Duck huntin' with the pioneers--Small Wonders

 Buffalo far as you can see, elk by the hundreds just north of town, deer so unafraid, they walk right up to a canoe—promises of game were never-ending when the only trespassers here were Omaha and mountain men.

 But sheer abundance wasn’t enough to keep a family eating.

 John F. Glover landed in Sibley in the latter part of August, 1871, and settled on the southwest quarter of Section 4, Township 99. Glover's coming was by way of a couple of gents from Sioux City, who let him know great land was to be had—open prairie--sixty miles north.  

 Glover put up a crooked shack with lumber he purchased and picked up from Windom, Minnesota, fifty miles north, with his team of oxen. But odd little shack, comfortable as it was, was no sanctuary if he had a little-bit-of-nothing to eat. But a neighbor named McAusland told him that Rush Lake, near Ocheyedan, was full of big fat ducks.

 A lake full of ducks thrilled Glover, so the next day he and McAusland left, expecting to fill up his own empty wagon bed.

 McCausland had not overdrawn the amount of game, but the two of them had no boat so there they sat on the beach hoping some of the hundreds of birds out there would come up close and self-sacrifice.

 Didn’t happen.

 Great gangs of ducks stayed just a bit too far away, so Glover and friend tried slinking after them. Nope—too cagey. Those ducks moved just far enough to stay out of range, and when those two pioneers ran, those big fat ducks put it in overdrive until Glover and Mac flat ran out of gas.

Now those old pioneers were nothing if not handy, so Glover, whose appetite was murderous by that time, fashioned a raft out of cottonwood branches and even a tree or two, sufficient, he believed, to float himself after the ducks. Preposturously dumb idea.

 Once he got into the water, that frail craft, “like many an air castle,” the old history book that tells Glover’s story says, “fell to pieces.” Down went the hungry pioneer, soaking his dreams of fat ducks. The ardor of hunting had left him, both men tired and discouraged. They tramped twelve miles home, soaking wet.

 But on the way something big happened. Just as they were starting, McCausland shot a brant, a skinny goose, the only game they got all day. So with that scrawny bird, they started home, altogether close to nightfall. Now they’d brought with them an iron pot of beans and a loaf of bread, but when the brant was retrieved it was decided that bread and beans were nothing in comparison with roasted fowl. Hungry as they were, their appetite was reserved until they could get home.

 Soon after they got to McAusland’s, Mc had the brant stuffed and in the stove roasting, but the oily smell was such that it made Mac a sick man, so sick that Glover was left alone until another old-timer, O. M. Brooks, happened to arrive. When Brooks and Glover got the table set, the roast bird on, the two of them sat down to a feast, poor Mc moaning across the room.

 “Alas for the dreams of fancv fowl, the visions of bliss and the tempting measures of delight,” the old history book says, “delight in which we too often indulge, imagined delights at last turned into the bitterness of gall in the round up of indulgence.”

 Which is to say, too bad for those pioneers.

 Because soon enough Glover and Brooks were laid out, groaning in the agony of way too much brant. And here’s the thing: the oily condition of that fowl made them too sick to hope ever to make final proof on a government claim, the taking of which had been the leading ambition of their lives.

 That old history book doesn’t mention whether Glover packed up and went back east or hitched up the oxen and went back to Windom for lumber to cut out decoys.

 Could have been either, I suppose. Book doesn’t say.