[fabsroman]

Utterly amazing. I clicked on this thread because I thought of one "dangerous" thing I dealt with while hunting a year or two ago. Then I read Lilred's thread and it turns out to be almost the same thing.

I was planning on goose hunting the last day of the season, because the farm owner had told me that the geese had been coming in and a "friend" of mine had been clobbering them for two days straight. I called the "friend" to see if he wanted to hunt with me and my dad, and he told me that he had 4 or 5 guys coming up the next day and that he would hunt a different farm with them. Of course, he "forgot" to tell me about the goose that he left embedded in the ice in the middle of the pond. So, the last day of the season, my dad and I set the decoys up and waited in the blind for the sun to come up. After we had enough light to see, we figured out that there was a dead goose belly up in the middle of the pond. I had hoped that it wouldn't affect decoying birds, but it did. We watched two groups lock up and then flare off. So, I sent my yellow lab, Nitro, in to retrieve the bird off of the ice. Everything was fine until he got to the bird. He was so excited that he pounced/jumped on it and broke right through the ice. He couldn't get himself out, and after watching him for a little while, I decided to go out on the ice and try to get him. My dad told me to go out on my belly to distribute more of my weight across the ice, but halfway out I could hear the ice cracking, so I scooted back to the bank. I went around to the other side of the pond where the ice was thinner and tried to encourage Nitro to break through the stuff, but he couldn't. Of course, I had left my waders at home thinking that I wouldn't need to get wet because I had the dog along. Well, my dad went to look for a rope as I watched Nitro for a couple of minutes. He started to look really frantic and that is when I made the decision to go in with my bibs and pac boots on. That feeling was rather funny. The boots filled up first, and then I could feel the water coming through the clothes from the boots up. I was breaking the ice with my hands and ended up cutting them up pretty good. Luckily, the water only reached shoulder high, so I didn't have to do any swimming. However, it was tough walking through all the runoff mud/silt in the pond. Half way back to the bank, with the dog in two, my dad was walking up to me with the rope in his hand. At that point I was just screaming to him to bring the truck around because it was a couple of hundred yards away and I was cold. He continued to walk my way. I think he was in disbelief for a couple of seconds seeing me in the pond. Anyway, he got the truck, and he actually had a change of clothes in it. That was lucky for me too because everything I brought was soaked. I changed my clothes as we let the truck run and the heat get warm. Then, I took a long nap with the heat running and the sun shinning in through the windshield. When I woke up, I saw my dad and Nitro out in the field together. The dog had already forgotten about the ordeal. When they got back to the truck, we watched a couple of groups of geese come in, and that was the end of that hunting season for me.