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Rail Shooting on Merrymeeting Bay
Unread 05-15-2018, 12:25 AM   #1
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Garth Gustafson
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Default Rail Shooting on Merrymeeting Bay

This is a story about what happened to Big Gus one September afternoon while rail shooting on Merrymeeting Bay. Gus is a fictional Maine hunting guide in "Tall Tales from the Tall Pines", a collection of Maine hunting and fishing stories by Christian Potholm. Reprinted with permission from Down East Books.

Big Gus Saves a Young Girl

I am fortunate to have three wonderful grandchildren. One boy, Dusty, is a true child of Maine, living on the edge of the "Wild, Wild East". At five, he's already into tracks and birds and getting wild oysters when we're out on the flats. Probably because he lives it, he doesn't ask too many questions about my life as a Maine Guide unless I bribe him with a Classic Coke, which he is not allowed to guzzle at home.

Steve, on the other hand, lives in a big city so whenever he comes to Maine, he always has a lot of questions. He once did a report to his suburban Washington school on the nine wild turkeys he saw on his visit to Maine. Of course, none of the kids in the school had ever seen one, let alone nine so they didn't believe him although the teacher tried to validate his claims.

Interestingly, like so many other suburban children, he's seen a ton of deer, even ones eating his mom's flowers, so that part of the Wild Wild East seems pretty passé to him. And so he truly feels sorry for the people who live in northern and eastern Maine who are having a hard time getting a doe permit, let alone getting a doe.

His older brother, Mikey Roach, on the other hand has no interest in the out of doors and only loves sports and chess, not the wilderness. He is a fine lad, just not interested in hunting and fishing stories. Mikey would rather be on the court or in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, or playing in a chess tournament.

Anyway, last Christmas, Steve asked me what was the best game to eat and I did give him my unvarnished reactions, "Bear tastes a lot like sirloin steak-fat, delicious but very rich, you couldn't eat much of it without feeling sick". His eyes got big as saucers. "You ate a bear? Yuk!" Unfazed, I carried on. "And moose, well moose can be real dry or taste like pine needles depending on what it's been eating, but mostly it doesn't have much of a taste on its own, but it goes great with anything ".

Now our kids were brought up on "moose burgers" and "moose-getty" but we always had to add a lot of fat to the meat to make it tasty or make sure it absorbed a nice sauce to give it real flavor. "What about deer" he asked. "Well to me venison has a real distinctive flavor, and if I got to eat wild meat every week, it would be venison, as long as your grandmother Sunny didn't overcook it."

"But really, the best tasting wild meat I've ever had was Sora Rail. That is a tasty masterpiece, a tiny speck but a masterpiece nevertheless. Yes sir, I'd make it rail and rice any day of the week, for sure".

Like most people, even most hunters here in Maine, Steve had no idea what I was talking about. Unfortunately, we didn't have any rail in the freezer to show Steve and let him taste some, but his question did remind me of one of my favorite Big Gus stories.

It was Big Gus who discovered rails in Merrymeeting Bay and showed me how to hunt those fantastic little game birds, both Sora and Virginia. Not many Maine Guides do rail shooting but Gus is one and he's a real master of it. For my money, Big Gus more or less put rail shooting on the Maine map. Now rails migrate like other wildfowl and they really congregate in Merrymeeting Bay in the early fall before they head south. They fatten up on its wild rice for the long flight south because I think they end up in South America or some far-away place.

The rails are drawn to the acres and acres of wild rice which grows thick and abundant among the reeds of Merrymeeting Bay. They're pretty, small, green and yellow birds which make a distinctive chirping sound. Sora and Virginias hide in the wild rice and reeds and to make them flush, you have to use a canoe or kayak and go into the middle of the big expanses of wild rice.

It is a lot of work poling or pushing your canoe through the heavy rice and reeds. And it has another big drawback, you can really only do it at high tide. The very top of the tide is best because those reed and wild rice tangles are impenetrable most of the time. So the timing of your hunt is very important. You need to get in and out and not get trapped in the thick reeds when the tide drops.

Now when you flush them, rails kind of jump up and fly a little ways off before settling back into the five or six foot high wild rice. Because they are so small, you only use a very light shotgun like a 20 gauge with #8 shot and you have to shoot them at the right distance otherwise you get a lot of lead (now steel) in your food. But the bag limit was 25 in those days (and still is today I think), so you could theoretically get a lot of action although in practice a bag total of half that per gun on one tide is pretty good.

Rails, Sora or Virginia, are well worth hunting for eating purposes, even though it might take eight or ten to make a meal. Big Gus is a real genius when it comes to getting a canoe down the little waterways and he delights in taking sports there although it does take a certain, special kind of sport to enjoy the hunt. I always loved going with him, sitting in the bow of the canoe and acting like the sport.

For me, the shooting of the rails is really secondary to having an excuse to be out on Merrymeeting Bay in early September. The duck hunting season hasn't begun yet so there are hundreds-and on some days, thousands-of blue and green wing teal, the first of the ducks to head south. And no hunters. Now for my money, green or blue teal are the perfect duck. They decoy well, die relatively easy compared to the thicker downed black ducks or mallard and are the best tasting wildfowl I know save the rails.

When you go into the reeds you are focused on the rails, but the clouds of teal off in the near distance, wheeling around, their blue and green wing bars flashing iridescent in the sun, are really a magnificent sight. And we often just stop and watch them. Even the most hardened sport is excited by the sight, and unless severely restrained, want to take a shot at them under the guise of "there was a rail somewhere underneath that flock". The bay must have looked this good or even better back in Indian days.

Also, game wardens are very protective of Merrymeeting at all times and especially during the run up to the duck season, and they are very likely to swarm around when they hear your first shots, thinking that some dim wit is jumping the duck season.

It was always fun to watch them come racing out the first time on a glorious early September day we were out on the bay. They always seem disappointed they can't arrest you so it's sometimes a nuisance to have them barreling over like that, but as the story will tell you, sometimes it is very good that they come over to investigate.

So among the local guides, Big Gus owns the bay for rail, no question about it. His green canoe is a fixture in early September and there are some dedicated rail hunters who come just to be there every fall. As I've said more than once, Gus is a real gentleman hunter, a strict observer of bag limits, start and end of hunting times, and also quite elegant.

He also has eleven different sizes and types of LL Bean boots and he's very, very particular about which ones to wear depending on the conditions. "Snappy, we've got three inches of wet snow, go with these". Gus is the only hunter in Maine that I know about who often hunts with a Purdy shotgun although when he is rail shooting, he often uses his classy little Parker.

That was a good thing he did, that September when he saved the young girl's life. The Parker may or may not have had something to do with it I told Steve. Gus's sport was something out of a picture book, a cute little thing with red hair and a dusting of freckles and at fourteen or so, blissfully unaware of boys and proms and pom poms.

Big Gus called her "that little slip of a girl" or "that bonnie lass" but she was quite the dedicated hunter, or huntress to be more precise. Julie McTavish was a hell of a shot too. Gus took her out to the skeet range once and she hit twenty-three out of twenty-five clays and wasn't even winded. Julie McTavish was impressive in general, and Gus in particular was truly impressed with her on many levels, one being she was half, or even one third the size of his own wife, the famous Willimina Sessions.

Impressing Gus was not an easy thing to do. Unless you were an English lord or duke, impressing that man has always been plumb hard to do. And as for the distaff side, he'd already found a wife that was perfect for him, although he could become a bit wisful when speaking about Julie. Williminia was a fine specimen for sure: 220 pounds dry. All muscle. Big head with lots of brain cells and a palpable lust for Gus. A real two fisted drinker, she liked to shoot submachine guns on FBI ranges which is where they met. She owns and operates a modified Armalite AR-15 courtesy of Bushmaster. But more of that gun toting side of her later.

And in Gus's mind, you could not, would not, never ever do better than Willimina. " I was put on this earth for her", he said more than once. "She
is just a damn fine woman all around". Now when Pepper first heard about their joint firing of machine guns on the range, he was flabbergasted. "Sum bitch, I didn't even think they let women near that kind of weapon. This could be bad for a lot of us".

But there was something about the distaff side of our species which has often been attracted to Gus's mature aloofness. He once taught a course at the local community college on the environment and utilizing its resources or some such topic and his classes were chuck full, all the time, every semester when he taught it. How he ever got "The Politics of Environmental Change" into the curriculum I'll never know.

Gus always tried to bring students out into nature and expose them to its realities. We kidded him about using them to drive deer to where he could shoot them, but that was only us having some fun.

Once, two young lasses, overcome with Gus in the classroom, or perhaps the idea of him out of the classroom on a remote backcountry ridge or isolated island, begged him to take them duck hunting. He reluctantly agreed, but "Big O" as she was known in the trade and her friend Bitsa showed up at his door the day he was taking them duck hunting in nylons and short skirts. I kid you not. That and lipstick too. Gus was not impressed. I spent the whole morning keeping a fire going in the blind. "I've never done that before and I don't plan to ever do it again."

But Julie was different. Julie love the out of doors with a fierce passion and she didn't want any nonsense about being a girl. She just wanted to be out there and dressing and acting like a Maine woods woman, no frills, no nonsense, no special treatment and she got mad if you cut her any slack.

Luckily, Julie had a father who could well indulge her passion for the out of doors. He'd taken her mule deer hunting in Montana and duck shooting in Sonora. "Mr Gus, it was wonderful shooting, hundreds and hundreds of ducks, canvasbacks, widgeons, pintails, a whole array of ducks we don't see much of around here. I don't think they had any bag limits there either" she said. "They let me shoot as many as I wanted, but I stopped at six though". Gus was both pleased and impressed. "This young generation ain't all bad", he said.

Julie's idol was Debra Plowman, Maine's first female game warden who was also the first in the United States and later she became Head of the Maine Warden Service, also a first. "She's something else", said Julie. "I want to be a pioneer just like her". Gus and I had to admit you couldn't do better than wanting to be like Debra. She was a legend and deservedly so. Imagine all the crap she had to take to become the first female game warden in Maine let alone the USA.

Anyway, this glorious early September day, Big Gus took Julie out on the bay and she was shooting great guns. "She had four or five doubles and only missed once or twice. It was so much fun to watch her shoot and her excitement was contagious. That's what got me into trouble", Gus opined. "The tide started dropping fast and we were right in the middle of the rice fields so it was getting harder and harder to pole. I pushed the canoe into the thick of it and two rails came up right in front of the canoe. One broke right and one left. Julie nailed the first one to the left and then swung onto the other one. It started to fly low so she stood up to get a better shot. That's when the canoe hit a real dense patch and I tried to pole us through it".

The physics were plumb against them for sure. Julie was leaning right to shoot and Gus was pushing hard left to free them from the tangle. When the canoe started to tip, Gus took the pole and swung it hard to the right to steady things down but caught Julie alongside the shoulder. Bad move.

The canoe started to tip over and the pole kept moving. It hit Julie in the head next and knocked her out. Then everybody and everything, big and small, got dumped into the water. Now the water was only six or seven feet deep but it was very murky and brown. Julie went face down and the canoe fell on top of her. Both shotguns, Big Gus's Parker and her little Browning fell into the water.

Now I know Gus pretty well and I'm morally certain his first thought was not for Julie but for the Parker. But Gus's Maine Guide sense of priorities and his fondness for that Scottish lass both kicked in then and he swam over to her. Somehow Gus got her head out of the water. Meanwhile the tide was going fast and pulled them out toward the middle of the bay. By the time Gus got her revived, the two of them were thirty or forty yards from where they spilled into the water. Luckily the canoe floated with them and they finally came to a place out of the channel where the two of them could stand up and get the canoe back upright.

Now if Gus has a weakness, it's not sex or alcohol but rather care of his feet. He is hooked, as they say on that. Gus simply can't abide getting his feet wet. He will do anything to keep them dry. Anything. To me, half the fun of being out in the woods is to get your feet wet, after all the Indians did this whole scene with moccasins so you know they were wet all the time, even when it was freezing and we guides sure pretend we could have been like them old time Indians a lot of the time. They are our heros even though we probably wouldn't last more than a couple of days in their moccasins.

So there Gus was, in the middle of Merrymeeting Bay in September, the sun was shining and he'd saved Julie alright, but now he was soaking wet and not just his feet either. He somehow managed to get her back in the canoe and with her balancing the craft with the pole, he got himself in too, no small task for sure. To this day, I really don't know how they did it.

"Can we go back and get my gun Mr Gus?" Julie asked. He nodded. "We sure can Julie, we sure can". But that was easier said than done because once the tide dropped, the rice fields became an impenetrable thicket what with the reeds and the mud and all that growth and no real way to get inside the mess and back to where the canoe went over.

Gus's first thought was to take care of Julie so he got her into his Land Rover and he drove to the general store and called her father to say she was alright and then he rang up Tad Johnson. Now Gus never called Tad Talpole, ever, so maybe that's why Tad who had been hauling traps with his dad since 5am dropped everything and rushed up to Merrymeeting Bay that afternoon to help Gus retrieve those shotguns.

"But I knew, Snappy", Tadpole said later when I asked him about it, "I knew as soon as we seen that water we were done for the day. That water is just like black coffee and skin-diving in it was pointless. But I didn't want to let Gus down so I showed up. By the time we got things organized, it was too low to do any swimming, let alone diving in those jeesly reeds. I told him we had to call it quits for the night. Nobody would or could find those guns tonight, I said, and we'll be back first light, but we need some high water to get up in where you lost them."

The next day, Gus had us all there bright and early with the tide coming. We had a couple of canoes and a johnboat and Gus brought us back to where he thought they'd been when the canoe went over. The water was no clearer, nor did I expect it to be. "Gus"' I said, "we'll just have to let the water drop and feel our way through things. We'll have to let our feet find those guns, our eyes will never get the job done."

Luckily, two wardens came over to help. They'd gotten a big kick out of Tadpole's earlier run-in with the coastal warden when they'd heard about it and asked him to tell them about it all over again. There's some rivalry between the inland wardens and the guys on the Marine side they call "Clam Watchers", so they like it when the coastal wardens have any problems. Ray Sader, the older of the two let out some real guffaws when Tadpole told the story all over again, "Can you imagine the look on those two dudes faces when first the gull dropped into their string and then a crow. They must have thought it was the end of the world, or you guys were ganging up on them."

The wardens especially didn't have anything good to say about the lead Sea and Shore guy, Johnnie Holton. "We call that piss-ant Yankee 'No Slack', said Hank Roberts. "He'd bust his own mother for five undersized clams in a bushel, swear to Christ and he doesn't like any of your family for sure, not at all. Not even a little bit."

Jake Struthers, the other game warden, continued, "Now we want to put the bad guys away, that's for sure but you have to cut guys some slack so you can concentrate on the big deals. Boy, I'd sure like to have been there to see all that action and them having to lug Willie all the way across the island to your boat and then have to wait around for the EMTs. What a hoot."

Well Gus finally put a stop to the gabbing when he said, "Guys, the tides dropping, I don't want my gun in the mud another night." We all grinned and got back to searching.

Tadpole got us all organized and we all got into the water. Despite all that was at stake, Gus was somewhat, no astonishingly reluctant to get into that mud and start trooping around in it. I could see he didn't want to get his super good LL Bean boots into that awful mud, so he took off his boots and jumped in with the rest of us wearing only his socks. What a sight, we were all treading around in that mud like we were going for quahogs, reaching out with our feet and toes to try to find those lost guns.

That's when we learned something new about Big Gus. He was, as I've already said, known far and wide as someone who doesn't like to get his feet wet. Well this day we all discovered he really didn't like to step on eels either. Didn't he jump nearly clean out of the water and let out a war hoop when he stepped on the first one. "What the hell was that?" He asked incredulously.

"Well it's either an eel or a snake", said Jake, cackling like a maniac."If it's a snake, I don't think it's poisonous, the last poisonous snake in Maine was 1830 or thereabouts."

"I don't like either one of those critters", said Gus haughtily. "Snake or eel. Besides, who knows what's in the Cathance River nowadays. There could be some pet snakes let loose in that waterway. Could be an Anaconda for all I know. I don't like the situation one bit."

Now Gus didn't want to look bad in our eyes so he persisted, but he wasn't real happy about stepping on odd creatures in the muck and mud. The eels must have been attracted to his socks, that's all I can say. Gus must have stepped on three or four in the first half hour.

Luckily, his agony ended in the second half hour of trampling around in that rice and reed mess. It was one of the wardens who finally found the first gun, by stepping on it. Jake held it up triumphantly. Wasn't Gus some relieved when he gave out a big whoop and held up the Parker. Next, Tadpole got Julie's gun which was only about twenty feet away and that part of the saga ended happily.

Back at the landing, we were standing around chatting and Gus lit up his pipe. That's when Jake congratulated Gus on making the choice to save the girl rather than the Parker first. "That took some real courage to make the right call about which of them to save. You did real good."

Then Gus got a real funny look on his face. He was never comfortable when people paid him compliments and he was painfully honest, especially about himself. He puffed on his pipe for a while before speaking, his brow all knit up with concentration.

"Well"' he allowed. "I am happy I made the right call and did the right thing when I did. Julie deserved the best. Anyone of you would have done the same I met pretty sure. Im just glad it wasn't my Purdy going over the side. That would have made it a much tougher choice."

We never told Julie about that of course. Everybody needs a hero, even a "little
slip of a girl" who could shoot gangbusters no matter who she was gunning with.
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Unread 05-15-2018, 02:55 AM   #2
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Well done Garth! Thank you. It felt like I was there on the bay with Gus. We still have some railbird shooting on the Delaware bay side of NJ.
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Unread 05-15-2018, 06:36 AM   #3
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Great story.
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Unread 05-15-2018, 11:59 AM   #4
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In my mind I can hear that story being narrated in a heavy Maine accent. That'd be wicked sha'p.

We have a member who lives nearby and I think I will contact him again about taking me to the Merrymeeting rice flats. He and I spoke of rail shooting there a few years ago but we never put it together.





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Unread 05-21-2018, 10:42 AM   #5
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for you rail shooters

another piece of hunting history that has been saved

http://www.duckboats.net/cgi-bin/for...post_view_flat

go to page 3 to see the boat back on the water
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Unread 05-22-2018, 06:53 PM   #6
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What about these? Third boat from the right is over 100 yrs. old.
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Unread 05-22-2018, 07:22 PM   #7
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i love seeing these old boats saved- but i have two finger lakes trout boats to redo at some point

a rail boat would never get used

i did have a real hard time passing on a Shell Lake Mallard Queen skiiff a while back however
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Unread 05-27-2018, 11:04 AM   #8
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Thanks for passing this one along. It was a pleasure to read.
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Unread 05-29-2018, 12:08 PM   #9
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That whole book is a fun read.
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Unread 05-30-2018, 08:46 PM   #10
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Maurice River, Port Elizabeth NJ just below Two Sisters Landing. Guns are a 1908 VH Parker 28 gauge 28" bbls. chokes CYL & MOD shooting 3/4 oz. #11 shot (top) and an "Obscure Britisher" (thanks Nash!) 20 ga. below choked CYL & CYL shooting 7/8 oz. #9s. Note the lone Clapper Rail (center) amidst the Soras, rarely encountered above the salocline in freshwater meadows.
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