Month: October 2010

Lightning


My skin tingles and for a moment I feel the lightning before it strikes.
Synapses fire, screaming at my brain and flooding my body with adrenaline.
I flatten myself further into the dirt, too late and to no effect.
The blinding white light explodes onto my retinas while a simultaneous explosion rocks my ear drums.
“Shit that was close,” I hear my mouth say.
I’m lying flat on my face in a copse of small pines on the edge of a high-country meadow. The towering ponderosas to my left are like lightning beacons.
The last summer storm of the year is chasing a cold-front across New Mexico, giving the mountains and those in them one last lashing before the snows fall. The truck – and my rain jacket – are a couple of miles south, two 10,000 foot treeless meadows away.
Another flash crashes close and I ponder briefly the possibility that I have been struck and my brain doesn’t know it yet.
The smell of wet pine needles is overpowering. When the thunder rolls into silence I can hear the hail pinging off of my pack and feel it stinging my skin.
I’m alive.
More so than I have been in weeks.

– GM

This.

There is just this. Windswept cheatgrass and sage, gradually ascending, wrinkled and folded in places like a well-used blanket. In the distance, steep rock and dark forest and blue grouse and elk and cougar all move under cover, but out here it is only the sheer vastness that aides concealment.

The steady gait of a horse, covering time and distance you’re unaccustomed to on foot; a horse that exudes the sort of disposition you want to take to the horizon. The rhythmic creak of saddle leather mixing with the wind and gurgle of ravens, trading precedence with your thoughts.

Dogs, possessed of incomprehensible drive, vacuuming the arid ground for scent before you. A sudden point – the kind of full speed to a stop that makes you think the dog is going to flip ass over tea kettle with the abruptness of it. Men, horses and dogs all stop in honor. A quick dismount, a few steps forward, a release command. A bird gets up and then tumbles over the knoll.

You can make more of it, if you’re so inclined, but really, sometimes, it is far better when it is just this.

– Smithhammer

Meat hunting

I’m two woodcock and a couple of spray-and-pray shots at ruffed grouse into the day when Henry’s little French Britt, Koda, goes on point. Or at least the beep-beep-beep of  his electronic collar tells me he’s on point.

I jam my way through the nasty tangle not yet suppressed by a real hard frost toward the dog. In this thick stuff you’ve got to be within 15 feet of the dog to see him, so I’m walking with the 20-gauge at the ready, unsure how close the bird might be. And then Koda moves, or least the tinga-ling of his bell tells me he’s moving.

And he’s back on point. Then barking. Then moving. And barking. And seemingly on point again. Weird.

“You see him Henry?” I yell.

“No,” Henry yells back. “He’s closer to you.”

Koda barks again, about the same time the beep goes off on the collar.

“What the hell is going on with him?” I yell to Henry.

And then I see it. At first I think it’s a fawn stuck in a muddy depression, but when my brain catches up with my eyes I realize Koda is standing – barking – a few feet from a mature whitetail doe with paralyzed hindquarters .

“Christ, Henry!” I yell. “It’s a deer!”

Henry emerges from his patch of thick alders just as I notice a quarter-sized hole on the doe’s spine. It’s a fresh wound, oozing blood, not a lot, and she thrashes around at our feet using only her front legs. I can see her backbone in the hole.

It’s archery season here, and I know the landowners have a couple of treestands hanging not far from where we are in the cover.

“We’ve got your deer!” I yell, thinking the archer would be within earshot if they were still in the woods.

Once it becomes clear there’s nobody but Henry, Koda and me in the woods with this deer we have to devise a plan. I run back to the truck to get my cell phone and a knife. I call  the landowner’s son – who’s still in high school – and ask him if he might have shot at a doe from his stand in the last 24 hours.  No, he hadn’t. Maybe his brother did? No, he hadn’t, either. A couple of phone calls later and it’s clear that whoever shot this doe is neither the landowner or still around. The game warden is called, and he’ll come around to tag it for us so we can get her out of the woods without violating any big game laws.

With little fanfare, I lay on the doe’s front legs, holding them tightly so she can’t swipe us. She doesn’t protest much, her bulging eyes the only real sign of panic. Henry takes the knife, tenderly caresses the doe on her neck just once, and plunges it into her jugular. She doesn’t die quickly, the blood gurgling in her throat as she bleats.

“They are tough bastards,” says Henry, as she flops and flutters. I notice he has blood stains on the knees of his pants. Finally, after a period of time longer than you’d think, the life drains out and her heaving chests stops moving.

The warden comes with the high schooler and his brother. We meet them on the edge of the woods and we drag her out. She’s legally tagged. They clean her and bring her to a butcher shop.

Henry and I finish our hunt – we found the deer in what’s really the sweet spot in the cover – and I manage to knock down one more woodcock.

The woodcock, too, is still alive when Koda finds it.

I just rap its head against a small tree. The bird does not bleed. It immediately goes limp.

– Matt Crawford

Getting to the Point

Sometimes, I forget what I’m doing. Seeing him locked up like some ancient, graven image, with a level of simmering, white hot focus beyond anything I’ll never truly know, yeah, I’ll admit that I can easily forget everything else, including why we’re supposedly here. That there is an unseen third party somewhere close by. That this is merely the prelude to an explosion that can go any one of several different ways. I want the moment to continue; this traingulated tension to be savored indefinitely, but all such swings of the pendulum eventually seek equilibrium, and the longer the build up the more abrupt and chaotic the release tends to be.

But sometimes, all of this just goes out the window, and I look at him, truly dumbfounded by the capabilities of this  high-performance animal, and the ways he must experience the world so differently from my own, though we stride through it together. I’m so distracted with admiring the beauty of this point that the bird gets up and I’m not ready and I feel like a head in clouds idiot. And the briefest of glances from over his shoulder makes me feel even more so. But he immediately forgives and forgets and throws every bit of himself into getting out there and doing it again, and it is this, not the missing of the shot, that lets me know I’m the lesser of two creatures here.

The frequency of this doesn’t decrease with experience. In fact, quite the opposite.

– Smithhammer

Not hunting

I am not hunting.
I waited 7 months for this season.
I’m burning up with the need to hunt.
16 days ago, I flushed 5 coveys of grouse.
15 days ago, I sat in a pointless meeting.
13 days ago, I mowed the lawn.
Wednesday, I wore a tie.
Damn all ties to hell.

– GM

Reverse Points: Bird Dogs Reconsidered

Part of the reason we started MoF is because we felt that fresh, down to muddy earth writing about the upland experience, unencumbered by formulaic nostalgia, is a hard thing to find. But when we do come across those all-too-rare exceptions, we’d like to offer props and give our readers a heads up. A while back I discovered a fine book – a book that finally takes a humorous, unflinching look at the reality of owning, and more importantly living with, bird dogs.

“Reverse Points: Bird Dogs Reconsidered” is truly a fun read, full of great, atypical pics of canine partners doing what they do best (especially when they’re at their worst). The book features the photography of Nancy Anisfield, taken at dog training clinics and on hunting trips around the country. Contributors include Alan Liere, Jon M. Bronson, , Michael A. Halleran, Tom Parmelee and our own Matt Crawford.

From the publisher:

“Tired of all the noble tales and images of gun dogs, Nancy Anisfield and five other outdoor humor writers take a look at the darker side of bird dogs and stare it in the face, even though that face is coated in mud with a cluster of slobber-laced pheasant feathers matted to its jowl.”

Definitely a kindred spirit.

Reverse Points can be ordered through Ugly Dog Hunting.

(p.s. – we aren’t in the business of product endorsements, just celebrating and supporting good writing.)