Anchorage Daily News

TWENTYMILE RIVER VALLEY -- By the time a tiring dog finally forced the end to opening day of the 2008 waterfowl season, we had slogged a lot of marsh hoping against hope to see dour expectations overturned.

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Too long we have hunted this country. Too well we know it. After all these years, the landscape is as rich in memories as it is mud and muck and buckbean, and the smell of methane gas.

The memories drove us on long after the reality should have told us to give it up.

The summer when the bees didn't make honey and the swallows didn't nest was obviously no friendlier to the waterfowl.

Winter came heavy to this part of Alaska and spring came late. In April, with the landscape still buried deep in snow, it was impossible not to wonder if you were looking at the coming of a new Ice Age.

Some of the snow had melted by May, but it was still more white than brown. Any duck with sense would have kept winging north looking for something better. That a few chose otherwise was evidenced only by the few birds we saw.

There was little indication they managed to produce many young. The white swans that took wing over the marsh were trailed by no gray cygnets. The mallards that rose from the grass usually rose alone.

There weren't many of the latter, either, but we kept pushing deeper into the marsh in pursuit of the memories.

At least, Steve Rinehart observed, we were getting a great workout.

That is one thing always guaranteed in the leg-grabbing sedge grasses; the mucky, thigh-deep buckbean patches, the floating bog-grass mats that sometimes support you and sometimes don't, and the crotch-deep ponds with their slippery, muddy bottoms.

Always ahead was the attraction of some place where we had found a bounty of ducks before.

Even as so many of the best haunts of the past proved barren, there remained the hope the next place would be "the" place, that the next pond would fill the rainy sky with the thunder of a big flock of rising mallards.

Out there somewhere, we believed, there had to be a patch of open water in the miles of flooded grass where we would stumble on some fat widgeon, or a pond hidden in a thicket of sweet gale where a flock of pintails already fleeing south from Alaska had paused to rest or at least a buckbean patch full of teal.

We believed because we wanted to believe, because that is the nature of belief. And there were just barely enough ducks to support some hope.

Hoss, before we wore him out, sniffed out and flushed a couple mallards from the tall grass, and ranged across a few other areas where his nose --which sees things we cannot see -- told him there had been ducks.

We saw birds flying too: A trio of widgeon there, a flock of teal, the few lone mallards or occasionally a pair.

Still, in the first hour, the five geese we put up out-numbered the day's sighting of ducks (a first) and the number of hunters spotted elsewhere across the wide expanse of these marshes between the Portage and Twentymile rivers outnumbered both (another first).

Deep in the marsh at mid-morning, we watched a hunter struggling across an old beaver dam that has grown into a grass-covered dike that holds back a big lake. Rinehart observed that he'd never before seen another hunter this far back from the Seward Highway.

Down near the end of the lake is a gut Chuck Gilbert used to call "Mallard Alley'' when we hunted here almost two decades ago. It is so far back in the drainage that we once thought a man could only get to it by canoe, but over the years, as Rinehart and I discovered the easiest hiking routes through the maze of bad ground, we found it was possible to hike this far and beyond.

If, of course -- and this was a big "if'' -- if you made yourself avoid some of the places with the hardest hiking. The problem is that early in the season these also tend to be the places that hold the most ducks. We couldn't avoid them.

They took the greatest toll on Hoss. He is old enough that he has overcome the boundless enthusiasm of young Labrador retrievers. He has learned to pace himself somewhat. But not even that could overcome the lack of summer training.

I'd spent too much time working on the home addition that friends have dubbed the "Garagemahal." Hoss paid the price. I tried to get him out a couple times a week for a maintenance run of 30 or 40 minutes, but there were none of the long, slow distances hikes that normally take us up and over Front Range peaks.

It showed. First he stopped wanting to swim the ponds with their chill water, choosing to work his way around them in the flooded grass whenever possible. Finally, he started to fall behind. Then the grunting and groaning started. It was clearly time to go home.

Rinehart led us out of the marsh onto a moose trail along the willows. We followed it as long as we could, then picked the straightest, driest line to the exit from the marshes and set out across the grass on a death march. Hoss trudged behind, head down, tail done wagging.

He was struggling, but he hung on.

We fought through those thickets until we finally picked up a well-traveled moose and hunters' trail not far from the railroad tracks at Portage. We deviated from it only where we knew good short cuts back toward the car. We were taking advantage of one of those, rolling through the grass on another moose trail along a thicket of alders 30 yards off a pond near the tracks, when a mallard unexpectedly took flight.

It caught us all by surprise. The duck pounded away into the sky to the west. I fumbled to find the safety on the shotgun. Rinehart, equally surprised, was swinging his shotgun up. I got the safety off just in time for the blast of two shotguns to sound as one.

Who knows who hit the duck. Given my lousy shooting earlier in the day, I'm inclined to think it was Rinehart, but then again I had a good sight pattern when the bird crumpled dead in midflight and splashed down into the pond.

Hoss and just enough energy left to battle through the grass and hit the water in a leap.

By nightfall, he'd barely be able to get up off his pad at home.

He was running purely on spirit here. It was one of those mind-over-body moments athletes of all stripes can appreciate.

When he brought the bird back, Rinehart and I could only laugh at the irony of it all. We'd beat ourselves and the poor dog half to death trying to find birds in the far beyond, and here they were so, so close.

Hours of hiking to see a handful of ducks and then we almost step on one a quarter mile from the car.

It was the perfect end to a less than ideal opening day.

Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist. Find him online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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