PLACER RIVER -- All day the winds built until the weather was wonderfully ugly. By mid-afternoon, a full gale raged, flattening the grasses in the marsh and pinning Hoss's fat, little Labrador ears back against his head. He smiled and kept working into the blow.

When you see with your nose, a howling headwind works like binoculars. It was going to be difficult for a duck to escape Hoss's detection in these conditions, and indeed his nose saw the flock far down near the end of the big lake even before my wind-teary eyes caught them. They were too far away to identify, but judging by the way they were bundled together and swimming as a bunch, I guessed them to be scaup.

I grew up shooting scaup in Minnesota, or "bluebills" as they were commonly called there. Some consider these diving ducks poorer table fare than their dabbling cousins, but I can't remember ever tasting a bad one. My fondest memories of Minnesota are of sitting in a duck blind when big flocks of scaup dropped into decoys with the wind flow over their wings roaring like a jet.

Hoss and I ignored these, though, and worked the grass and buck-bean patches along the lake. Ducks on big patches of open water -- even foolish migrants from the remotest corners of Alaska still ignorant to the dangers of humans -- are seldom approachable. They can see a hunter coming too easily and tend to take flight long before one gets within shotgun range.

These sat on the lake until Hoss spooked a mallard out of the grass, and I shot at it before shooting it. The first shot was a miss because I led the duck in the wrong direction. Normally, one leads above and ahead of a duck flapping madly into the air to get away. But, in this case, the wind was blowing so hard the duck was driven backward as it took wing. I corrected on the second shot, leading above and behind, and that was it.

Dead in the air, the duck arced even further back in the wind, and hit the grass with a splash behind Hoss, who had turned to watch its fall and calculate the point of impact. He was in the landing area searching for the kill in seconds without direction, and shortly thereafter delivered a gorgeous, green-headed, drake mallard to hand.

Ducks are so much prettier now than they were only weeks ago, having finally moulted out of that brown dullness of their eclipse plumage into breeding colors. The mallard drakes in particular are spectacular. Their green heads, orange bills, white-banded necks, rust-colored breasts, and blue wing patches are always there, but they take on a much greater intensity of color this time of year.

They are so beautiful it is almost a shame to shoot them, but all things in nature are destined to die, and these things taste particularly good -- far better than the fat, overfed duck one would purchase in the market. Ducks just weren't meant to be raised domestically. They were meant to take their chances in the wild. Chickens need people to feed them before killing them. Ducks don't. They do fine fending for themselves in places humans seldom tread.

This was one of those places. Unless you are a bit of a masochist, the swamps and marshes of Alaska are not very attractive for hiking. Not even many duck hunters hike them. Most spread their decoys on open water in some place more easily reached on foot and hide in the brush to wait in ambush. That is the sensible thing to do. You need to be a bit nuts to go stumbling around in mushy bog and crotch-deep ponds with the wind blowing strong enough to stagger you at times, but we did, Hoss and I, thinking it was all as wonderful as it was ugly.

In this sort of wind, ducks do not want to fly. The scaup on the lake took wing at the disturbance caused by my shooting at the mallard, but they quickly circled around and returned to near where they had been. They sat on the water 40 yards out in the lake even as we approached the shoreline.