A Reddit user said the closest he may have come to dying on a hunt did not involve a bear, a moose, or another hunter with a gun. It happened during a waterfowl hunt in under-freezing weather, in a winter storm, at high tide. According to his comment in the thread, he was out on a foreshore with two buddies hunting ducks and snow geese when a flock of snowies came straight at them. He wrote that they hunkered down, let the birds get in, and then opened up. He dropped two geese cleanly, but instead of landing somewhere easy to reach, both birds came down in the middle of a channel.
He said that on almost any other day, or even another hour of the same day, retrieving them would have been manageable. But with high tide running and the cold already cutting hard, the timing was terrible. Even knowing that, he decided to go after them anyway. According to his comment, he had at least left his shotgun back on the sled, but once he stepped into the channel, things went wrong almost immediately. A few steps in, he hit a pocket and went completely under — waders and all. He wrote that he came up swimming in freezing water.
That still was not the moment he gave up on the birds.
He said he got one goose in hand quickly enough, but the second one was just out of reach. Instead of turning back, he kept after it. By the time he finally snagged the second bird, he knew he was in trouble. He wrote that the cold had already gone past uncomfortable and into dangerous, and he understood that hypothermia was becoming the real problem now. That was when he yelled to his buddies that he was done and heading back to the cars, trusting them to retrieve the rest of his gear while he focused on just getting out.
The walk back sounded brutal. He described it as an arduous slog to solid land with water-filled waders and frozen clothing dragging on him the whole way. He said he slipped and fell multiple times. By the time he got back up onto the dyke, he felt like an ice block. People standing there were shocked watching him pull himself out. From the way he told it, this was the point where the hunt had fully turned into a survival problem. The geese were no longer the issue. The issue was whether he could get to the car and get himself out of soaked, freezing gear before his body gave up any more heat.
He wrote that once he reached the vehicle, he threw everything down and spent the next ten minutes trying to strip out of frozen waders and the rest of his clothing. He even said he had to talk himself out of using a knife to cut the waders off, which gives you a pretty clear sense of how desperate and miserable those few minutes were. Luckily, he had packed spare clothes in the car ahead of time. He changed, cranked the heat to full blast, and sat there drinking hot tea until he finally started to feel human again.
Even then, he was not fine right away. He said his buddies hunted another hour before finally packing it in and bringing back the gear he had left behind. He gave them the geese for hauling his stuff in. After that, it still took him another full hour before he felt okay enough to drive. Looking back, he called it a fun story now, but he also admitted it had been a stupid decision to risk his health for two birds.
So the story he told was simple and rough. He and two buddies were hunting snow geese and ducks in a winter storm at high tide. He dropped two snow geese into a channel, stepped in to retrieve them, went under in freezing water, still insisted on getting both birds, and then had to drag himself back to the car while soaked, slipping, and already worried about hypothermia. By the time he got changed, blasted the heat, and drank enough hot tea to stop shaking, the whole hunt had turned into the kind of mistake that stays with you a lot longer than any limit of birds.
What do you think — if two birds dropped into a freezing channel at high tide, would you leave them there, or do you think you’d make the same mistake and go after them too?
Original Reddit post: What were some of your most intense and possibly life-threatening “close call” moments?
