We would both laugh, exchanging glances like friends playing poker, looking for a hint of change in the other's expression.

It had been a year since I met Ezra. I had become his student of sorts, following him all over the tidal marshes surrounding our hometown, Port Arthur, Texas. I was his doctor, too, and he couldn't help asking me often in his casual, by-the-way manner, "How am I doing, Doc?"

Using my doctor's eye, I would look at him and say, "Fine, Ezra! You feel fine, don't you?"

"Sure, man, I'm better than I ever was."

He looked tan and fit although I knew that his heart was large. I marveled, comparing him now with my mind's image of him the day I first met him, sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, wearing pajamas, a translucent oxygen tube looped over his face. That day, the opening day of duck season, a hunting companion had persuaded him to leave the marsh and come to my office. During the preceding weeks, he had often been short of breath, and that morning he was short of breath just standing in his blind. It did not take long to make the diagnosis. I sent him straight to the hospital.

In duck hunting circles around Port Arthur, Ezra was a legend. He was a champion duck caller, and good hunters respectfully conceded to him. "How did you learn duck calling, Ezra?" I asked while he was still seated on the hospital bed.

"Doc, I'll tell you something," he said, in an East Texas drawl that was peppered with Cajun. "I've made duck calling records-I'll give you one, if you want-but you can't really learn to call a duck the way I call them by listening to records. Everything I know about calling I learned from ducks. You can hear some people call a duck, and it sounds beautiful, like they was playing a musical instrument. They blow their caller like they was in a band, but the ducks just fly by. They don't even look down." He shook his head a little, as if telling something that was almost pathetic.

There was a story in his answer.

Meeting and knowing a master intrigued me. Even in my own field, I had met very few. Ezra was part of a rare group. He had a drive that kept him chasing one of nature's secrets. Like all masters, he had learned to apply himself patiently in order to understand something thoroughly. Something that looked mysterious to ordinary folk became a force under his control. He didn't work at his skill halfway, either. He learned it by sitting for hours, hidden in salt grass, watching and listening.

Ezra must have been looking for someone to teach even before he became ill. He was particular about who he would let around him, and he had not "brought someone up," as he put it later, for years. He didn't care to have someone slow him down, but he liked the way I listened and decided to take me as his partner. He knew I wanted to learn.

In the hospital, he said, "Doc, you're steering me right. I'm gonna stick to you like glue. You know what they say, ‘Gotta dance with the one that brung you.’ You ever been in the marsh?"

"Truth? No. Even raised here. I've never hunted it, been in it, or anything."

"Let me take you, Doc, and you take care of me."

"Sure. But you've gotta get stronger. Let's see how you do when you get home; you've gotta get back on your feet first."

"Aw, man, I'm gonna do what you say. You're the boss! Whatever you say. We can take it easy. Okay. One step at a time!" he said, his voice rising.

"Yeah, we'll see how you do once you're out of the hospital."

He was already planning ahead. "All right, I'm dancing with the one that brung me! Whew, boy!" he exclaimed, this time letting out a Cajun yelp. I couldn't believe his excitement. I hoped that I hadn't oversold him on his recovery. He had a weak heart, possibly a viral cardiomyopathy, and I had no idea how well he would do.

During the next year, he got back on his feet and then some. I even wondered sometimes if I had made the right diagnosis. There were times when I barely kept up with him. Tests confirmed that his heart was weak, but nothing could measure his will; it was the strongest I had ever encountered. He took his part of our partnership seriously, too, rousing me more mornings than I wanted so that I could be up with him before dawn, in the marsh, and back before rounds at the hospital. During that year, it seemed that every waking minute I wasn't in the office or in the hospital, I was in the salt marsh, learning as fast as I could absorb Ezra's lessons.

Still, all that time I was keeping an eye on him, too. I thought sometimes that I sensed in him a bit of fatigue, a little tiring in his fight. It was hard to say. He had a way of conserving energy and working things so that he could take a short break when he needed one. He didn't want me telling him to rest, but if I rested, he would. His competitive nature prevented him from showing any sign of slacking. If he caught me watching his breathing after he finished slogging a few hundred yards through ankle-deep mud, he countered by asking me, "You all right?"

"Sure, I'm all right, Ezra. This marsh's put me in good shape."

"It'll do it. It's the best thing for you, Doc."

One winter day, Ezra and I made a trip to the marsh for a late afternoon hunt. It was the last day of duck hunting season and a little over a year since I had met him. We were driving out to Los Patos, known as the "duck ranch," a piece of privately owned Gulf Coast marsh marked off by miles of barbed wire.

Ezra was driving his old green pickup, which had a salvaged camper over the bed. Leaning forward in his seat, both arms folded over the top of the steering wheel, he talked while I poured us a sip of coffee. He was in a good mood. He looked over with a kind of earnest expression, as if about to thank God for his good luck, and said, "Man, Doc, I've got it made in the shade, don't you think?" He didn't need a direct answer. "I mean, look at this. We're headed to Los Patos, the best duck hunting in the world. What else do I need? When this season is over, I can fish it or crab it to my heart's content. The owners don't care. All they want is for me to keep up the blinds and take 'em for hunts. What's easier than that?"

I had to nod. Of course, I was the luckiest person of all because I was stuck like glue to the best duck hunter in the world in the best marsh in the world.

We pulled up to the entrance of Los Patos. I got out of the truck's cabin to unlock the gate. With my back to the Gulf of Mexico, I swung the gate wide, holding it open for Ezra to drive through. The best part of opening the gate came with smelling air fresh with Gulf surf. To either side of the gate, I could see the effect of the gusting winds whipping over fields of salt grass, picking up the tangy scent of fermenting grass-straw. When I stepped off the road into the brackish salt marsh, I could easily appreciate the generative union between land and sea. What I missed on the highway from the truck's cabin could be seen closely by looking down at the tannic water between my boots. There, mosquito larvae and minnows fought out their existence. A sea of salt grass stretched far to the distant intercoastal canal. Los Patos was big, a wetland representative of the Gulf Coast plain, lying within the central flyway for ducks and geese migrating from Canada to Mexico and back. This was heaven for Ezra.

Today, he wanted to try something different. His idea was to walk as far as we could to an area where he could call down pintails that were wary of hunters this late in the season. He wanted to get there on foot; he was convinced that pintails were staying far away from the sight of airboats. It would be hard work. We pulled on waders and packed shells and coffee thermoses into green five-gallon buckets that Ezra had camouflaged by spraypainting them brown and black. Carrying shotguns and buckets, we took off in a new direction for the last afternoon hunt of the season.

Finding a spot of ground in front of a little open water, we put down our buckets and pulled salt grass up into a blind. We settled in, talking a little and scanning the sky overhead. Not much happened while we sipped coffee. Suddenly, Ezra crouched low, pointing to a thin line of ducks in the distance. They were barely visible to me; I could just make out the characteristic wing movement. Ezra said they were pintails. I still couldn't understand how he could tell pintails from mallards at that distance. They didn't seem to be in calling range, but he had two callers of his own making hanging from a string around his neck, and he put one to his mouth, opening with an incomparable, authentic call. The wind was blowing into our faces. At first, I couldn't see much response in the ducks. Ezra put a bigger effort into his caller.

"I'm gonna hit 'em with this, Doc." He put out a long distress call.

I didn't know if he could reach them. Then I saw their flight make a shift. The lead ducks picked up his call. Their flight changed with small jerks, as if in indecision. They turned tentatively toward us. Soon it was certain: He had locked them with his calls. At first, the ducks were a few thin streams of distant cirrus trails. Then the lead ducks turned toward our blind, and the trails coalesced. A boiling gray cloud of 100 ducks headed straight for us. In the process of coming closer, pintails in groups of 10 began dropping down. I knew that within seconds they would be whistling by our blind. I kept my head down, eyes turned on Ezra, waiting for that split second when he would look at me to signal, "Now!"

Instead, he whispered, "Aw, Doc, this is too easy." He shook his head as if he couldn't believe how pathetically easy it had been.

His words took me by surprise, but I knew I had heard him right. I eased back onto the overturned bucket I used for a seat. A sharp catch in my neck relaxed as I turned my head from Ezra. The ducks were landing with light splashes. I felt my heart beating in my ears. In seconds, only the hum of mosquitoes and the soft, undisturbed feeding chatter of the ducks surrounded us.

I looked back at Ezra. He, too, was uncoiled from his hunting crouch, sitting on his bucket, his worn Browning 12-gauge across his lap. He looked at the ducks and the marsh.

I studied my mentor out of the corner of my eye, and I looked at the ducks on the marsh, too. Ezra was a master duck hunter. The greenhead's tail feathers trimming the band of his dress Stetson were real enough. But this was another matter.

I thought over his comment. "This is too easy." It wasn't, of course. That was an ironic understatement; only his great effort had taken us to this point. But now I realized something else. Even as I had learned from him as my mentor and patient, I had not foreseen the possibility of this change. He had redefined himself, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that he had prepared himself. Perhaps the change occurred while he was conceding something to his illness. Perhaps not. I could only guess, but I suspected that minutes ago, having visited the pinnacle of his skill, he had seen an image of himself that looked small against the magnificent image of those ducks responding to his pleading call. This was his awakening experience, an integration of himself and his universe. Rather than struggling for another instant of mastery over nature, he instead stopped and sought simply to reflect on life. I never asked him, but he must have been willing to view himself, and be viewed, differently, as a person who was willing to relinquish mastery over life long enough to become part of a greater whole.

The afternoon sun shone in the pale winter sky. A cool Gulf Coast breeze fluttered over the marsh, occasionally touching down and wrinkling the water's smooth surface, erasing reflections of fast-moving clouds overhead. We sat there quietly, without regard for time, until for no reason except that known to the ducks, the pintails suddenly rose from the water, beating their wings, and, like one of the clouds overhead, pushed away.

Ezra grinned. We gathered up our buckets and shell boxes and left. We were through for the season.