Charlie Potter is a duck hunter. He does other things, but mostly, I have reason to believe, he's a duck hunter. During the 1982-83 hunting season, for example, Charlie not only went on a duck hunt, but he went on a migration. It started in September at The Pas, on the Pike Lake Indian Reservation in northern Manitoba. It concluded five months later at Pass-au-Loutre Wildlife Management Area in Louisiana. The odyssey?an armchair waterfowler's "Travels with Charlie"?is chronicled in the first two-thirds of Following the Flight (1999).

In a secondhand pickup truck, towing a camper and accompanied by Casey, his six-year-old yellow Labrador, Charlie embarked wistfully on an adventure "to follow ducks and geese down the continent and become part of the grand passage know as autumn migration." It was a quest fermented from the pages of sporting magazines, from the pens and brushstrokes of the likes of H. Albert Hochbaum, and from November days of youthful awe and exuberance in patched hipwaders amid the sloughs and traditions of the Illinois River.

Although there were waters and wetlands visited that held ducks and geese in numbers that only a few alive today can even imagine, the fulfillment of Charlie's dream was not wholly idyllic. The journey was fraught with comical misadventures, physical hardships and some very real dangers of the sort generally censored from wistful dreams. There also was more than a skosh of iconoclasm. In ways too abrupt, Charlie found that waterfowl hunting is a terrific argument for the buddy system and that waterfowl hunters are not of common ethos or uniform ethic. He experienced both the pulse and tragedy of migration down the landscape of today's Mississippi flyway. He learned that the institutional memory of sport or recreational hunting is measured not in generations, but in mere decades.

Following the Flight is worth the read just for the narratives of unique places hunted and their outcomes, told in a wonderfully clear and direct style, a tad reminiscent of William Faulkner's prose. Although nothing in the telling is sugar coated, veteran waterfowlers will catch the ambrosia scent of cattail muck, feel the lash and spit of a northerly gale, and hear the telltale, canvas-ripping wind shear of synchronous bluebills. Nonhunting readers are likely to seek out veteran waterfowlers.

But there is another third of the book and it, too, is worth the read by itself. In these pages, Charlie addresses the pitfalls and potholes of waterfowling's future. There is wisdom and warning in his words.

Artwork by famed waterfowl and upland game bird artist David Maass is featured attractively throughout the book. The pencil vignettes are particularly spectacular. The only things about the book that I didn't especially care for were the endsheets, which are too busy and smack of border wallpaper.?????????
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I have a good and venerated friend who had a distinguished career as a waterfowl biologist in the Midwest. Like Charlie Potter, this friend and hunting companion admits readily to having duck disease. He has said often and in a number of conservation, hunting, and harvest- and habitat-management contexts, "It's about the ducks." That, too, can be said for Charlie's 145-page book.

Following the Flight was published by Delta Station Press. It is available for $25 from the Delta Waterfowl Foundation (888-987?3695).