We were set up in a layout blind on the edge of a cut cornfield. Four of us. Early November, eastern shore of Maryland. The kind of morning where your fingers go numb inside your gloves and you seriously question every decision that got you here.
The decoy spread was solid. About six dozen full-bodies and shells. We’d been there since 4:30 AM, setting up in the dark with headlamps, arguing about which way the wind was actually blowing. Same argument every time.
Around 6:15, just as the sky started going from black to that pale gray that means birds are about to move, my buddy Matt realizes something.
He left his new shotgun in the truck.
Not his backup gun. Not some beater 870 he’s had since high school. His brand new Browning Citori. The one he’d been talking about for six months. The one he showed everyone pictures of. The one his wife was still mad about.
“Be right back,” he says, and starts trudging across the frozen field toward where we parked the trucks about 400 yards back.
Now, you know how this works. The moment one guy leaves the blind, the birds show up. It’s a law of physics. Something about the universe having a sense of humor.
The Goose That Fought Back
Matt gets maybe 200 yards out when someone hisses “Geese. Low. Coming in from the left.”
Three of us hunker down. The birds are coming in perfect — wings cupped, feet down, maybe 30 yards out. We pop up and start shooting.
I drop one. Clean shot, folds up and falls behind the blind.
Then I hear it.
“SHIT!”
Followed by a lot more words I won’t write here. Use your imagination. A grown man having a very bad moment.
I turn around and there’s Matt, flat on his back in the mud, covered head to toe in wet field sludge. The goose I shot — the one I was feeling pretty proud about — had sailed right over the blind and hit him square in the chest.
A six-pound Canada goose. Direct hit. Center mass.
But wait. It gets better.
The Shotgun Burial
When the goose nailed him, Matt panicked and threw his hands up. Including the hand holding the Citori.
The shotgun went straight up in the air, did a full rotation, and came down barrel-first into the mud. It stuck. Like a javelin. Two feet deep. Only the last few inches of the stock were visible above ground.
I wish I was exaggerating. I am not exaggerating.
So now we have: one grown man on his back in freezing mud, one dead goose that just committed an act of violence from beyond the grave, and one $2,000 over-under shotgun buried like a fence post in a Maryland cornfield.
Nobody helped him up for a solid 30 seconds because we were all doubled over laughing.
The Aftermath
He didn’t speak to us for the rest of the morning. Just sat in the blind, covered in drying mud, cleaning goose guts off his jacket, staring at nothing.
The shotgun? We dug it out. Took about 15 minutes with a multi-tool and a lot of swearing. The barrels were packed solid with mud and clay. He had to fully disassemble it at home. Took him three hours of cleaning to get it working again.
He still shoots that Citori. Every time he pulls it out of the case, someone in the group reminds him about the goose that fought back.
And yes — we still leave someone in the blind when a guy walks back to the truck. Some lessons you learn once and they stick. Some you just get to laugh about for the rest of your life.
