As a famous sports personality once said, "It was Déjà vu all over again." Or at least that's how it felt as Duncan Price gave me the tour of his goose hunting grounds. Had not the small, fence-rowed, tree-lined five- to 40-acre fields on the 200-acre dairy farm he hunts been surrounded by the fast-coloring, great northwoods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula; they could easily have been mistaken for any number of those we'd hunted back in the '60s along the east side of the Horicon Marsh.

The author and a fat Yooper Canada.

And just like so many of those that butted up against Wisconsin's great goose magnet back then; several of Duncan's fields sported simple, permanent, box-type blinds surrounded by semi-permanent, unattended decoy sets deployed by some of his cronies. Far from the mobile and stealthy low-profile layout blind tactics almost exclusively employed wherever the big, dark geese fly these days; Duncan's appeared every bit the throw back-type setup. It remained to be seen how well it would work.

"Looks like all we need is the geese," I not-so-brilliantly offered upon completion of our brief tour.

"Not to worry. We've got those too," my enthusiastic host promptly replied. Later that afternoon we watched as geese in small flocks came from nearby Portage Lake, and the slightly more distant Keweenaw Bay to which it's attached, only to settle in the roadside pasture next to the cow yard like they'd done it dozens of times before. Which they no doubt had.

Without commenting on that fact, it seemed to me that the only 100 or so geese total we'd seen were well-trained locals, and not the migrants I expected to hunt. But they were enough to put a confident smile on Duncan's face, and that's all that seemed to matter.

Taking in the sunset back at Duncan's place, a hilltop homesite overlooking Portage Bay; we were treated first to the hollow, distant music, then the ever closer echoing vocalizations of a good-sized flight of migrant honkers. Only as they made their free-of-the-clouds, approach-to-landing glide on the becalmed waters below, did we finally catch a glimpse of them. It was a good omen to be sure.

After setting a fair-sized rig of silhouettes to his artist eye's perfection, we settled into our blinds that first morning, Duncan and his burly yellow Lab, Rascal, in one, and Tanner, my always-thinks-he's-the-big dog Lab, and I, in another barely twenty yards to their right. Not trusting they'd play nice, we decided it best to separate the boys.

The morning only grudgingly dawned calm, gray, clammy, and birdless. After what seemed like an hour, but was really no more than twenty minutes at best, the resonant honking of geese finally broke the thick-aired silence. Winging in low over the spruce-studded forest from the south, the flock locked their wings and slid confidently into the pasture they'd fed in the afternoon before without so much as giving us a look. It was a sad but predictable pattern repeated by several quick-following, equally well-educated family-sized flocks.

Just when it looked like our hunt had gone in the dumper, the growing sounds of unseen geese closing the distance from the north got our attention. Only moments later, after bursting low over the treeline edging our 40-acre hay field like a flight of B-52s trying to fly under the radar, the band of 14 or 15 geese was on us, flaps down, and save for some soft moans, suddenly silent, swinging into our rig like it was old home week.