Taking a knee with a string of black ducks.

As the years slipped by, we continued to go on September dove shoots and to fish for bream and bass in ponds around home in the spring and summer. My traveling saw me gone for most of the waterfowl season and another duck hunt seemed impossible to arrange. Then she started dating and I always told her not to date any boy unless his daddy had a place to shoot ducks. So far she has not heeded my advice. But she has made sure that any young man she dates likes to duck hunt.

As time neared for her to finish high school, I told her that before she began whatever it was that she wanted to do in life, that I was going to take her on a black duck hunt on Canada’s Prince Edward Island for her graduation present. I could not have presented her with a finer gift.

Throughout the summer we stayed on the phone chatting about guns and shells and what type of clothes we would have to pack. My excitement for this sport has never waned and it makes no difference whether I’m off to some exotic land or to shoot a wood duck in a nearby swamp close to home. It is my passion. It is my life. It is my undoing.

Now we were all together again and Tiff was ready to take on whatever the weather pitched to her. It was only two weeks before we left home for Prince Edward Island that she killed her first whitetail buck with a rifle. A hefty six-pointer. However, she is quick to say that her first two deer were killed when they collided with her truck.

Before leaving home, Tiff wanted to know if these faraway people spoke English. After a day on the island, she said, “They sound just like us, ‘cept they don’t have no Southern drawl.”

Before Tiff came, this field we were hunting was only a piece of ground of no consequence. No name. Its duty was to grow crops and feed black ducks. This was about to change.

The sun that had greeted us when we arrived on the island with its doll house scenery was no more. The weather had turned frightfully awful. A duck hunter’s climate.

In the vagueness of day’s first light I could see her bushy blonde pony tail protruding from the back of her cap. She was intense and ready for black ducks to rush into the decoys. Her right trigger finger rubbing ever-so-softly the safety on her 12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun.

A light rain began. The wind continued to build.