January 2, 2003

Plains Folk: Waterfowl Shooting

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Waterfowl Shooting was the title that beckoned from the used bookstore shelf. More so the cover art, Canada geese rendered in straightforward fifties fashion, lured like a well-arranged set of decoys. The author of the work, published in 1954, was Wallace R. Labisky.

Or rather, despite the long-out-of-print status of the book, is Wallace R. Labisky. The dust jacket says he lives in Aberdeen, South Dakota and sure enough he’s still in the directory.

This is a pleasant work to read at leisure now, when the sloughs are frozen tight. It’s full of the sense of place, for clearly, Labisky writes of sport on the northern plains, not some distant shore. It’s full also of the sense of time, the values and expression of a generation that now seems like a foreign country.

My preference is for waterfowling in classic fashion, with a good spread of decoys and a smelly Labrador retriever. Labisky, however, recognizes all the ways people commonly hunt in this region and writes with knowledge of the country.

He offers, for instance, a nice discussion of pothole shooting—the practice of taking up stations at the various sloughs and potholes in the neighborhood and keeping the ducks scooting around one to another. "In its true form," he says, "it is pretty much restricted to localities where the terrain creates numerous bodies of surface water that are arranged in a cluster-like pattern"—that is, the northern plains, and more specifically, the Missouri Coteau, where the author was born and raised.

He learned about pothole shooting and other ways of the field and marsh from his father and from experience. "Some things you just learn," the writer told me over the telephone. "Every time I go hunting I learn something new." This January Labisky turns 80, "But I’m still hunting hard and still working," he says.

My check of the Library of Congress catalog showed no other titles by the same author and so I asked him what else he had written and what he had done for a living all these years. His family had a ranch southwest of Aberdeen; after that he drove a truck for highway construction; after that came a stretch with the Army in Korea.

Coming home to South Dakota, he resolved to spend the rest of his life doing what he wanted to do. He became an outdoor writer and consultant. Educating himself on ballistics, he became technical editor for a group of magazines including Handloader, Rifle, and Successful Hunter. He also freelanced for American Rifleman, Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, and other sporting publications.

Currently he’s at work on a book about pheasant hunting, one that I look forward to, because like Labisky, I often wonder whether the glossy outdoor writers ever have done much pheasant hunting outside of shooting preserves.

Technical matters of shooting are his area of expertise, but in Waterfowl Shooting, I was particularly drawn to the chapter entitled, "Wild-Fowlers’ Decorum." Labisky begins, "Proper conduct when afield is the mark of good sportsmanship." Now, I could launch a rant here about the boors one encounters afield today, but instead let me observe that the advice offered in this chapter—like the pep talks of one of those old-fashioned high school coaches who insisted that character counted—is both timeless and generalizable. It applies in life as well as in a duck blind.

I like this piece of advice, for instance: "When you miss a duck, alibis are unnecessary; they are not of the slightest help. You have missed the shot and that is that. You know it, your partner knows it, and he is seldom interested in knowing why."

I think I just found my New Year’s Resolution 2003.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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