Hunts with Morrie

“Why don’t you write about hunting with Grampa?” That was a recent suggestion from my daughter, referring not to my father but to my father-in-law, Morrie, her personal hero, who died a dozen years ago. If he were still living he’d be 100 years old and would like nothing better than to tell some hunting stories. His father lived to past age 101, so the longevity genes were there, though in the end, Parkinson’s trumped longevity.

Morrie did plenty of hunting for probably 70 of his 88 years, but turkey hunting became a favorite in later years. He and his wife, Bernelda, now 95 and living in a Glendive nursing home, loved to pack up their pickup camper and head to the Long Pines area near Ekalaka, in southeastern Montana. They’d gotten acquainted with a rancher there and, as was the case literally hundreds of times, they got to be fast friends with the family.

We’d given him a box-type turkey call for Christmas one year and that spring, while camping in the pines, he was relaxing by the door of the camper practicing his turkey call. “You’d better look up,” Bernelda whispered to him, drawing his attention to a flock of turkeys gathered around, curious about turkey sounds coming from the camper. Wild turkey was on the menu the next family gathering.

Morrie grew up in a small northwestern North Dakota town where his father owned a general store, and hunting was a way of life. He often reminisced of a stormy October day when his father came to the high school and asked for Morrie to be excused for the afternoon. They went out to a cornfield and took shelter next to corn shocks and spent the afternoon shooting at ducks coming into the cornfield, with both shooting limits of something like 25 ducks each. Those limits seem almost unreal these days, but they offer a glimpse into days when flocks of ducks would literally darken the skies.

Morrie owned just one shotgun over his many years, a 20-gauge Winchester Model 12 pump action shotgun, and he was an example of the person competitive shooters learn to not bet against: the guy with just one gun. Morrie was a crack shot with any firearm and occasionally showed off by throwing a coin in the air and shooting it with a .22 rifle. Hitting a moving target with a shotgun was easy.

My wife tells of a fall day in her growing-up years when she accompanied her dad on a pheasant hunt. They were walking across a field when he stepped in a hole and lost his balance a bit and his shotgun accidentally discharged. He recovered his balance and with this startled look on his face said, “I think this is the first time this gun ever went off without hitting something.”

She remembers other outings, especially one when, after a picnic lunch, he climbed up on a straw pile and jumped off, doing a somersault before landing. She says, “I particularly remember his first putting his hands down to cover his pockets so he wouldn’t lose anything from them. Then my sister and I also did somersaults after he showed us how to do it.”

My wife also recalls when Morrie and her uncle had gone duck hunting and found some ducks caught in a sudden freeze, frozen into the ice on a pond. They chipped them free and brought the half-frozen but still living ducks home and took them in the house. The ducks revived as they thawed out and started running and quacking around the house, much to the delight of the children. “Mother wasn’t a happy camper about wild ducks in the living room,” my wife recalls with a smile, adding that they released the ducks after they’d recovered.

Morrie experienced the glory years of waterfowl and the WWII-era explosion of pheasant populations in eastern Montana. I’d give almost anything for the chance to have gone on some of those long-ago hunts.

Marrying his daughter turned out to be a pretty good deal, of course—though I still wish I had gotten his shotgun, too.