Classic waterfowling scenes on canvas portray hunters peering into the sky as the first few weak rays of light turn night into day over a duck marsh stretching to the horizon. A skilled artist brings life to the images of Labrador retrievers, making them appear to shiver with an excitement born of the awareness that huge flocks of ducks will soon be coming in, each arriving wave offering the dogs the opportunity for a mad dash into the icy water. Such renderings vividly recreate this country's long, storied past of waterfowling.

A refined appreciation of the classics of design is certainly to be admired, but "art" ultimately lies in what your eye makes of it. And something of the same relationship holds true for northwest Georgia duck hunting: maybe not a masterpiece in the classical sense, but frequently pleasing nonetheless.

No marshes here, nor flooded hardwood bottoms: Here, those participating in the Sport of Kings (as both waterfowling and horse racing have been called) instead find hardwood ridges and greenfield valleys stippled with a few pasture ponds and the occasional beaver's handiwork damming up a small stream or spring seep.

Duck hunting isn't an easy sport to make a start on in this region; you've first got to pay some dues if you hope to enjoy success down the road. Northwest Georgia lies in the path of no major flyway, and although enough ducks use the area to make hunting them a worthwhile pursuit, it does require the cultivation of a new slant on the sport.

Two northwest Georgia hunters who've got small-water duck hunting down pat are the uncle-nephew duo of Allen "Butch" Eleam and Scott Copeland, both of Summerville. They prefer to start their winter days by spending the first few hours of daylight on a duck pond before they head for the offices of Guffin and Eleam Insurance for an honest day's work. Both have been duck hunting in northwest Georgia since they were old enough to swing a scattergun, and have witnessed many a sunrise while gripping a shotgun and looking up into a waiting sky.

"Duck hunting up here can be good," Butch Eleam said, "but it takes a little different way of thinking. We would all love to have the kind of duck hunting they do in Arkansas and other places on the major flyways, but you take what you can get -- and around here that means hunting a small pond or swamp for a few hours in the morning before work.

"We still see plenty of ducks, though. On a good morning hunt, you may have 25 or 30 ducks come in on you."

"It all depends on the weather up north," Copeland added, "but usually the later in the season it gets, the more ducks we see. The first few hunts of the season might be a little slower, but toward to the end it really picks up."

Since wood ducks are considered by many hunters to be the bread-and-butter ducks for Georgia waterfowlers, it's surprising that gadwalls, mallards and black ducks make up most of the duo's harvest.

"We don't shoot a lot of wood ducks," Eleam noted. "We usually let them fly. The reason is the other ducks like mallards usually come in just a little later, and you don't want to be shooting up the swamp after a few wood ducks and scaring off some good flights of mallards that were headed your way."