Before I married, 2 friends and myself duck hunted all over N. La., from the Red River to the Miss. River. We had the fever, baaaad. Any way, we were hunting the 'honey hole' south of the Fort Necessity Bridge, on the Beouf River. You put in at the bridge, motored down several miles, then up a creek, and a right at the 'Y'. Best place to hunt after the morning feeding. Some hunters would hunt the shallow water, which was early shooting.
Anyway, back then La. was on the point system. Every bird was given a number of points and the first bird that put you at 100 pts or over, meant you were thru for the day. For example, Mallard hen was 90 pts and a teal was 10 pts. If you killed the mallard hen first and the teal last, you were thru for the day. But if you killed 9 teal and then the mallard hen, that was legal.
'Stacking the limit' is when you shoot ducks for a while then figure out who shot what duck, in what order, to get the most ducks.
We had stacked the limit and were motoring out, when we met a friend coming back down the river, and he flagged us down. This friend hunted the shallow water and had stacked his limit earlier in the morning. When he had got back to the landing, that's where you always got checked, a new young game warden had asked what order he killed his ducks in, and he told him the order for the stacked limit. Then the young game warden pulled out a thermometer and stuck it up each ducks azz and told my friend the order they were shot in..... and wrote him a ticket for over the limit.
We set there in the middle of the Beouf River for a minute and then I remembered the law was you had to keep a feathered head and wing while transporting ducks. We gutted our ducks and threw them in the river to cool them off. Motored up to the landing and was met by the young game warden. The older GW was standing up the at the trucks, 50 yds away. Young GW was polite and asked could he check our boat and we said yes. He checked 1 gun to make sure it wouldn't hold more than 3 shells and then made the comment that we had an lots of ducks. Now each of us had tied 'his' limit with string around the necks in a bundle and knew what order 'his' limit was killed. GW pulled out the thermometer and flopped a duck on its back to insert the thermometer in the azz.... only there wasn't an azz. He looked up and asked my friend why he gutted the duck and my friend said he always did it. GW says you cant do that and my friend was waiting for him. He took out the hunting pamphlet and read 'word for word' what you had to leave on the bird for transporting them. While he was reading to the young GW, I walked up to get the truck and you could see the older GW silently laughing his azz off, behind the truck. After he caught his breath, he told me that we had 'made his day'.
