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this guys story makes you want to go along and watch ..............................................................................
Dec 3, 9:25 AM EST
Coleraine man has passion for duck hunting
By SAM COOK
Duluth News Tribune
ON CASS LAKE, Minn. (AP) -- The temperature hovers around 20. A northwest wind drives snow across a steel sky. And Gene Olson of Coleraine is right where he wants to be - chest-deep in 35-degree water.
Olson is putting out a string of decoys near an island on Cass Lake, where he has come for this mid-November hunt with his friend, the Rev. Paul Larson of Deer River.
"I'll bet not too many other duck hunters are out today," says Olson, 54.
No surprise. Even by duck-hunting standards, it's a raw day. But you must understand something about Olson. The man cannot get enough duck hunting. Ask him just how many days he hunts ducks each fall, and there's a long pause.
"I hate to admit it," he says finally. "Sixty days."
And he has a full-time job at the Keetac mine in Nashwauk.
The decoys are out now, bobbing on the wind-whipped waves, icicles slowly forming on their bills. Olson is serious about his decoys. They are beautiful, if inanimate, critters - scaup, goldeneyes, redheads, canvasbacks, Canada geese and a couple of scoters. Two dozen, plus the geese, on one side of the point. Another 18 on the other side.
A compact man with cheery blue eyes, ruddy cheeks and a neatly cropped goatee, Olson finds a place to hide among some red osier dogwood. His black Lab, Coal, takes up a position out front and scans the skies for waterfowl. Larson finds a spot just beyond Olson, and Larson's Lab, Ani, patrols the sky with Coal.
Snow squalls pass frequently. The cold wind probes for openings in our clothing. It's going to be a two-Thermos day.
As always, Olson and Larson are hoping the ducks will fly. But they know the odds are getting slimmer each day as the cold pushes down from the north and most of the smaller lakes have frozen.
"A lot of swans were moving over the weekend," Olson says.
The tundra and trumpeter swans are among the last waterfowl to migrate. But for Olson, if there is open water and an open season, he'll be out there.
"This is his life," his wife, Shelly, had said one evening at their home. "This is what he was put on this Earth for."
Olson hunts snow geese in South Dakota each spring. He begins his fall waterfowl marathon with Minnesota's early goose season, hunting local fields and waters every day it's open. That's 18 days. Then he and a buddy take off for three weeks in Saskatchewan. Olson has been making that trip since 1982. Somewhere along the way, there's a week near Roseau with his brothers. He wraps up Minnesota's 60-day duck season hunting local lakes until freeze-up. In December, he travels to Rochester, Minn., to hunt Canada geese again.
If you stop by Olson's home, you are apt to leave with goose salami, canned goose and goose Polish sausage.
"If he'd been born 100 years ago, his family wouldn't have starved," Shelly says.
Just off the living room in Gene and Shelly Olson's home, there's a small room devoted entirely to mounted waterfowl. Mallards, pintails, scaup, redheads, canvasbacks. Canada geese, snow geese, speckle-bellied geese. There must be 40 or more mounts.
"I have all the divers and puddlers we have in this flyway," Olson says. "I have all the legal sea ducks in North America."
He also has nearly every book written about North American waterfowl. He keeps all his back copies of waterfowl magazines - Ducks Unlimited, Delta Waterfowl, Wildfowl and the Minnesota Waterfowl Association.
He is not merely a duck hunter. He's a student of waterfowl.
Not many ducks are moving on this Monday in the heart of Minnesota's deer season. A few common mergansers. The occasional bufflehead. An itinerant pair of scaup or goldeneye. We pick up a bufflehead and a couple of mergansers.
We sip coffee and hot chocolate. We munch on cold pastries. We build a fire back near the woods and move in close for its heat, always keeping one eye on the sky. If we had been thinking, we'd have brought along some goose Polish to roast.
On a previous outing, a couple of weeks earlier, Olson and Larson hunted the canes on Leech Lake. They took home a goldeneye, two buffleheads, two scaup and a ring-necked duck.
Olson has tried to figure out what it is that pulls him to hunt ducks.
"I really can't explain it," he says. "My dad didn't hunt ducks. He was a pheasant hunter. My oldest brother took me one time. There's always something that's fascinated me about it. It's the decoys. It's how the birds work the decoys. It's the thrill - the next flock could be the one."
Larson, too, is afflicted this way. He has been known to hunt geese before a morning Mass. He knows Itasca County lakes like he knows his rosary. If he could put his St. Mary's Church congregation in his 19-foot square-stern for a cattail Mass, he probably would.
For Olson, the hunting is important. But so is the looking.
"I don't have any problem watching waterfowl all day long," he says.
He manages to hunt deer a few days this time of year, too, but that's a venison-centered activity.
"I shot a really nice buck in 1984," he says. "But the reason I was so excited was that I could hunt ducks again."
Throughout our hunt, Coal stands on our small beach and watches for ducks. Coal is 12. He was given to Olson many years ago. Olson cannot quite imagine hunting without him. All of the time Coal watches the sky, his tail wags like a metronome. Snow accumulates on his head. Still he watches and wags.
When ducks swing over us, Coal remains motionless, but follows their flight with his head. When one falls from the sky, he races down the beach and chugs through the water for it.
The sun tries but fails to pierce the gauze of clouds. Ice forms on rushes in the shallows. Smoke from our fire drifts past our blinds and is whisked down the lake.
Olson moves a batch of decoys from the windy side of the point to the calm side. He does this with bare hands despite the cold. I ask him if there's a time of year that he finds gloves necessary. He chuckles.
"People ask me that all the time," he says.
During a lull in the action, Olson walks out and kneels beside Coal. The dog's eyes never leave the sky. Olson throws an arm around the dog, lowers his head and seems to whisper something to him. Coal watches the sky. His tail continues to wag.
It is hard to decide which of the two creatures is happiest to be here.
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....that quacked me up.... 
