The Season's End

Sometimes Ezra would kid about the future. “What'll happen when I'm gone?” he would ask with mock seriousness. “The fish and ducks will rest a lot easier.”

We would both laugh, exchanging glances like friends playing poker, looking for a hint of change in the other's expression.

It had been a year since I met Ezra. I had become his student of sorts, following him all over the tidal marshes surrounding our hometown, Port Arthur, Texas. I was his doctor, too, and he couldn't help asking me often in his casual, by-the-way manner, “How am I doing, Doc?”

Using my doctor's eye, I would look at him and say, “Fine, Ezra! You feel fine, don't you?”

“Sure, man, I'm better than I ever was.”

He looked tan and fit although I knew that his heart was large. I marveled, comparing him now with my mind's image of him the day I first met him, sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, wearing pajamas, a translucent oxygen tube looped over his face. That day, the opening day of duck season, a hunting companion had persuaded him to leave the marsh and come to my office. During the preceding weeks, he had often been short of breath, and that morning he was short of breath just standing in his blind. It did not take long to make the diagnosis. I sent him straight to the hospital.

In duck hunting circles around Port Arthur, Ezra was a legend. He was a champion duck caller, and good hunters respectfully conceded to him. “How did you learn duck calling, Ezra?” I asked while he was still seated on the hospital bed.

“Doc, I'll tell you something,” he said, in an East Texas drawl that was peppered with Cajun. “I've made duck calling records-I'll give …