In the tiny town of Olive Branch near Horseshoe Lake Refuge in Alexander County stood the legendary Goose Pit restaurant. Early each morning, long tables filled with hunters eager for breakfast -- or needing food to absorb some leftover beverages from the night before. As each hunter entered, he handed his thermos jug over to a young lady who would have it filled with steaming hot coffee and ready to go when he left. There was no breakfast menu at the Goose Pit. Platters of fried eggs, bacon, sausage, fried potatoes and toast came to each table in an unending stream. Eat your fill, pick up your thermos, pay the tab and hit the road. It was as simple as that. Then one day, the Goose Pit burned to the ground and it was never rebuilt.

When the goose hunters arrived at the club of their choice, they found conversation at a minimum as sleepy men struggled into hip boots and awaited their pit assignments for the day's hunt. This last item came from a God-like figure -- the club owner. Most owners allocated the best spots to those who hired one of the club's guides, while next was long-time customers, and finally to the rest who were still working their way up the pecking order. The great hope of those in back-row pits was that maybe they would be moved forward to better pits when others had limited out. Maybe.

Hunters were then packed into old vans with doors that seldom stayed shut, and then driven over muddy pothole-infested farm lanes to a point several hundred yards from their designated hiding spots. The driver would yell out the pit number, see the hunters out of the van, point generally in the direction of the "hole" and leave two men standing in the mud contemplating a journey of as much as a quarter of a mile through ankle-deep "gumbo-like" mud. Armed with guns, bags full of gear and further weighed down by rubber boots that became heavier with each step in the clinging muck, they began their day's adventure.

Although the prospects of a good day may sound dim, the hunters' spirits were buoyed considerably by a rising crescendo of goose calls coming from the nearby refuge. Soon the first flights would appear over the distant trees and time was of the essence if they were to be settled underground before the birds arrived. Accordingly, the boys scuttled and "slud" across the treacherous field to their pit.

All the clubs in The Quota Zone carefully placed the decoy spreads the day before the season began, and then retrieved them on the day after the season ended. The fakes were always in the field, never picked up for the night, and rarely was their positioning changed -- unless by a hunter who believed that feeding birds always face into the wind. Frost and snow often accumulated on the decoys' backs, but since the guides did not carry snowbrushes, this accumulation stayed put until the sun melted it away, and not always on the same day it fell.

But when those "good 'ol boy" guides went to work with their cut-down Olt A-50 calls, the geese came anyway. More often than not, hunters left with coolers full of freshly killed geese -- after making reservations for their next hunt, of course. Life in The Quota Zone was indeed good.