Injustice irked Bill Ramsey. So did hollow self-righteousness. He could puncture pomposity like no one else.

Those traits made the Vicksburg attorney, who died six years ago, a formidable force in a courtroom.

Otherwise, he was so laid back you’d have to check to see if he was breathing. He was the champion of live and let live.

And he was funny. Any room would fall quiet if Bill was telling a story. With encouragement, he could transform himself into a pack of bird dogs jockeying around in the back of a pickup — adopting each of their personalities, sounds and body language flawlessly. That’s because he was a hunter, a student of the outdoors who lived for the time he could spend in the wilds of Mississippi, especially the lower Delta.

The story goes that Ramsey, Robert McConnell and Jack Branning were planning a duck hunt and that during the preliminaries McConnell made a remark about his intent to shoot only mallards (a desirable duck) and avoid gadwalls (a less desirable species). In keeping with his outlook on life, after the hunt Ramsey wrote the following, which McConnell made available to me:

Make Mine Gadwalls

It was not a quack, it was more like a low, raspy muttering chuckle. The sound was everywhere, resonating in the fog, almost like some sort of machine running — gadwalls.

We slid our jon boat into the muddy boat trail at Dead Lake. The unavoidable noise set off a thunderous roar of ducks lifting into the fog. It seemed to never stop.

The trolling motor easily took us the short distance to the blind, and Robert, Jack and I shuffled the gear from the boat into the blind. Gumbo, our retrieving dog, had gone in ahead of us and assumed his position on the left side of the blind. I followed next and took my seat on the left end of the bench, so I could handle the dog. Robert took the middle seat and was still grumbling because he couldn’t hear any mallards and reminded us more than once that he didn’t like to shoot gadwalls. Jack secured the boat and then climbed in to take the right hand shooting spot.

It was still 15 minutes before shooting time, hundreds of ducks swarmed over the decoys, and then started dropping in. Hordes of black silhouettes against the gray early sky would vanish as they dropped below the darkened button-willows and splashed into the water in front and on both sides of the blind. Gumbo trembled and whined.

Time — it was 6:04 a.m., and a group of 100-plus locked up and came straight into the decoys and all hell broke loose. We all emptied our guns, including the mallard shooter, and ducks rained out of the sky. Over and over they came, cupping, diving and twisting and setting up, landing in the decoy spread. On each attack by the brown and gray birds, many folded and tumbled under the fussilade of steel shot, and it ended too soon as Gumbo brought the 18th bird back to the blind. Time — 7:05 a.m.

What a delightful shoot. What a way to open the season.

We visited Dead Lake many more times that season, Jack and I did. The mallard shooter sought his pleasure elsewhere, and we even scrapped out maybe three mallards before the season’s end; but at the Dead Lake blinds we could always count on a good hunt with lots of gray ducks and warm fellowship.

Make mine gadwalls.

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Last Friday, a contingent paused from life’s other activities to unveil a marker on what most people call Eagle Lake Road, Mississippi 465 near U.S. 61 North. The highway is now officially a memorial to Bill Ramsey, who traveled it often.

It was Tom Ramsey of Jackson, Bill’s son, who guided the designation to passage by the Mississippi Legislature this spring. In brief remarks, Tom talked about his father’s many civic and legal roles — but most of all he reflected that a century of Ramseys have regarded the lower Delta with reverence.

A road slicing through a region of unspeakable beauty now bears the name of a person who cherished it greatly.

Fitting, and proper.