Laying amongst a pile of family photos was a Christmas letter from 1956; one of those that people enclose with their holiday cards that details their family’s highs and lows of the past year. According to this one it was the year I became an Eagle Scout, and when, the day after Thanksgiving, I shot my first goose.

World Champion goose caller and guide Sean Mann calling and flagging geese near Wye Landing, Maryland.

Anniversary Edition
It all came back in a rush. Dinner with my elderly great aunt and uncle was over and my dad and I were heading across Southern Illinois into goose country. Lights twinkled from farm houses as we turned from the hard road onto gravel south of Miller City, Illinois. Goose hunters in 1956 hunted at “Cairo,” (pronounced Kay-Ro, the other in Egypt is pronounced Kai-Ro) but the hunting was really 15 miles northwest of Cairo, Illinois, around Olive Branch and Miller City. Known in those days as the “Goose Capital of the World,” the hunting was in the fields surrounding the Horseshoe Lake refuge.

Horseshoe Lake was formed when the Mississippi River was in its infancy, and is an old ox-bow that was cut off as the river shifted its channel a mile-and-a-half to the west. In the 1920s, the Illinois Department of Conservation purchased the island in the middle and most of the lake, 3,500 acres in all. Improvements were added enabling the lake to hold water year ‘round, and the island put into grain crops.

Historically, Canada geese had wintered on the sand bars and islands in the river, but soon began concentrating on Horseshoe Lake because of the calm water and plentiful food: But there was a down side. Increasingly hunters were taking large numbers of geese, and it all came to a head in the mid 1940s when the goose season was closed following only five days of hunting. In those five days more than 5,000 geese were bagged, causing the closure of the season. The following year the entire Mississippi flyway was closed to goose hunting, and in 1947 President Truman and the Governor of Illinois proclaimed the 18,000 acres surrounding the lake closed to hunting. By 1956, some 170,000 geese were in Southern Illinois.

We arrived in darkness at the home of John Marlin, whose “club” we would hunt the next two days. He quickly introduced us to Bud Dillman, who guided for Marlin and who offered rooms and breakfast to goose hunters. As a growing lad I recall lacing into a hearty plate of home-made sausage, and then wondered at my thirst the whole day.

Heavily laden clouds covered the moon, making it nearly pitch dark when we alighted from a tractor-borne wagon. Headlamps in those days were for miners, and hunters traveled light with gun and shells; a thermos of hot chocolate or coffee was a sometimes thing, normally becoming a casualty when the glass liner broke at the slightest jolt. Bill Collins, who introduced himself as our guide, had directed us from the wagon and forward across a harvested corn field. Through the pre-dawn gloom muted by the gray clouds, we quickly sighted some silhouette decoys and soon Collins kicked the corn stalks from the top of our pit.

Collins had served in the Army during the second World War, and as we awaited shooting time, he described his near fatal wounding in the Battle of the Bulge: Such were the men who raised the likes of me in the post-war years.