Timing is everything at Modoc National Wildlife Refuge near Alturas. Hit it right, and you've got your limit in no time. Photo by Marv Bibby.

The sky was turning gray behind the Warner's when I stepped down from the truck. The smell of burning brake pads smacked me full in the face.

Three pickups and a single car were scattered around the parking lot at Modoc National Wildlife Refuge, but the smell wasn't coming from them.

Steam and smoke were pouring from my driver's side rear wheel. It was too hot to touch -- and the air temperature was only 16 degrees.

At least that's what the display on my mirror said when I had bounced over the railroad tracks and started down the gravel road leading to the south parking lot at the refuge.

I kicked the wheel and tried to decide what to do. Driving the 180 miles of desolate desert highway to Reno, then another 120 miles on the interstate over the Sierras to my home in Sacramento, did not bode well for either me or the brake. And it was Halloween; I'd promised my wife to be home that night for trick-or-treaters.

Maybe somebody in Alturas could fix it? But the garage wouldn't be open for several hours yet.

The brake would have to wait. I stayed to hunt mallards.

Half an hour later, I got to the hunter's ferry on the Pit River. The 1 1/2-inch rope was encased in ice. The steel pulleys that powered the contraption were reluctant to budge. But someone had made it work that morning; the ferry was on the opposite shore, and a trail of broken ice meandered away across the shallow flood plain towards the south 395 borrow pond a quarter mile away.

I breathed a sigh of relief. The patch of tules north of the pond was surrounded by unbroken ice.

I struggled through ice and mud towards the tules, punching a semicircle of holes in the ice with a wading staff. Then I slammed my decoy bag down on top of the ice and kicked it forward with my foot -- and remembered the previous Thursday.

* * *

Mallards had come in fast and hard -- singles, pairs, triples. And they couldn't even wait for me to retrieve a bird and get back under cover. They wanted to set down in the decoys, now. Right now!

One hen had even landed in the decoys, swum to within five yards of my hide before deciding something wasn't quite right and giving me a raucous scolding as she burst into the air. It was over before it started -- six mallards and a gadwall, with me back at the Sports Hut in Alturas well before noon.

"You hit it just right," said storeowner, Ron Pervette, picking my birds in the back room while I changed out of my waders.

Just days before, a big influx of mallards had arrived. And with a ton of birds kegged up on the new refuge acreage just north of the hunting area, Pervette figured that hunting would be good until the next freeze.

And it was.

* * *

So here I was, a week later, following Pervette's advice.

It was close to 9 a.m. before I'd managed to kick a hole in the ice big enough to set out some decoys and get into my hide. But even with my late start, I collected three mallards, a widgeon and a teal. Then I hotfooted it back to the hunter's ferry and to the parking lot -- to deal with the brake.

HUNTING MODOC
In the northeastern corner of the state, just south of Alturas on U.S. 395, the Modoc NWR's 2,130 acres straddles the South Fork of the Pit River. The area is set aside for hunting on every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

"Three-quarters of the hunters using the area are local," said Steve Clay, refuge manager. The rest come from all over the state. Heaviest hunter pressure occurs on Saturdays. But even then, peak days in 2006 found only 54 hunters chasing ducks on Nov. 4, and 41 hunters on Dec. 2. That's not a lot of hunting pressure.

You can access Modoc from two parking lots -- one north and one south. Much of the acreage in between can be reached just as easily from either one.