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Duck hunting was practiced on the lake where I grew up, and there was a duck blind on the neighbors property at the east end of the island. Back in those early fifties days, first day of duck hunting season late October autumn, would be woken at six in the morning by a momentous booming, like the outbreak of war usually on a Saturday. On those weekends of duck hunting, could be standing outside and get rained on with shot, from some hunter in the distance. Didn't hurt and it was harmless, a patter like rain on the fallen leaves, and on the lake water. Duck hunting pretty much tapered off and ended a half dozen years later from my first memories of it.
I remember the painted wooden decoys in those days, an ambiance to them with their crystalline yellow glass eyes. Sometimes they were left in the lake and got frozen into the ice, and kids ice skating might kick the heads off. That made someone pretty mad. And the occasional expended shotgun shell left along the muddy shore, of some channel or the lake, red and waxed with the brass end dimpled from the firing pin.
At some point maybe about when I was sixteen I got a shotgun. Traditionally I had a BB gun, a pump quite powerful --- used mostly to shoot dogs in the butt, that came after our Springer female when she was in heat. I felt like a big game hunter and it didn't do much except sting them. Not sure where the shotgun came from, maybe my mother, a single barrel pump I think 12 gage. I Would shoot at birds after school, but this didn't last long, maybe a week or two.
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