She was too much of everything. Too expensive…too green…and much too tall.

But we were horseback all the time then, trail riding, working dogs, and hunting the edges and fallow strips on farms adjoining Bob Thompson's place. When I went to look at some walking horses, I was looking for a staid shooting pony. What I bought was a show horse.

Give me a little credit.  I didn’t agree to buy her that afternoon. But night after night, I tossed and turned, thinking of the leggy chestnut with the bright blazed face, so smooth in her gaits, so alive under saddle. 

I do not remember how we cobbled the money together, but a week or so later we were back at the horse farm.  There was a painfully written check and a handshake before “Midnight Rose” clambered into Bob's old trailer and followed us home.  Over the next few years, I logged a lot of miles on that big mare, learning first hand what it meant to "feel ten feet tall" in the saddle. But of all our rides, it is the duck afternoon I remember best. 

The rains had been heavy the first three weeks of March.  Rush Creek and the deep ditches that veined the bottom fields were well over their banks.  On his trips into town, Bob had been watching ducks pile into picked cornfields swallowed in flood. The old duck hunter was itching to investigate, but before we could organize a sortie, he had to undergo a long-delayed surgical procedure.

Bob was on a tight leash after the operation. Whenever I visited, he asked about the ducks.  It was still raining nearly every day, but he was certain the birds would only hold a little while longer.

The rain stopped, the weather turned cold, and the water began to subside. In two days, the banks of the creek and irrigation ditches were clear again.  Surely, we were running out of time. Bob still wasn’t strong enough for a nature hike over greasy ground, so I made a proposal. 

With permission secured to ride the biggest of the flooded fields,  we’d trailer the horses down one late afternoon, wrap Bob in a blanket, outfit him with his best field glasses, and leave him at the truck while two of us rode down into where we’d been seeing waterfowl.

One day later, we were saddling the horses at the trailer tucked into a farm machinery access lane.  Bob, always the field marshal, laid out our line of march.  I remember the sound the mud made, sucking at our horses’ feet. Midnight Rose, unridden during the monsoon, was a handful on the way out.  She danced and side-passed through pockets of skim ice, fighting the slick footing before finally leveling off into her ground-eating, ear-flopping running walk.

At the edge of the only wide drainage ditch between us and the big stretch of flooded ground she hesitated, weaving back and forth before stretching her neck and catwalking into the water. She breasted the cold brown swirl that came over the trooper saddle’s hooded stirrups, then my calves, then to my knees before she forged the last few yards and scrambled up the other bank. That’s when the birds began to rise.

They came up in dark knots first, mallards mostly, then geese lumbering out of the water before the entire landscape seemed to take wing.  Great rafts of waterfowl battered off the shallows, geese in good numbers, but ducks in the hundreds, more than I’d ever seen away from big water, wing thunder I could feel from the saddle. With squeals, honks, whistles and quacks, they formed ranks and circled the fields, reluctant to leave, but wanting no part of two horses and riders splashing into their sanctuary.

Some flocks swirled in wide gyres that spiraled higher and higher before heading off for godknowswhere.  I turned and saw the flash from Bob’s binoculars as hordes of ducks flew well within his view, many of them circling broad passes before setting their wings and skittering down in our wake.

Back at the trailer, we rubbed down sweat-steaming horses while Bob ticked the species off on his fingers: gadwall and black ducks, Canada geese, wigeon, and wood ducks.  Best of all, for him, were pintails in numbers he’d not seen since the late ‘60’s when he would take a Labrador and gun and haunt stretches of the Scioto River on his way in to work.

We stayed a long time.  With blankets on the horses, hay nets within their reach, we watched the far treeline melt down a pale yellow sunset. Birds traded across the horizon into the dusk, the murmur of waterfowl, safe and content, coming back to us as a whisper from a dream.