War Paint - Virginia Goose Hunting
Christmas Eve 2025 looked a little different for me.
For as long as I can remember, it meant my in-laws' house. Familiar faces, the same plates of food, Memaw’s delicious deviled eggs, the same rhythms.
This year, in the literal weeks after my marriage ended, it meant something else entirely. An A-frame blind in an open dry field, somewhere in Virginia (not far from where I originally grew up.) with people I'd only recently met, waiting on geese.
I brought homemade fudge. . . peppermint. The kids brought a bag of powdered donuts, and if we're being honest, the donuts won.
I shot my first goose that morning.
It was unseasonably warm for December in Virginia. The kind of day where you start layered and end up stripping down to a base layer by mid-morning. We'd set the decoys in the dark, illuminated only by headlamps and truck lights cutting across the field. (I say “we,” but let’s be honest, I supervised with my camera.) By the time we all settled in, the kids already had powdered sugar on their faces, labs locked in beside their handlers. Watching, waiting, ready in the way only a good retriever can be.
Then the geese started moving.
If you've hunted waterfowl, you know the sound. Wings overhead. Honk, honk, hoooonk of calling birds. The electric quiet that fills the blind when everyone goes still at once.
I was shooting two things that morning; my guide’s (Bryce, now friend) Benelli SBE3, and my Canon R5 (70-200 /2.8, of course.) To this day, I can’t tell you which I had more fun with.
You don't remember every bird, but you remember your first. I remember the excitement, the smiles, and looking down at all the geese the pup’s brought back, realizing that traditions don't always arrive with years of history behind them. Sometimes they begin with an invitation, a borrowed shotgun, and a morning you never saw coming.
The field we were in was in a section of Virginia where your limit was ‘one.’ So once you shot your goose, your hunt was over. I happily hung back, taking photos while the kiddos and fellas got their goose first. Then it was my turn, one landed in the middle of the decoys.
“Take ‘em,” I was told.
One shot. Down. Yellow lab, Tide, retrieved cleanly and brought my goose back to dad, Bryce, and he handed it to me. Heavy; unexpectedly heavy. I remember telling him “this goose is the size of Cedar!”
Once the excitement wore off, I found myself a little melancholy. . . a little sad. . . a little un-sportsmanly. You see, I prefer to take birds on the wing. As I mentioned this to the other men in the blind, I remember them making a good point about how sometimes taking a grounded bird (or “water-swatting” if on water) can be a cleaner kill than on the wing. When birds are flying there’s more potential for missing, and therefore wounding them. This way, at least you know they aren’t flying off hurt. Made sense. . . but we’re still undecided.
As my hunt was now officially over, I went back to photographing everyone else. Later, editing the images, one photograph stopped me.
Tide, her face streaked red with blood, sitting beside Bryce, eyes fixed on the horizon.
The hunt was over. All the geese had been picked up, and the men were collecting decoys. But she hadn't gotten the memo; she was still locked in. Still scanning. Still convinced there might be one more bird somewhere out there that needed her.
The blood on her muzzle caught the light in a way I couldn't ignore.
War paint.
She'd earned it. She wasn't pretending the morning hadn't been hard or that she wasn't tired. Girl had done the work; she'd carried the weight, quite literally. And still, when she lifted her head, her eyes said:
What's next? Where are the birds? I'm not done.
The perfect metaphor for a Christmas Eve I hadn't planned and couldn't have imagined a year ago. At thirty-nine, I found myself in a season I never expected to be in, trying to understand what life looked like now. What I looked like now.
I went to bed that night smelling faintly of cedar branches and goose feathers, the fudge container empty, a 15-lb goose with a club foot dry-aging in my fridge. It wasn't the Christmas Eve I'd planned.
It was a bright shining star in a season that had mostly felt dark.
Because somewhere between the powdered donuts, my first goose hunt, and this yellow Labrador wearing her war paint, I realized something: You go through the dark. You do the work. You carry the weight.
And then you lift your head.
You don't have to know exactly what's next. You just have to be willing to look toward the horizon as if there's still another bird coming.
The geese may be gone, the hunt over. But there's always another morning. Another field. Another sky worth watching.
