Greg McReynolds

Dirt road soundtrack

Dirt roads traveled in the company of bird dogs and dog-eared maps deserve their own soundtrack.

The season is still somewhere ahead, but the road begins to beckon. The first trips are for mountain grouse, so September is for driving. It’s for sunflower seeds and cold beer in the cooler, lunches in Aspen groves and beside tiny trout water that you promise to re-visit with a rod, but never do.

Much of hunting blue grouse and ruffies in the west is an arm-out the window pursuit.

Later in the season, we’ll make the long treks into the backcountry for prairie grouse and chukar, starting early from the spots we know.

The first week of September, we set the cruise at 26 mph and glance at a stack of maps printed off with intentionally cryptic notes (lest they fall into the wrong hands) as we explore old logging roads.

The windows down and the dog whining in anticipation, we’ll stop and look, hunt a spot, then back in the truck.

We’ll spin a disk of old favorites and rejoice in birds and dogs and the roads to get there.

Here’s my disk for day 1

Stay a Little Longer – Willie Nelson

Photograph – Charlie Robison

Broken Bottles – Sons Of Bill

Out here in the middle – Robert Earl Keen

Circle back – John Hiatt

Threadbare Gypsy Soul – Pat Green

Down By the Water – The Decemberists

Guitar Town – Steve Earle

Pearl Snaps – Jason Boland & The Stragglers

Birthday Boy – Drive By Truckers

Lonely All The Time – Reckless Kelly

Horshoe Lounge – Slaid Cleaves

Rusty Cage – Johnny Cash

Wicked Twisted Road – Reckless Kelly

Snake Eyes – Ryan Bingham

Burden of legacy

Where chickens boom in golden grass
A faithful friend and I hold mass
Set out to hunt and death impart
We find not endings, but only starts
From us, this place soon shall pass

Alone, not I, nor would I be
My dog, a friend to cherish me
In this church that is the land
I give thanks for where I stand
My companion too, a gift from thee

My thanks is required, but sufficient it is not
Life’s passion needs more than allegiance to a plot
We are called to seize our endowment, and labor
Gratitude is fair, but wild lands need our sabre
It is up to we, else this temple shall rot

Not from night, the darkness will arrive
Taking not freedom nor profit, but lives
All is not well, the chickens grow quiet
For them the end approaches, but who will riot?
Grass, bird and church, cringe from steely knives

Set it right we could, if we’d only try
Stop the rush to destruction and ourselves defy
Gather the arms and raise the guard
Hunters must rally to protect the yard
Should we not, I won’t hunt. And the dog would die

SFRED

Avocation

A bird scented.
The world compressed into a moment of single moment of sure as hell, not-a-second of doubt this-is-what-I-do confidence.
All is as it should be.
To be a dog in tall grass…

Rain

They were waiting for the rain, but the rains came late.
Instead of wetting the ground and bringing shoots and bugs and cover that just hatched quail so badly need, the monsoon came when the chicks were on the ground.

The rain came in a torrent, mixed in equal parts with hail and sleet, hammering down on the desert. While the succulents drank it in, the quail were victims of its fury. Innocents swept away by the very thing they so badly needed. Add in years of drought, exacerbated by overgrazing and it’s tough times for New Mexico’s uplands.
Low survival rates mean few birds, scattered widely across the desert in small bunches. These are not the easy birds of wet years. There are no lay ups now.
These birds have been hunted, by man and beast.
At the flush, they go low and fast. Bird, tree, bird, nothing.
No shot, just a quiet curse for myself. On a day like this one, in a year like this one, the opportunities are few and far between.
The dog is exuberant and I laugh at how much energy she regains from her success at finding a single.
“Go on,” I shout at the scalie, rocketing downhill out of sight. That bird is a survivor. A worthy sire for another year’s covey.
It’s been three months of quail hunters, hawks, coyotes, bobcats, skunks and foxes.
Now the season is done.
The men and dogs are gone from the fields.
Time to dodge the raptors and predators and wait for the rain.
The dog and will I settle in and wait for Nov. 15.
For them, it’s merely another chapter in a long dry spell.
They wait for the rain.

Wall tents

In the age of high-tech fabrics and two-man tents that require you to spoon your hunting dog and leave your boots out in the rain, I had a revelation.
Wall tents are awesome.
The Romans knew it. And the Souix, the Vikings, the gold rush miners, the military, the Bedouin…
You can stand up. Room for the dog? Hell, there’s room for the dog and her kennel. Not to mention chairs, gear and that holiest of holy, a stove.

Yes, it weighs 60 lbs and no, it will not replace my dog spooning, ultralight, no-room-for-boots backcountry excursion tent.
It will however, keep me out of bed-bug infested hotel rooms where you can play “what’s that shape” with the stains on the sheets.
I don’t like hotels. I often don’t sleep very well in them and if it’s warm, I prefer a bedroll near the truck off some Forest Service Rd.
Of course, late season bird hunting and frigid, wet weather can sometimes mean cheap hotels. Not that I mind that they’re cheap. I like that part.
It’s the smell of stale smoke and mildew and lingering doubts that anything has recently been washed that makes it tough.
I stayed in a hotel a month back and as my dog surveyed a donkey-shaped area of discolored carpet, I wondered, “was DDT really that bad?”
Enter the wall tent.
It’s warm, roomy and comfortable and it is really no different from the tents used for hundreds of years by outdoorsmen of all sorts.
In the age of polypro, Gore-tex, nylon, pop-up campers and ultralight dome tents, it’s good to know that you can’t really improve on 10oz treated canvas.
That’s to centuries-old technology, I have a base camp. It’s dry and warm, free of bedbugs and since it’s mine, I can be sure there was never a burro massacred inside.

Bloody hands on the wheel

It’s only after I have been through the drive through, paid and taken the heart attack in a paper sack from the teenage boy at the window that I notice my hands are covered in blood.
It’s only pheasant blood, but in hindsight, he probably didn’t know that. In my head, I start working on my explanation for when the blue lights flash and the questions start.
Luckily, I make it across the state line, no sign of pursuit.
On the short-grass prairie, near the Canadian River, I water the dog and wash the blood from my hands.
I have escaped.

Jackets are the answer

It’s cold.
Seeing as it’s winter, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
Apparently surprises the shit out of a lot of people though.
They are so surprised that many of them forget how to drive, or how to dress, or even how to take it in stride.
They forget how to talk about anything else. Don’t they know there are two weeks left in the quail hunting season? Or that ice on the river concentrates the ducks?

When you live in the Rockies above 5,000 ft, you have to know that’s it’s going to get cold sometimes.
The thing is, so many people never do more than brave the cold between their car and the front door of their office.
It makes them soft.
Unless they’re hunters that is.
If you have pounded through the snow clenching a 7lb chunk of frozen steel in your hands while following a deliriously happy dog, then what’s a little cold weather?
If you have felt your truck do the diagonal slide, where you look a bit like a crooked-gaited hound dog going down the road and asked your buddy, “We have a shovel, right?” Then what’s a little snow on the roads?
If you have knocked the ice off of your fly-rod guides so you could get an extra couple of feet on your cast, or sat shaking in the frigid predawn dark listening to elk, or taken off your gloves to cut the ice balls out of your dog’s toes, then what’s a single digit temperature mean to you?
Nothing.
It’s winter.
It’s what happens in the mountains.
It’s cold.
So what.

– GM

Just us

The small army is gone. The skirmish line and the blockers have packed their bags and headed across the horizon, leaving a mile-long cloud of dust.
This time there is no, “how should we hit this one” conversation. No waiting on slowpokes or getting into position only to watch the line dissolve into a grupetto.
Now, it’s just the dog and I and a simple plan. Head up wind, as quickly and quietly as possible.
No whistle, no yelling, just a quiet “easy,” then we’re moving. A few dozen yards in, she sniffs hard, inhales something bigger than bird scent and snorts a bit before working two hens into the air. Their flight sends a jumpy rooster up, just out of range.

We round a corner and two roosters get up. I whack the first one and when the second one drops, I’m momentarily disappointed that there is no one to witness my shooting, then Roxy drops a bird in my hand and returns to complete the double and I recall how many birds we have watched flush from 500 yards away on this trip. I snap back to reality and think about how often this game of wild birds and dogs comes down to chance.
Sometimes, for a few brief moments, the dog is flawless, the birds hold and my shooting is clean.
It’s just us and it’s perfect.

– GM

Getting low

He’s running now. Bowling-ball sized chunks of rock are spilling down behind him as he races uphill. Sweat is dripping down his brow and you can read the profanity-laced tirade on his face.
This morning, he was hesitant, waiting for the birds to stop as if this was some kind of gentleman’s hunt where he wouldn’t have to break a sweat and the birds would cooperate.
Two coveys later, the thorns, cacti, brush, hills, rocks and sand have brought him to a more basic understanding of the guerilla warfare that is desert quail hunting.
Sometimes you have to run the bastards down and when they flush wild, you empty your gun at them.

– GM

Unrequited

It’s not you, it’s me…

It’s not you, it’s me.
You are great – beautiful, classy, refined – but it just wasn’t meant to be.
I knew it couldn’t last when we met. You were out of my league – unattainable. Through some bad decisions on the part of your previous owner, I lucked out and we ended up together.
What we had was beautiful, but we both knew it wasn’t forever.
Let’s just go our separate ways and cherish the time we had together.
I’ll go back to my old, lowbrow ways. You will go on to someone special.
Someone with a gunroom, and maybe a collection of leather-bound books and an apartment that smells of rich mahogany.
I wish you all the best, and I will remember you fondly…