Lynn Floyd setting up a spinning-wing decoy.

Gather near while I tell you this story. But first you must know the lay of the land and its people.

About two hours east of Memphis--maybe a hair's bit more--sits the siesta town of Camden, Tennessee. It's a village surrounded by rolling hills, valleys, ponds, creeks and swamps. There is also a 161,300-acre source of water with a shoreline of some 2,100 miles, once the largest man-made lake in the world, or so I've been told. Its name? Kentucky Lake.

Each year, when every nook, cranny and crevice to the north has been fettered in ice or packed with snow, the Mississippi Flyway sends down its ducks. This is the time to hunt the Lake. And it was such a time when I first hunted the Lake with Lynn Floyd--a man with happy but discerning eyes, a tall, thick, wide-beamed man whose passion to hunt and shoot ducks matches his willingness to render assistance to his neighbor. Lynn Floyd is a waterfowler who knows the scent and the sound of ducks on the move.

To further anchor this story, I must turn back the clock to the early 1990s when I met Lynn while hunting the Bear Tail Duck Club near Coldwater, Tennessee. Ricky French was the club's proprietor and I went there to shoot mallards with Ricky and Lynn in a large flooded cornfield. Yet even as we shot into continuous droves of cup-winged mallards swarming into the decoys surrounding our two-story blind, I noticed large numbers of mallards working the timber not 400 yards to the front of us. The scene reminded me of where I grew up duck hunting, South Carolina's Santee-Cooper Lakes of Marion and Moultrie counties in the mid-1950s and early '60s.

Lynn Floyd hails a flock of mallards from his family's blind.

This 171,400-acre impoundment, flooded in the early 1940s, was the terminal port for Atlantic Flyway mallards. And so it was with warm memories that I watched the large flocks of swirling, colorful mallards spiral down through the tall trees.

The shooting was good and during a lull I followed Lynn downstairs into the kitchen area of the blind for a cup of coffee. "I noticed the way you were lookin' at those mallards hittin' the woods," Lynn said to me in his rolling Tennessee accent.

I told him of my fondness for shooting mallards in timber during my coming-up years.

"You know," he said, "I live in Camden, Tennessee, near Kentucky Lake, and I also have some swamp land that I can hunt like where you grew up. If you ever care to come hunt with me, then by all means give me a call."

"Pretty good, huh?" I asked.

"We do okay on the lake and in the swamp. It's like everywhere else, some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue," he said, grinning through his beard.

Belle keeps an eye on a group of high-flying pintails.

Two years passed with no further communication between us. Then one cold January night, I received a call from Lynn. He said that northeastern Arkansas was locked tight in ice and the ducks had "jumped" the Mississippi River and were now in his corner of the world. "The ducks are on Kentucky Lake and in the swamp," he said happily.

I left early the next morning with Belle, my black Lab, riding shotgun. Before the sun crested the eastern horizon we were through the Blue Ridge Mountains and heading west on I-40. Lynn's comment of "More pintails than I can remember!" kept ringing in my ears.

But I did not know that while I'd slept that night after Lynn's call, a muscular winter storm had manhandled western Tennessee, and the land was frozen hard. By mid-afternoon I pulled into Camden, Tennessee, and called Lynn from a gas station's public phone. Thirty minutes later I followed his pickup truck up Rocky Ridge Road to an old farmhouse on a hill.