Settling back, we waited silently for dawn and legal shooting time to arrive. Suddenly someone hissed, "I hear a drake."

The plaintive call of a mallard drake cut sharply through the dense white fog. Quack, quack, quack.

The sound of hen mallards came from the blind as several members of the hunting party other than Mike tried to settle the drake down onto the water. They were raspy and guttural, pleading with the greenhead to take refuge on this quiet pothole in the flooded timber. Their calls sounded good to me -- but the drake would have none of it.

We saw it start to fly away from the decoys just before Mike started calling. Then, suddenly, everything changed; it was as if someone had thrown a boomerang around the duck. The mallard immediately banked hard in the soft morning mist, turned abruptly and flapped straight toward Mike's calls. With a short half-circle completed, the duck was fluttering its wings and getting ready to land 20 yards out when one of the hunters shot twice and the drake dropped cleanly into the marsh. The Lab sitting next to me dove in and quickly retrieved the downed bird.

McLemore's modest about his skills, but we knew we'd seen a dramatic demonstration of phenomenal calling talent. In barely 10 minutes, he'd lured in a duck that really didn't seem to want to come in to the spread at all. It was almost as if Mike had a rope around the bird's neck, so convincing was his duck talk.

After that red-hot start, action slowed a bit, with dry spells between a few lively moments when one or a handful of ducks would fly within range. That gave me plenty of time to pick Mike's brain on the topic of how best to improve duck calling and hunting skills. First, though, I asked him a bit more about his contest wins.

"A lot of it is luck," he says modestly. "The thing you're after in a contest is the absence of mistakes. The majority of the guys entering these events are very good callers. The one who wins is the caller who blows three rounds without making a mistake. Yet you can't be timid. To win, you have to be aggressive with the call, really attack it, yet be smooth. It's a striving for perfection, like a concert performance by a musician."

Although he doesn't play any musical instruments, Mike does believe he was born with a certain natural talent for blowing a call. "I picked it up too easily. I know some boys who would be super if practice were the only thing involved."

But Mike says that anyone can learn to call ducks well enough to bring them into a spread of decoys. "It takes practice, though. Unfortunately, many people don't know a really good caller to get help from, or they're too shy or embarrassed to ask for criticism and instruction. I've found this especially true with older people."

If you don't have a local expert to advise you, Mike recommends, use instructional audio tapes or videos. Another good option: Visit some real ducks and listen to them.

"Go to refuges, ponds or marshes and listen to how the birds sound," says Mike. "Tape them, and then try to mimic those sounds. The main thing is to memorize exactly what the live ducks sound like.