It took me a while to get ready for this duck season. About forty years if memory serves.

Besides the annual paint job, my duck boat needed a new bottom. I've dragged it over a thousand oyster reefs and muddy flats with a load of decoys, gear and guns aboard and the bottom was finally just too thin to face another year.

While tearing off the old scarred wood I found again a grizzled spot on the poling deck left by my eleven year old pointer when she was a needle -toothed pup.

The boat was turned upside down on the creek bank and a herd of Cotton Rats had taken up residence under the deck. Specks had a great nose and a well-developed taste for fresh rat, and stayed on guard for days waiting for the rodents to make a slip. Finally, tired of all the delays, she chewed her way in to their party.

The stem, now dinged and patchy with many paint jobs, was cut from a Chestnut Oak that grew outside our bedroom window and was the first thing we saw every morning for five years. It was a magnificent old creature that harbored lots of life including a family of Screech Owls who regularly came to peer in the screen and chatter at us before flying off to find supper.

A hurricane felled it, leaving a limp and twisted mass. I saved a piece of it for no reason I could explain at the time, and it found new life as the stems of the little double-ender.

I built this little boat myself more than forty years ago under the hand of a wonderful guy, now gone, named Army Emmott. It was one of the most intensely pleasant weeks I've ever spent. More than 40 boats have left my shop since, but none as special as this first one.

But the story really starts much earlier. About fifty years ago Army was traveling through the Louisiana delta country and took a wrong turn that led him to an old house at the end of a road. The house was on the banks of BayouTeche, and in the front yard was the framework of a big bay shrimper.

Being a boatbuilder himself, Army stopped to ask directions and ended up staying all afternoon talking to the man swinging the hammer.

They discussed boatbuilding, swapped hunting and fishing stories, drank a few beers and had a high old time. When the talk got around to duck boats, the Cajun craftsman took him around back and there on the bank was a pirogue. It was singularly beautiful; one of those boats with classic lines that are just simply right. Army fell in love.

The boatbuilder was Ixton Barras, widely known as the best pirogue maker in the region. Fur trappers, crawfish men and duck hunters throughout the bayou country, people who made their living gathering and hunting, used his boats.

Army carried the boat back to Texas on top of his car, and he and Ix became lifelong friends.

I had known Army about a year before I saw the boat. He and his wife Sarah had taken me under their wing and one day they invited my fiancé and me to spend the day fishing at their lake house. Ten minutes after I laid eyes on the boat, we were on the lake rowing. I knew from first splash that I had to have one like it.

My schedule was impossibly tight back then, and it took an agonizing six months to get enough time ahead to build a copy of the little boat. It was worth the wait and a hundred more like it, and I learned more in those five days than in some years. Ix Barras had died by then, and copying his boat was strangely like communicating with a man now gone. I began to feel connected to a tradition for the first time in my life.

I've rowed and poled the pirogue in weather I wouldn't dare tackle with an outboard. I've lain on the bottom, pushing the boat along with my fingers to creep right into a flock of resting Pintails and Redheads, intending to sit up and shoot when the range was right. But when I reached the birds, I just laid there listening to them talk.

I remember one really fine Fall day spent sitting on the boat cooning and shucking oysters while my wife fished for Reds nearby. Toward evening I traded shell knife for shotgun (an old Lefever 16 gauge) and took a few Rails from the surrounding Mangrove swamp. We rowed back home right at sunset and had a feast.

Once, when we were newlywed and really young, we made love in the tiny boat, hidden from view at the end of a brushy bayou. Looking at it now I cannot imagine how.

We took the boat back to its ancestral home in the Atchafalaya swamp and spent a week exploring the endless and confusing braided channels lined with cypress trees and button willows. Cajun crawfishermen, now equipped with broad bottomed aluminum skiffs and big outboards, stopped to admire the little boat and share stories of days spent in its twin. On one night time adventure there, a very large cotton mouth dropped from an overhanging limb into the boat causing a moment of intense snake catching activity and a decade of nightmares for my wife.

Getting it ready for hunting season became a ritual, religiously practiced. Then gradually the speed of out boards (and even a few inexcusably intrusive air boats) claimed me. I was too busy to take the time the little boat demanded and it got less and less attention, finally ending up under a pile of stuff at the back of the barn, virtually abandoned.

But age, or wisdom, caught up and slowed me down. I rediscovered the lovely little boat a couple of years ago and we are again inseparable partners each fall and winter.

It's slower so I have to leave early, but I see that as an advantage, not an impediment. I see a hundred times more life on my way to the blind when I use the pirogue, and always end up with a mellow feeling at the end of the morning.

This boat carried me on my first Rail hunt, my first coastal duck hunt, gave me my first really close look at an alligator, led me down some very interesting side roads, and taught me great respect for craftsmanship.

We've been around, this little boat and I. Mature and scarred now, but still game and lovely, it has become a part of my life I wouldn't want to do without.

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