But Brookfield had some great hunting-goose season started in mid October; had to call off football practice so wouldn't have to punish players for skipping to go hunt! This was a great experience especially to a novice hunter; I did get better after several years to the point that I started to serve as an unofficial guide to new hunters. We hired a new science guy, young, considered himself an outdoors guy, and even had a chocolate lab pup! He was single so my wife and I provided some home cooking, and some TV watching but he wanted to go goose hunting. Thanksgiving vacation was upon us and he was not going home so we set up a trip to a local field that I had been hunting and bagging some geese.
Now the limit at the time was one goose per day and two geese in your possession; this was a Federal standard since these birds migrated-fines were high and punishment meant losing your gun and privileges. I am sure that the time limit for prosecution of crimes has long passed so I hope that I can safely tell this story.
We had decided to hunt Wednesday morning since it was a half day of school without much pressure in the classroom. He knew the bag limits and was a good waterfowl hunter but had never killed a goose, so to say he was excited was an under statement. We got to the blind early in darkness without our dogs as we would be shooting in a corn field plus storing the dogs at school was usually not a good idea. The geese were flying hard from the south as there was a good north wind plus over cast, great weather for hunting. But the geese were ignoring the decoy spread in front of our blind and landing on a large pond or small lake north of our blind probably 800 yards away and coming over us too high to shoot. But I knew what to do-I told him to go to the fence line and hide in the weeds while I went up the ditch to the pond, came in to the geese from the north side, they would fly south over him and he could get his goose. A simply brilliant plan, what could possibility go wrong?
As I was crawling up the ditch, geese were flooding into the pond, I estimated there was at least 500+ birds on the water, wall to wall. The biggest danger when flushing this big of flock was to only shoot one bird, if they were too close together with a shot gun you could bring down several birds and since I was out in the open and could be seen from the road I only wanted one goose! I also was enough of a hot dog that I wanted to shoot a bird with a band so I could research where it had been, how old it was and the like. So up over the dam I came busting into the geese-now if you have ever been around geese they are quite noisy especially when they are startled-the noise was deafening, I surveyed the geese, picked one out (with a band) and with one shot dropped it into the middle of the lake/pond! Geese were flying and heard my hunter friend shooting-bam bam bam-(he had an automatic) then I heard bam, bam, bam, then another bam, bam. I am thinking: I know this guy can shoot but maybe he is so excited that he can't hit anything! The thought crossed my mind, do I need to shoot one for him, but quickly dismissed the thought because I didn't want to get caught killing a second bird.
I threw clods of dirt at the floating bird until it finally got close enough for me to pick it up; I headed back to check in with my friend in hopes that he had killed a bird and not shot himself! I climbed the fence and saw him sitting on the ground with a goose at his feet; I told him good job but then he stood up and started talking. He said that he had gotten so excited, he had never been so close to so many geese and he just started shooting, reloaded, shot some more, reloaded and that he had two geese out in the corn field, two geese down in the ditch and two more in the fence row plus the goose at his feet for a total of 7 geese killed. Visions of federal penitentiary in Leavenworth Kansas, came to my mind as I asked him what the hell were you thinking? His response of I don't know-there were just geese every where and they were flying and making noise and my gun just kept going off!!!! He said that he knew he needed to stop but he just couldn't!!! Great-to get back to town hunters had to pass through check points whether the conservation agents would check your car/truck for geese.
We went back to town, checked the geese, took them to the butcher shop to be dressed-Thanksgiving dinner! But we still had all these birds out in the field and i didn't really want them to be wasted but how to get them to town? Then it dawned on me-I taught driver education and could pass through the check points without question, so first period we drove out and moved the birds closer to the road, put a couple in the trunk, returned to town, dropped them off in my garage, second period, back to the field and stop by the garage to drop the birds off. School was out at noon, I went home, dressed the birds, and made some phone calls for distribution of the birds to people that I knew was short on food at this time of year. So what was a bad situation, although still bad, at least some good came of the hunting trip.
I had great students in driver education classes, most of them were hunters or dated hunters so the trips with the geese stayed secret. The story of the trip did slip out and the science teacher, outdoor guy with the chocolate lab lived to hunt another day-we goose hunted the Friday after Thanksgiving but that is another story. He was a great teacher and a good friend.
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