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One fall along about 1940 Ernie Zahn and his brother
were mowing weeds with a team and horse mower for the highway department
along Highway 56 south of Kulm, North Dakota. They stopped by a slough,
gave the horses some oats, ate their lunch, and rested a bit. A car stopped,
and it was full of hunters.
These fellows wanted to know where they might find some pheasants. The
Zahn boys, having grown up in a big German-Russian family in Dickey County,
were always on the look-out for any way to make a buck. So they said sure,
we know where you can find some birds, but it’s hard to tell you
where—come up to our farm on the highway Saturday morning, and we’ll
take you out.
That Saturday morning the two boys were up early and impatient. “We
walked down to the pasture to see if we could get any ducks,” Ernie
related. “We got to a pothole and there was quite a bunch of ducks
on there. We pulled a sneak on them and fired into them, and we each had
our limit of mallards. And wouldn’t you know it, every one was a
big greenhead.”
When they got back to the house, the carload of hunters pulled in from
Ellendale, where they had been staying at the hotel. Ernie recalled, “We
came up from the pasture, each us carrying these four nice big greenheads,
and them guys just went wild. They didn’t care anymore if they got
any pheasants, but they wanted us to show them where they could get some
of them ducks.”
The hunters all got their limits of drakes that day, too. “That evening
when they went into their hotel at Ellendale, they walked into the lobby
with their ducks hanging across the front and back of their hunting coats,
and the people were amazed. They wanted to know where and how they hunted,
but they wouldn’t tell, because the wanted us as their guides as
long as they were there. After that, though, they did tell.”
And thus the Zahn boys were launched on a career as hunting guides for
out-of-state sportsmen. One problem, though, was rationing of ammunition
during the war. “It was almost impossible to buy ammunition or gas,”
Ernie said. “We had these out-of-state hunters call us, saying they
would come up by train. They would ship the ammunition to the hotel to
be there when they came up. We couldn’t even buy it here, but there
was more than they or we could shoot up.”
Guiding hunters turned into a lucrative sideline in several ways. “The
pheasants, ducks, and geese were plentiful,” Ernie reminisced. “The
potholes were full.” He recruited his mother- and father-in-law to
clean birds for a price. “They were busy every afternoon and evening,
sometimes practically working all night, to process the game. They would
save the down feathers, and this down was worth a lot of money.”
One day Ernie was supposed to take out a group of hunters, but it turned
out too cold and blustery to hunt, so he took them up to the house for
lunch. It being Sunday, has wife was gone to church and visiting relatives.
After lunch the men got to playing gin rummy, and as you might guess,
they left a certain amount of clutter around the house. Ernie was pretty
worried about what his wife would say—until he noticed the fellows
also had left behind four $20 bills.
“I want to say a word about the nonresident hunters,” Ernie
closed the story of his exploits as hunting guide. “On average, they
were the best and most courteous and law-abiding citizens I ever took
out. They were careful how they handled themselves when they were our
guests.”
I wish old Ernie’s eyes had been a little better; I would have loved
to have taken him out to his old hunting grounds.
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