's alright," he said, "I'll have plenty of warning when they start gettin' up. I'm lookin' at the lake roost through my binocu... wait. They're gettin' up right now. Wow. They look like black smoke on the horizon. Wow, you should see all the snow geese with 'em. Wow. Thousands and thousands. Oh, look. They're goin' the wrong way. No, wait. Some of 'em have peeled off and are headed this way. Hey, Conrad, gotta' go!"

And so he did.

I'm telling you, there's lots about this technical stuff that bothers me. To get a call like that, "live feed" a technician might say, from the middle of a cornfield almost a time zone away, right into my living room and connected to my hand and brain and then relayed to a damaged heart, could not be altogether healthy, do you think? It's not natural.

Maybe I'm making more of this than I should, but let me ask you something: What if Custer's troops had cellphones tucked away in those blue jackets they could have accessed just as the Sioux were closing in? What if Travis' men had all had cellphones in their buckskins just as the Mexicans were pouring over the walls down at the Alamo? What about Pickett's men in that last, great charge at Gettysburg? Napoleon at Waterloo? And on and on.

Speaking for myself, but I'm not sure instant news, which is another way of saying instant gratification, is good for me. Again, I say there's something unnatural about it. I think news, hunting and fishing news particularly, like brown beans, is best after aging, quietly, two days.

Bryon's call from the battlefield, during the battle, put me to thinking about some other things. Remember a few paragraphs back when I used quotation marks around the word "regular" when describing the goose season? It might have confused you. I used the marks to illustrate the irony of closing a goose season one day, and then opening it up again the very next.

Whereas the regular goose season runs, roughly, November through the first half of February, we have another season, the Conservation Order Light Goose Season (COLGS) that runs Feb. 17 through March 30.

That there is such a season, to me, is amazing. When I first started hunting geese in the 1950s, many folks were worried that there would not be any geese left to hunt in the 21st century.

Well, here we are, and the geese, particularly the snow geese, are so populous that they are literally eating themselves out of house and home. Something had to be done to control their numbers, as their breeding grounds up in Hudson Bay were being nibbled into bare mud. Hence, the add-on season for light geese, not dark geese, as they migrate back north to breed. Check regulations for bag and possession limits, and other "special provisions" for this season: You're not going to believe them.

It's not necessary, by the way, to hunt this special season with 600 decoys, three pickups with trailers, and a ten-man crew, à la the TV hunting shows. One man, alone (think of Bryon), can do it quite well, and maybe have more fun doing it than when ten guys wonder if they all shot the same goose at the same time. The method one man might use is called "pass shooting."

In pass shooting, you shoot the geese as they pass back and forth between their chosen feed fields. It is not the mostly easy decoy shooting you get with birds hovering (literally) over an acre-wide spread of plastic decoys, but offers shots, instead, of birds flying higher up, with and against the wind, and, commonly, out a ways from you. The shots are trickier, and more fun because of it.

It is also a sport best suited, perhaps, for loners; people who don't mind a little time by themselves, and who like to know who shot what goose.

Once a couple years ago, Bryon and I were pass shooting some snow geese trading back and forth between a milo field and a wheat stubble field near Spearman, Texas, not far from Guymon. We were separated by several hundred yards, our backs against a fence line, with tumbleweed piles to hide in. The wind was blowing, hard, out of the south. The sky was powder-blue, and hard to look into so powerful was its color. The geese were going nuts, fueling up for the big flight North, and were in the air between us constantly. Sometimes a ragged blue and white mob of them would fly over Bryon; a few moments later, me.

At some point during the height of the flight, I looked down at my feet and got embarrassed. I leaned my gun on a strand of barbed wire, and walked over to where Bryon had taken his stand. Honestly, I didn't care if I flared any birds off of his hide or not. The sky was dark with them, and more where they came from.

"Bryon," I said, raising my voice above the hum of the wind in the wire fence, "I've got more geese now than I want to clean."

He knew exactly where I was headed.

"Me, too. I know a good little Mexican place in Gruver. Great fajitas, man. Chile rellenos. Pico de gayo; Oh, my goodness."

"I'm good for that. What about Kelli? She fixin' dinner, maybe?"

"I'll call her on the cell. She'll meet us in Gruver."

So, there you have it. What would it have been like to have shown up at Bryon and Kelli's stuffed full of pico de gayo, dinner on the table? Technology, and a marriage, saved. I'll grant you that, but a big ol' domestic fight, in front of company; that would have been more natural, and fun, don't you think?