Month: December 2009

Excerpts from a Quail Quest…

From the Upland Lexicon of Essential Euphemisms (3rd Ed.):
Main Entry: 1quest
Pronunciation: \ˈkwest\
Function: noun
1) Typically used in retrospect, to summarize the unsuccessful pursuit of an elusive, small bird in a big land. 2) An attempt to put a valorous spin on failure. 3) Also used in place of such platitudes as “it’s just good to be out here.”

Az. Fish & Game agent: “Yeah, the Mearns numbers seem to be really down this year. Dry spring and summer did a number on ’em. So what are you guys hunting out here?”

Us: “Mearns”

AZF&G: “Oh.”

“We scouted that road last weekend. It’s pretty rough, and **** ‘s truck wouldn’t make it, but I’m sure your rig will be fine.”

“Hmmm….where do you think those folks are going on ATV’s, in head-to-toe camo, ski masks and handguns?”

“Note to self – when you go on a road trip, bring the keys to the locking gas cap.”

“Javelina’s are basically just big cranky rodents on steroids.”

“We could always move down lower and see if we can find some Gambel’s…”

“I’m not ready to slum with Gambel’s yet.”

“That’s gotta be the weirdest Johnny Cash song ever.”

“Looks like that big pot of beef stew flipped over in the back of your truck.”

“Should he be chewing on that?

“Well, till next year.”

“Yep.”

– Smithhammer

Four–aka Taking Duke

The day my friend died.

That day is on the list–you know, the list we all pack around. The personal list of the days that sink into your core, the days you will remember for a long, long time. Days like 9/11 and the day the Broncos won the Super Bowl for the first time. Bad and good. Burned deep. Days to remember when you are old and worn and pooing in your own britches and eating soft food.

So the day my friend died. Here’s another one–the day his family asked me to take his dog.

His name–the dog’s–is Duke. My friend had three dogs, two Brittanies and a setter. I’m a setter man.

“Would you maybe take him, Tom?,” Dave asked. “Dad would have wanted you to have him. He needs to be hunted.”

I gulped and goosebumped. “I’d be honored.”

Three were already at home, a team of setters that sweep the country and miss little. A fourth? Really? A fourth? There would be no bird safe from here to Great Falls with that kind of canine vacuum power. Four? I gave it about three minutes’ thought. Yes, four. I’d do it for my friend, but I’d do it for Duke too.

He came home with me in October, a thin high October with filtered light from the sky and a vast stretch of partridge prairie out before me. He was out of shape and a little overweight, which for a setter is about one pound. But he had fire. I had seen him hunt and I knew it was there and that he’d burn hot and long and get it done. And so it was and then all four dogs were out on the ground–a huge canvas of grays and browns and four white setters dancing across it like notes on sheet music. Glory.

They swept out into a southward Montana wind and spun in it. The original three following each other and swapping leads and going cautious when birdy. Why would I screw that kind of a trio up with a fourth? And then I saw him, off left.

Tail high noon. Stunned. Stopped cold. The trio did not see him and I loped his way and called to them and then they saw him and all three honored, then one moved ahead, stealing the point. Poor form. I spoke and she stopped then and there it was–four frozen. The frozen four.

The covey went up and the shotgun barked and a hun was there. Down and Duke on it.

My friend smiled.                                                                                       –TR

In the Hall of the Chukar King

Out of breath, I stop to leave a little water in this otherwise dessicated landscape. Looking down, I note that my boys are as red as chukar legs in that detached, objective way not uncommon to moments of pain and survival. This trip is beginning to take a toll on me. Looking up, I survey a thousand feet of loose scree and caprock and cheatgrass above, and hear them laughing from on high. I try not to take it personally, though it is most definitely personal, and I continue scrambling to reach their steep patch of hell, simmering with murderous intent.

I know they are close – the dog starts getting birdy and then locks, just as half the covey pulls a flanking maneuver, running around behind him and then they all get up simultaneously – a dozen chukar exploding and tormenting him from all sides. He predictably loses his shit, jumping in the air and spinning and barking. Poor little bastard. No good dog deserves this. Instead, some of them, like some of us, simply become addicted in spite of better judgment; gluttons for punishment.

As the chaos subsides and I tell Hank it wasn’t his fault, I hear the lone holdover bird flush behind me. Wheel and fire and the bird drops decisively. Mistakes are unforgiving here; a maxim that applies to us as much to us as it does to them.

It wasn’t a classic take over a point, but you don’t always wait for that in this country, on this quarry. No, this is guerrilla warfare, and I don’t mean that lightly. Refined gentlemen and their traditions and their rules remain far below, looking up at places like this through binoculars.

From above the saddle I watch the covey flush wild and take cover in a jagged outcropping, disappearing into the crevices. We learn from their flanking tactics and return in kind. It’s so damn steep I practically have one knee braced into the hillside when I see the GSP locked up hard, balanced on a boulder. I catch my breath, taking a second to admire the work of this first-season pup, and release him with an “ok.” He rockets in and the little devils get up and I promptly send two of them to meet their infernal maker. I watch the birds drop 75 yards below me on a 50 degree slope of nasty, loose, volcanic talus. Even in death these fiends make you pay.

Lest the wrong impression is given, I spend the next day going through an entire box of shells with only two hitting their mark. Fast passing shots on birds dropping from above at mach speed, whiffed. Shots taken at birds that I knew damn well were out of range, solely out of frustration, hoping to bend physics to my will. It didn’t work.

Evening is not exactly  the affable return to the sprawling lodge after a jaunty day afield one imagines in the sportsman tomes of yore. It is instead a deliberate refueling with piles of greasy sustenance; a licking of wounds with corn liquor salve and barley-based anti-inflammatories. Plotting, debriefing, refiguring tactics – a team effort to recharge before tomorrow’s redeployment. The banter is generally about as offensive as you can imagine. The easily affronted might want to camp somewhere else. Far away.

Dawn reaches our cold little camp in the arroyo and high-octane joe eradicates the last vestiges of rust from sore muscles and we’re off. We ascend to the Hall of the Chukar King yet again – knowing they await far above, assuming they’ll be no easier than they were yesterday, working like you would for no other upland species, to return spent, with maybe a few birds in the bag and the weary contentment that only comes from having your ass handed to you by a small, crafty partridge in a vast, alien land.

We’ll be back.

– Smithhammer

Generations

In camp and around the house, he is a big loveable goofy bastard.

Right now, though, he’s on point and it is as classic a point as a setter man in a life of setters is likely to see. He is white and handsome and up against the skyline behind a juniper and frozen. Solid. A salt pillar.

One covey back, he had pointed and then broke with the shit-hell expression of a pup on his mug, flushing birds like playing cards shot into a stiff wind. Rotten sonofabitch, with a smile.


This time, I tell him “hold, buddy” (one does not command this dog, one converses with) and stumble-skip across mean footing and see the covey.
They go up in a flurry of gray wing and clown’s mask and I swing carefully and pull the trigger and one goes down. I do not think about a triple or even a double. One is enough, one good chukar after one good point.
His name is Echo and he’s here on the mountain with me as a partner, not as a dog doing the work for a walking man. For the most part I am not in that run-and-blast, stagger-and-fall, curse-and-bleed rant that is chukar hunting in on-end country. Instead I am largely lost in thought. Soaking. Absorbing. I’m all in.
His real name is Greylock’s Hank’s Echo. Greylock is a good kennel back east, but this dog is a western lad. It’s the “Hank’s Echo” that is the important thing.
Sage and juniper and greasewood run through his veins. Hank was his grandfather and in this country of echoes on rimrock, Echo is his echo.


A decade before, I climbed the same hill with Hank–a dog all bones and balls–and we shot chukar left and right and Hank pinned them all and brought them all to hand. In the cooling light of a northern Nevada day going away, we walked down to the truck one thousand feet below, Hank at my side and the warmth of a half dozen chukar dead against the small of back. The caprock across the valley splashed pink then gold-red and then it was gone and the chill of December was on me.
A decade gone by and a bird dog buried at the base of a chukar cliff in another state, a place where chukar walk across his grave and his name is carved in soft yellow sandstone above. Now his grandson at my heel, then cast out into the thick of it–the old cold lava, the junipers, the sage, the cheatgrass greening in December sunlight and a fresh-dead partridge in that same frayed-by-years bird vest. Dead and warm against the small of my back and a honed-hard, bones-and-balls white setter out in it, after them.


The third generation hunter after perhaps the fifth or sixth generation quarry. Life ticks on.                                                                                 –TR

Leave. Please.

Another lonely morning in the treestand. A gray, late-arriving November morning completely devoid of deer. Only the red squirrels scurrying in the leaves puncture the far-off soundtrack of commuters heading to work.

I unload the .308, climb down, stretch the back and ready myself for my re-entry into the gotta-get-to-work crowd. Thirty yards from the stand, in a mix of dogwood and aspen saplings, I almost step on a lone woodcock. The color of a potato or a good beer. About the same size, too. It startles me, but I recover in time to playfully bring the empty rifle up to the shoulder and swing.

“Bang,” I say.

The season closed more than three weeks ago on these birds – little long-billed, worm-eating, tight-sitting, upside-down-brained migratory things. This one, I’m guessing, hatched in eastern Quebec and is on its way to, I don’t know, Virginia, maybe. North Carolina? Whatever. It should be there by now. We’ve had hard frosts. Snow is in the forecast. I’m awaiting snow for tracking deer and for making turns in the mountains. Everybody’s lighting woodstoves and furnaces. These are not the days for woodcock to be hanging around, although the weather dudes say we’re in something like the fifth warmest November on record.

Empathy is my first reaction, but then I remember not to doubt the acumen of nature, the insight of evolution. If this woodcock is tardy in arriving to its winter destination, there must be a solid, reasoned explanation. Not that I’m going to get it, or frankly, do I deserve it. I’ve guessed wrong about things woodcock too often in the past to develop any kind of logical rubric.

Maybe that’s the allure: not knowing, not understanding. If we figured it all out, if the answers were too easy, then the whole thing would be a sham – us in the driver’s seat of nature.

We wouldn’t want that.

MC