Not At All Like Up Home In Michigan

An hour before dawn it was unseasonably warm, with the wind out of the southeast pushing a bank of thunderheads in the moonlight. It was indolent weather, the sort one associates with the morning hatch on a trout stream in July. It was mid-December but there were mosquitoes in the air at the marina. I swatted at them while my friend finished loading the skiff with decoys and shotguns and attempted to coax his yellow Labrador, Rain, into the boat.

Rain is a wonderful dog. When you are around people and call out to her, everyone looks up in the air. If you shout "Rain" angrily, the people are likely to look askance at both you and the sky, and feel sorry for the dog. On this morning Rain was acting put upon and, when called, lay on the dock with her feet in the air. She didn't want to go for a boat ride in the dark for as yet unrevealed reasons. I lifted the dog gently into the boat as the motor started.

Lake Okeechobee proved to be the strangest body of water I've ever been on. Leaving the marina we traveled down a long canal, still in total darkness. The canal abuts a huge dike built during the Depression to control Okeechobee's floodwaters. The lake level is thus higher than the canal, so your boat must go through a small lock that opens at 5:30 a.m. for duck hunters, bass fishermen, commercial catfish long-liners and other odd citizens who might want to be out on the lake as the world wisely sleeps. The lock was strangely thrilling to an outsider. As the skiff rose a foot under the arc lights, the attendant yelled down for our boat's identification number and the operator's name. I learned later that our goings and comings were recorded, in part to keep us from staying lost if we got lost. Okeechobee is an immense lake, and the swamps of palmetto, saw grass and cane are a navigational nightmare that takes years to solve. To the inexperienced Northerner, Okeechobee looks like the "green hell" of stories and motion pictures; a sense of insecurity mixes with breakfast in the pit of the stomach.

It was a half-hour run to our spot, and our speed in the dark was appalling, nearly 40 knots, with bugs stinging against the face so powerfully that you tried to keep your head down. The speed seemed senseless, but we wanted to set out our decoys before dawn broke. One consolation was that Okeechobee lacks the logs and deadheads that plague northern lakes. I signaled happily to my friend as our boat kicked up large rafts of ducks. He shook his head and yelled, "Coots!" over the roar of the big outboard motor. A coot is a daffy, unwary member of the rail family. In sporting terms shooting a coot is akin to shooting a parked car.

Phobias are clearly understood only by those who share them. My wife's vertigo I find quietly amusing, though she hid in the backseat in terror on a day when we drove over the Bighorn Mountains. Mice and spiders can crawl over me if they choose. And on airliners I often sleep during takeoffs and landings. However, snakes drive me up—and over—the wall with a visceral kick of adrenaline. Thus, when we reached our spot and I stepped off the bow of the boat into a large truck inner tube with a sling in the middle, my heart pounded at the thought of water moccasins. The inner tube is unquestionably a wonderful device for warm-water duck shooting, but within moments, sitting in one, you feel a terrible sort of vulnerability. Your wadered legs hang down treading water—an obvious alligator meal—and though the top of the tube is six inches above the water, you are sure this is no barrier for the feisty moccasins that slither around in search of Michigan hunters dumb enough to challenge Okeechobee.

I pulled myself through the reeds to where my friend stood on a ladder in the chest-deep water. Rain sat on her platform looking utterly bored, her eyes peeking out from the camouflage covering. She was glad to see me and wriggled precariously on her narrow seat. I explained my fears. My friend shooed me away.

"Nonsense! We can't hunt this close together. We'll make an outline, and the ducks won't come into the decoys."

"I'm not sure I like you anymore," I said, pushing back toward my spot. "I don't see any ducks around anyhow."

"Ssshhhh!" he hissed, pointing out into the lake, now gray with dawn.

I could see a large raft of ducks about 200 yards away that he seemed to know weren't coot. My fears were not really allayed, though. I had heard a probably apocryphal story about a water skier who had fallen into an Alabama lake and been attacked by hordes of moccasins. But then a giddy resignation began to come over me. How noble to die a truly "natural" death. It was the same feeling I have had in grizzly territory in Montana or at sea when the motor fails. Or in Africa once when we lost our transmission near a pride of lions.