The good news is that a memorable Texas goose hunt is worth its weight in gold. The bad news is that to get to that pot of gold requires sleep deprivation, working in the dark and heading home red-eyed and exhausted.

A 3 a.m. rendezvous in a hotel parking lot usually is not a good thing, but that's where one of my hunting excursions began last season. And after about three hours' sleep, getting up at 2:30 a.m. for a goose hunt sounded ludicrous, especially when the hotel phone rang with that dreaded wake-up call.

There is nothing easy about goose hunting. It usually involves getting up extra early just so there is plenty of time to travel to a specific "hot" field, where you can then do something really crazy like set out 500 to 1,000 decoys.

Last season, one of my goose hunts was on a section of flooded land north of Winnie. The other was out of Bay City. The one in Winnie was with Rian Glasscock. Several of us hunted that morning and got easy limits of speckle-bellied geese with several snows mixed in. We even shot some ducks. What made that particular hunt so easy was that Glasscock had gone through the trouble of setting out a few hundred decoys the night before. Having the dekes already placed is a real luxury. The icing on the cake was that it was only a mile or so away from a goose roost holding thousands of birds.

The Bay City hunt was totally different. When guide Randy Triplett said we had about 800 decoys to set out, I staggered backward a few steps. Oh brother!

But like all good goose guides, he followed up the decoy news with a pretty good pep talk -- sort of like a football coach before a big game.

"We're going to be hunting on a field that was loaded with geese yesterday," he said, as six of us stood there in the dark against a howling north wind. "We've got a lot of young birds, so that should set up some great decoying. We're not far from a roost pond. Hopefully, all those birds will come our way once they begin moving."

I've been goose hunting for years. And I've learned to lock in on certain words that guides deliver before a hunt. One of which is "hopefully." Another one is "help," as in needing some to set up a decoy spread.

Nothing is guaranteed when you're going after geese, especially snows, aka white crows. They are totally unpredictable. They are smart; they move in big flocks. But if you're where they want to be, the shooting can be a barrel burner. Conversely, if you're not on the hotspot, it's a bust. A bore. A total waste of your valuable time.

On the other hand, I've seen many a goose hunt salvaged by specklebellies. This has been a great year for specks. The limit is two per person. Specks are much more gullible than snows. They react to calls like mallards and gadwalls. They don't normally move in huge numbers like snows. And when they commit to your spread they are a true pleasure to watch as they circle in on cupped wings and orange feet.

On a hunt with Glasscock near Winnie, six of us got our limits of specks with ease. And after we quit shooting them, they proceeded to come in and land in the decoys like nobody's business.

On the Bay City hunt, we got our specks. But the snows were a different story.