August / September 2011

Viewpoint: Guns & Ammo
by Butch Goodwin

n a lifetime of roaming here and there in search of this bird or that one, theintensest feeling of utter isolation I’ve even known came to me while shooting ducks in the Argentine province of Corrientes, among the marshy tributaries of the Rio Paraná. To get there required a 45-minute boat ride, much of it at high speed, up the Rio Corrientes from the village of Esquina, into a smaller channel, to one smaller yet, and yet, and ultimately a winding tour through a labyrinthine still-water maze, around tiny islands, through broad pools partially choked with inches-tall water weeds. When Tata my guide finally cut the motor and nosed the boat to shore, I hadn’t a clue where we were. Tata spoke no English, nor did Gabriel, my bird-boy, and I know barely enough Spanish to understand that I was to wait here while Tata went off to start the ducks moving.

The island reached at most three feet above water-level, but even that puny summit was enough to reveal an immense expanse of marsh grass in every direction, literally from horizon to horizon. Tat left, and Gabriel led me to a clump of grass where a few old empty hills testified that someone else had shot here in the relatively recent past. The boat presently faded out of hearing altogether, and a powerful sense of isolation set in almost immediately, a feeling of being virtually alone in a featureless universe comprising only the dimension of depth.

It was not an unpleasant feeling. On the contrary, that incredibly vast sweep of space gave me great comfort, and so did the thought that occurred to me soon after: If Tata for some reason does not come back, I will spend the rest of my life right here; and it will be a short stay, indeed.

And then, far off, the ducks began to rise, looking, in the distance, like smoke from a grass fire. By the time the first waves were passing overhead – led by a phalanx of the chunky, white-headed birds the Argentines call suiriri, after the sweet three-note melody of their voices, and followed up with flocks of that supremely sporty duck knows as the rosy-billed pochard – I felt that dying in this place, among these birds, would be no bad end at all.

Isolation is the nature of duck shooting, differing only in degree from a riverine wilderness the size of Pennsylvania to a green-timber pool, to a little blind in some flooded cornfield. To commune with ducks is to seek their world, and their world is different from ours. What happens there is different, too, from the life we know elsewhere. It is not a consistent life but rather a patchwork of moments.

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