Even while admiring the legendary duck hunting water that is Beaver Dam in Mississippi, I wonder how I’d deal with the responsibilities Mike and Lamar Boyd feel as the owners - and guides- of the legendary Boyd’s Blind.
There are few places like Beaver Dam.
It has a storied history and that has forged connections with duck hunters for more than a century. It was given legendary status via its lifelong connection to larger-than-life writer and duck hunter, Nash Buckingham. That history coincides with the Boyds, their legendary blind on Beaver Dam Lake, and is still a direct connection that’s obvious when talking with either Boyd about their jobs and their passion - guiding duck hunters and duck hunting.
They take their work seriously. Watching them guide is like watching any professional guide at any top-tier hunting camp. They manage to make you feel welcome while making certain you don’t do anything stupid.
We, the hunters, rolled out precisely at 5:30 a.m. - well before daylight. For us, the early morning wake-up is the price you pay for what you hope will be a memorable day filled with plenty of ducks and accurate shotgunning.
If you’re a guide, your day is going long before bleary-eyed hunters are rolling out of bed.
To successfully hunt ducks, you have to be up before the chickens.
While hunters are fumbling around getting ready, guides are already on the water, prepping decoys, checking batteries, fueling boats and doing the myriad of things necessary just to deliver us to the legendary Boyd’s Blind.
Waiting for daylight, I talked briefly with Mike Boyd about his time with “the blind.” While he’s been hunting since he was old enough to accompany his father and grandfather, he told me he’d “only” been guiding for the past forty-two years or so.
Having already commiserated over our mutually failing joints, limited flexibility and the other general signs of growing older (but not “up”), I knew Mike maybe wouldn’t have minded a few more minutes in his warm bed. Instead, he was sitting on a hard wooden bench over cold water, waiting for a pot of his legendary “211 Coffee” (the blind’s old stove and older percolator heat the water to 211 degrees- “just short of boiling”) to be ready. So I asked: “how do you know when it’s time to wind it up?”
His considered response resonated. “There are days when I seriously think about it,” he said, “but there are still those terrific days that put the cold ones, the rainy ones, the ones where the ducks either aren’t flying or the hunters can’t hit them into perspective. I still enjoy what I do, and I love where I do it.”
“Why,” he asked, “would I want to give this up?”
Waiting for my coffee to cool enough to drink, I considered Mike’s question while drinking in the experience of a waking woods I realized I needed instead of the shot of caffeine I wanted.
While the coffee might warm my body, the woods stirred and warmed my soul.
That’s when I realized my response to Mike’s question about giving it up would be simple: “why, indeed?”
Like hunters everywhere, being in the woods had reinvigorated me. And like the hundreds of duck hunters who have preceded me in this very spot, a connection to Beaver Dam and Boyd’s Blind has been made.
I suspect it’s lifelong…hope I’m right.
— Jim Shepherd