I will tell you a hunting story, but you need not worry if you’re not a hunter. It involves no taking of any animals, not even any shooting.

In that way, it’s like a lot of hunting stories that never get told. Hunts like this happen more often than you might expect if you don’t hunt.

It happened last week, on a small wetland in western Minnesota. I would call it a duck slough, but few ducks were in the area this fall.

A slough is a low area, usually wet. This one is a good quarter-mile long, linear in shape, fringed by thick stands of cattails. It is beautiful if you are the kind of person who doesn’t mind wearing chest waders to get around.

When you slog through the cattails, or out to the little island where the dog and I hunt, your wader boots suck into the ooze at the bottom of the marsh.

The smell that rises from a marsh when you stir it up is methane, an odor that most people have come to think of as unpleasant. But somehow, when it’s connected to duck hunting and the company of a Labrador retriever, it seems altogether reasonable, even good.

The dog and I have gone down to the little island for the last hour before sunset. I know, with the scarcity of ducks, that my chances of any shooting are remote. But I also know that sitting on the island with its 360-degree view of the prairie will be better than almost any other way I could end my day.

So, we sit and listen and watch.

We watch the sky paint itself in shades of purple in the east and tangerine in the west. A pied-billed grebe makes his evening rounds, gliding silently along the cattails. A flock of geese passes to the south of us, honking.

From the grasslands, rooster pheasants cackle over the glory of another October day. A grain dryer drones somewhere to the northeast.

No ducks come.

In the last 15 minutes before sunset, though, something remarkable happens. The red-winged blackbirds return. They come in loose clouds, 50 or 100 or 200 at a time. The elastic clouds elongate and compress, then funnel into the marsh like so many tornadoes.

The air is full of the birds’ chittering and clacking and singing. They bank and flare on final approach, dropping in all around us, oblivious to the dog and me.

Until sunset, the sky is never without the incoming birds. They must number in the low thousands. Once tucked into their roosts, they continue to chatter. The marsh sounds like a roomful of ladies at tea.

It is exhilarating to be among this rush of wings, to be at the vortex of this breezy homecoming.

I know they are just blackbirds, a species too common to hold a special place in our hearts. But the sheer numbers in this convergence will log the evening in my memory.

No ducks come.

It’s a wonderful hunt.