Six teal and a second tub
THE OZARKS — Button has been informed, by a poster and then by a grown-up who owns a duck stamp, that teal season opened yesterday and will close next Sunday. Six a day. Eighteen in the freezer if a person is both lucky and organized. Sunrise to sunset. No wood ducks dressed as teal. No lead. Three pieces of paper before the first shot.
Button considers this an excellent set of rules and an incomplete set of rules. The missing rule is the one the pond already knows: if the water is a puddle with a name, the teal will try it, the cows will stand in it, and the goats will complain that the cows are standing in it.
The public calendar is not a hunting story. It is a timing story. Blue-wings leave early. They do not wait for the oak woods to turn their full theater. They use a cold front the way a kid uses a gate that someone forgot to latch. A week is all Missouri gets of them in September, and then they are a rumor heading south.
Button’s field note, illegal in most newsrooms: a teal is a small opinion traveling at speed. A goat is a large opinion traveling at lunch.
We will not invent a bag or a blind. We will invent only the part the regulation leaves lying in the sun: the farm that shares a fence with a slough, and the second tub that has to be filled before anybody leaves at 4:30 a.m., because teal do not water goats and goats do not care that you have a federal stamp.
Professor Gruff’s margin note: “Print the dates. Print the look-alikes. Do not print a shot you did not hear. The pond is not a scoreboard.”
September 12 through 20. Six and eighteen. Second tub first. Then the slough, if the slough is still a slough and not a memory of rain.