Dark was with us and the howling wind tugged at the cloth blind tucked into a windrow of cedar trees on the edge of a cut barley field. The rain would also come and the storm clouds would snuff the sun. Gathered in the blind was our granddaughter Tiffany Holladay, whom I affectionately call Tiff, my wife Renette, our host Eric Wagner, and myself.

Tiff in a pre-dawn duck blind listening for the sound of thin wings slicing the air.

We were on Prince Edward Island, Canada, during that season of the year when summer’s greenery turns to autumn’s flame on this resplendent island with its rolling hills, flat farmland, laced with creeks, ponds, rivers, beaver ponds and all bordered by salt marsh where the smell of the ocean is strong. A most perfect place for black ducks. A waterfowler’s playground. The last bastion where you can shoot four of these grand Atlantic Flyway ducks. But it is also within my memory when I could shoot four black ducks in my home state of South Carolina. The limit is now one.

This story began on July 7, 1988 when Tiff was born. I had been fishing that sweaty, summer morning for bream and was scaling them when I got the call that a second girl, the baby wasn’t scheduled to be born for another week, had been birthed by my daughter.

I stopped long enough to brush fish scales from my beard, my short-sleeved faded khaki shirt and hurried to the hospital. She had blonde hair and sharp, glistening hazel eyes that you could look into forever. I had no idea that she would become a huntress and ducks would be her favorite game.

As she grew older we fished and I soon learned that she had a talent--a skill for the outdoor way of life. Her mind even at an early age was a compass.

When she was nine, she came to me and asked me to take her duck hunting. I talked her into waiting a couple of years. I gave her videos on waterfowling hunting and I watched as her interest rose. She was serious about wanting to be a duck hunter. Her waterfowl identification soared. When Tiff turned 11, she again came to me and said, “Let’s go.”

It was time for me to ante up. She had shot some doves with me and so I knew she was versed in gun safety and some shooting dexterity.

Tiff and the author sharing some down time.

My wife and I had hunted at Ace Cullum’s Pin Oak Mallard Lodge, now privately owned, near Rayville, Louisiana, in the late ‘90s and had banged mallards for three days.

This seemed as good a place as any to put her on some big-time duck hunting and to jump start her with ducks and memories.

“The mallard count is down,” Ace said when we arrived at the Lodge only days away from the year 2000, “but the gadwalls are here in large numbers.”