You stand hip-deep in freezing water, unwrapping anchor cords and pitching them here and there, trying to make a pattern that will sooth the suspicions of beady-eyed ducks.

Fingers numbed by cold, you slosh back to shore, crouch in a blind and hope for the best. The best is when you get some shooting. The worst is when you don't and you still have to pick up the spread, often as leaking icy water invades your waders.

Decoys have been around about as long as man has stood upright and had a bright thought. They are the difference -- sometimes -- between a futile hunt and a memorable one. Ancient Egyptians used them, and no doubt even earlier man fashioned mud and feathers into crude facsimiles before there was a way to record the practice.

In the United States, widespread use of decoys by waterfowl hunters developed in the mid-1800s. Much of it was for market hunters -- gunners who registered bags of 100 to 500 ducks a day, which they sold for about a quarter apiece.

In England, the decoy is the hide or blind itself, but in the United States, the term has come to mean the block that imitates a duck, goose or other game creature. I've been in the late Sir Peter Scott's decoy/blind at Slimbridge, a waterfowl refuge in southern England. Scott, son of Robert Falcon Scott, who died at the South Pole in 1912, was a wonderful waterfowl artist who established a series of refuges in the British Isles, the citizen equivalent of our National Wildlife Refuge system.

Some enterprising hunters have combined the English idea with their own. In the 1880s, some hunters built a boat resembling a huge swan. They towed conventional decoys on either side of the boat and sneaked into waterfowl flocks. I know hunters who have built enormous Canada goose decoys and used them as blinds in cornfields. If nothing else, it suggests that waterfowl lack a keen sense of proportion. (I also know a deer hunter whose blind of choice is an old-time manure spreader, converted into a hide -- a source both of comfort and of scatological puns.)

Until the 1950s, almost all decoys were wood -- some solid, some hollowed out, but all heavy and unwieldy. Now, most are machine-made of lightweight plastic, and a couple dozen modern decoys weigh no more than a half-dozen historic blocks.

Old decoys attract collectors. Yesterday's working block is today's art object. The Chesapeake Bay area and the Illinois River, both historic gathering spots for ducks, always have been hotspots for collectible decoys because each boasted legendary decoy artisans.

Most of the great collectible decoys originally were fashioned for market hunters, a practice outlawed in 1918. By the 1930s, the best of the historic decoys were becoming scarce, collected not by hunters, but by museums. Today, a crude wooden decoy by an unknown maker will cost more than $100 in an antique store, but the really rare carvings have disappeared into private collections and are worth thousands of dollars.

Antique decoys have become the most collectible hunting accessory, sometimes reaching the status of precious. In 2000, one collector auctioned his decoys through Sotheby's for more than $10 million. In 2008, an auction brought $3.5 million, including three decoys that went for more than $100,000 -- one for $269,000. Most of the choice decoys had more than doubled in price since their previous auction sale.