Photo by Brian Strickland.

The wind was a living thing that morning . . . a hungry living thing. It nibbled at our coat collars and tried to eat our hunting caps as we stood in the dark on a concrete ramp on the bank of the Missouri River not far from downtown Kansas City, clumsily trying to unfasten the boat's tie-down straps without removing our heavy gloves.

The wind was a cold living thing that morning, too. The temperature, an overly cheerful early-morning DJ had informed us just before we got out of the warm truck, was 11 degrees. Coupled with a northwest wind that was steady at 10 and gusting to 20 miles per hour, the result was a wind-chill factor several degrees on the wrong side of zero.

In other words, it was colder on that boat ramp than it was inside our deep freezers at home. Even so, the three of us were grinning like mules eating saw briers. December duck hunting is obviously not the province of rational people!

A half-hour later and three unbelievably cold miles upstream, we guided the boat out of the choppy river channel and into the lee of a large wing dam that stuck 8 or 10 feet out of the river. The rock dike not only broke the current but also (we hoped) would provide us a little shelter from the wind.

We made quick work of throwing out a couple of dozen oversized mallard decoys fitted with 20-foot cords and half-pound weights. While Jerry took the boat 100 yards down the dike toward the riverbank and covered it with a camouflage tarp, Pete and I deployed boat cushions, decoy bags and life jackets to provide the most comfortable seating arrangements possible on the cold, hard rockpile.

By the time Jerry had carefully picked his way back along the dike to the decoy spread, the wind had picked up a little more, and only a few minutes remained until legal shooting time. Pete and I had already had three bunches of ducks try to work the decoys, but all of them had flared away downwind when they spotted Jerry walking along the face of the dike.

"We're going to need to make our first shots count," Pete said, watching the third flock of birds rapidly get out of shotgun range.

Jerry had joined us under our makeshift blind (a second camouflage tarp) when the fourth bunch of ducks showed up. Pete gave one short, loud hail call -- and that was all it took to get their attention. They broke around below us and started beating their way upstream along the invisible currents of the wind. As they came, Pete glanced down at his watch.

"It's time, boys," he said. "This bunch is in trouble."

Not in much trouble, though, as it turned out -- at least, not from me. The ducks slowly sculled into range and let their feet down, Pete called the shot, and our three 12 gauges belched in a single roar. Two of the nine birds in the small flock folded, but neither of them was the duck I'd shot at. My bird and the other survivors flared, caught wind in their wings and in half a second they'd put 30 extra yards between us. Two brown ducks floated belly-up in the decoys -- gadwalls: desirable ducks, but a little surprising, considering the lateness of the season and the deep-freeze conditions in which we were hunting.

Leroy, Pete's Chesapeake Bay retriever, made short work of the two retrieves, and he was back under his own cover when the next batch of ducks showed up a few minutes later. I hit my duck this time, and three curly-tailed mallard drakes were on the water when the shooting stopped.

We finished out our six-duck limits in only a little more time than it had taken us to run upriver and put out the decoys.

It was a mixed bag -- mostly mallards and gadwalls, two scaup, a goldeneye, and a redhead drake that now lives on the wall in my office, plus two Canada geese that evidently figured ducks were acceptable company as long as they were in a sheltered spot. I also missed (three times!) the only oldsquaw I'll probably ever have within shotgun range -- a beautiful spike-tailed drake that would no doubt be on the wall beside the redhead if I could have caught up to him with my gun barrel. By 9 a.m. we were at a warm truck stop, drinking coffee, eating lumberjack breakfasts and shaking off the cold.