Anchorage Daily News

PLACER RIVER -- Afterward there was just the slightest tinge of guilt, though the price that had been paid for success was fair enough.

We had invested sweat and persistence for the two dead mallards floating in the flooded sweet gale. Still it was hard to avoid a momentary thought about the unfairness of it all.

The mallards had been ignorant. It had cost them their lives. This is the way nature works.

When you spend too much time in the insulated world of humans, you sometimes forget.

The world where the wild things live is still governed by old rules of fang and claw. This world, the raw world of our ancestors, is different than ours.

No better; no worse.

Just different.

A lot harsher. Maybe a little simpler in the absence of mind-numbing bureaucracies, meaningless politics and head games.

Out here, things are easy to sort out. There are the predators, and there are the prey.

Among the former, you need cunning and luck to survive. Among the latter, life depends on constant wariness and, yes, more luck.

Always there is the luck. If you can wish for anything in life, wish for luck.

Luck had brought us these two mallards after an hour of difficult, fruitless slogging through flooded grass. Hoss worked the hardest, following his Labrador retriever nose far and wide in a search of ducks though it was obvious to a man's eye the effort was wasted.

Early October snows had bent and flattened the marsh grass. Then came heavy rains to wash away the snow, and high tides to flood the beaten down vegetation. Now almost nothing stood to hide a duck. A pair of eagles riding the eddies in the wind high overhead looked down on a perfect killing field, but there was no hint of anything to kill.

A smarter man might have recognized the futility of trying to hunt this place in these conditions and gone back. It was not a pleasant day to be out. Wind drove rain sideways from the east. It was a fall rain that came in cold from over the glaciers off toward Prince William Sound. It felt like it could turn to snow any second.

For a moment, I confess, there was a thought of giving up, but the thought passed quickly. We'd already made the long drive south. We'd get some exercise if nothing else.

And there was a chance.

With ducks still in the country, there was a chance, and unless you're a quitter at heart, it's hard to quit if there remains a chance.

I've never been a quitter. Neither has Hoss. Just the opposite. He's worked himself to near collapse more than once, and me, well, I'd been known to bang my head against a brick wall or two.

We were well matched.

With Hoss leading, we struggled across the marsh toward the big lake back along one of the several channels in this braided, glacial river valley.

A lone goldeneye was swimming around offshore near its west end. The little divers aren't very good eating. We got within shotgun range, but I didn't even try to put the duck up. It was that luck thing again.

The duck was still swimming in tight, nervous circles, trying to decide whether to flee when we passed it by and started the march down along the lake. Almost always there is a duck or two in the grass along here, but this time there were none.

At the far end, the water flooding the normal route out toward the sandhill crane flats was beyond wader deep. Hoss swam across fine, but I had to detour far around. The tough going just kept getting tougher.

On the flats, rainwater ponds dotted the top of the wet muskeg. On at least one other high-water occasion like this, I'd put up a flock of mallards from one such pond, but there was nothing this time. So we pushed on toward the buck-bean pond in the triangle formed near where the western-most channel of the river splits in two.

It is a good place for mallards, but not this day. We were standing on the edge of that pond, Hoss and I, contemplating the seeming uselessness of this hunt when two ducks came from out of the north, circled above us, cupped their wings and dropped into the sweet gale along the river 100 yards ahead.

This was luck almost too much to believe.

Pushing toward where they'd appeared to land, we moved to within 60, then 50, then 40 yards of a thick band of the alder along the river, by then starting to wonder if this was one of those cases where ducks land close and then somehow just disappear. These didn't do that. They rose quacking into the wind 30 yards out.

Decades of conditioning took over then. The shotgun came up without thought toward the duck on the left. The sight pattern was determined with no thought of seeing, the trigger pulled with no consciousness of pulling.

Feathers exploded from the duck, but it kept flying. The action on the semi-automatic shotgun cycled. Another round came into the chamber. The bead on the end of the barrel moved fluidly toward the duck on the right. It passed the duck's bill, and the shotgun boomed once more.

The duck folded dead and plummeted from the sky.

The shotgun cycled again. The bead swung back toward the first duck now pumping hard for air, for space, for life. It didn't make it. The third shot ended its life.

Even as it fell lifeless from the sky, Hoss was rushing toward where it would land.

He was wholly in his element. Labrador retrievers might have evolved a long way from their ancestors, but their instincts remain locked in the ancient times.

Sometimes so do mine.

For whatever thoughts might form about the ugliness of killing -- and killing is an ugly business by all the standards of today -- the predatory rush is still there, still lurking, still preaching that if a man is going to eat meat, by God, he ought to have the courage to kill things for himself.

Sometimes it is not a pretty business, I admit.

In the marshes, it is usually because of less than perfect shooting. A mallard goes down with a broken wing. Hoss sets off on the chase. When he brings it back, it is still alive, and I ring its neck to kill it.

This is the way it is in the wild. This is the way it was meant to be.

By nature's rules, ringing a duck's neck and killing it quickly is a humane end. There are worse ways for prey to die.

"Bears don't kill," a biologist friend once observed. "They eat."

Pretty much the same can be said for many of Alaska's other predators from wolves to eagles.

They attack. They disable their prey. And then they begin to dine.

Whether the prey is dead or still alive does not matter. We're the only ones who worry about such niceties.

Sometimes.

When we step away from civilization as we know it to live the killing ourselves.

But nobody picks up a pound of hamburger at the supermarket and contemplates how the cow died or, for that matter, how it lived. Nobody living in that world much cares.

Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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