Author: Greg McReynolds

Water is important – I like to carry it in plastic 5 gallon containers with handy dandy built in spout. Filling up before you leave is smart. Driving 15 hours in the bitter cold with aforementioned water jugs in the shell of your truck? Not a great idea. A 5-gallon ice cube is hard to thaw, especially when it’s in a plastic tub.

Sleeping bags are important – It might be Arizona, but it still gets into the low teens at night. Leaving your sleeping bag hanging in the garage is not a great idea. Two dogs – each with a sleeping bag of their own – will share, but it’s a squeeze.

Flanken steak is awesome – My buddy took a chance on packet of pre-seasoned meat in a border grocery store. Neither of us knew what flanken steak was. Later, when the grill was hot, we discovered it is basically an off-cut of short ribs. And it’s incredible. Fresh tortillas with limes and grilled flanked steak? Yes please.

Proper fueling – Bird hunters powered by sunflower seeds and coffee can run a long time past normal expiration when there are birds somewhere ahead.

Limes – Beer, flanken steak, bagels, water, sunflower seeds… Limes. We need more limes.

Serial podcast, season two – It’s no season one, but if you’re looking at a solo 15-hour drive, I highly recommend it.

We at MOF occasionally write for other outlets and linking to some of our more MOFish content elsewhere on the web.

Here is a piece on Trout Unlimited’s website from a couple of years ago when the fight for our public lands was just ramping up.

Public lands are the symbol of the things we as a nation have managed to get right. We are a nation of explorers and adventurers. We believe in freedom and we deserve it. We need these vast public spaces to find ourselves, to journey and to test ourselves. We need these places not just as people or westerners or sportsmen, we need them as Americans. We have pioneered from the edges of space to the depths of the ocean, just as our ancestors pushed across this vast continent. The men and women who pioneered these lands, farmed and ranched and hunted and bled and died for them knew their value.

There is a MOF post over at Filson Life, along with bunch of other cool stuff. Go check it out.

I follow the dog. She noses into the cold wind and I center on her, tugging on my gloves and pulling my hat low. 

The above is a short video I took last spring of a Columbian sharp-tailed grouse. This particular bird is taking in the scene after a morning of dancing on the lek. If you listen closely, you can hear a few optimistic males still dancing in the background. 

Snow is falling outside, putting a fresh six inches atop a weeks-old layer of deep, crusty snow. My little part of Idaho has been covered up for the better part of a month. It’s the kind of snow that knocks back our local populations of huns and chukar because it covers up the food and sometimes the roosting cover as well. There are a few steep and windblown slopes that are snow free and will keep some birds going, but there is deep snow on much of the best bird country.

It’s been long enough and cold enough that I even worry a bit about pheasants and sharp-tailed grouse, though those are much hardier birds. Last week, I saw a handful of grouse graveling on the side of the highway and I took it to be a bad sign. Still, sharpies can actually burrow under the snow for food and protection and they are native to some of the toughest places you can imagine. Their range straddles the northern plains from Wisconsin to Washington state and unlike pheasants, which share some of that range, they don’t need grain crops to get by.

Technically, it’s still hunting season in Idaho; you can hunt chukar and Hungarian partridge until the end of January. But many – myself included – will hang it up for the year and let the birds alone to survive the cold and snow.

Hopefully, I’ll get out of the snow and hunt a few more days before the end of the season, but part of me is already moving on to spring and fly fishing and the sound of sharpies drumming on the leks.

There is no amount of shooting well than can make up for shooting badly over a sustained period. When your dog works her tail off for one or two points, it’s demoralizing to walk in and miss. Early this season I killed a dozen birds with only a single miss over three days, then proceeded to miss 6 out of my next 6 shots. Part of it is that I don’t shoot as much in the off season as I used to and practice helps. But for me it’s more than just a reduction in practice that has diminished my shooting consistency.

A few years back, I considered myself a pretty consistent and fair wingshot. Some of it was practice, some of it was shot selection, but mostly it was confidence. I remember the day that I started to shoot poorly. I was using a tightly choked, lightweight (tough combination) gun that I hadn’t shot much. It was shortly after I lost a 20ga O/U that had been my primary gun for years. The wind was blowing on a steep patch of sage-covered CRP above a cut grain field. I’d let my springer nose into the wind and she was really stretching her legs. She flushed a series of roosters, 7 to be exact. Each one of them would flush, turn with the wind, then rocket directly over my head.

I missed. Every single one. With both barrels. Later that day and in the following weeks, I missed some more. I piled bad shooting on on top of poor gun fit and too-tight chokes until I expected to miss.

I sold the offending gun and replaced the lost one, but the damage was done. Doubt had crept into my mind.

Last month, I hunted with my nephew. He’s 17 and the world is his oyster. We’ve hunted a few falls together and it’s been fun to watch him grow into a competent and confident woodsman. It wasn’t that long ago that I could walk away from him without trying but those days are gone. He’s at an age where he can hunt all day at an elevation he is not accustomed to and still leave me in the dust when a dog goes on point. He is also at the age where it does not cross his mind to miss.

We hunted one day in the howling wind, following a line of cottonwoods up a narrow drainage. I could see the white setter pointing maybe 200 yards ahead in the grass about 20 yards out from the tree line. Before I even had time to yell, the rooster got nervous and jumped wild. He turned with the wind and bombed the hill using the trees as a course guide. He flew directly at us, right at treetop level maybe 60 feet in the air with a steep glide path and a 20-mph tailwind.

I never closed my gun or even lifted it from where it rested open across my shoulder, knowing from the moment it flushed that I wouldn’t hit it. My nephew, slightly to my right and downhill, fired an ounce of number 6 and knocked it from the air. It sailed 50 yards past him and hit the ground like a bowling ball dropped from a rooftop. Over the couple of days we hunted birds, I only saw him miss once. It never occurred to him that he could miss; so he didn’t.

For a long time, it never occurred to me to miss either. When I was shooting well, I never thought about lead or if I was swinging or pushing or pulling through or anything else. I just raised the gun and shot the bird.

Now there are days when I think about missing, and so I do.

I placed what I thought was a pretty normal order at the taqueria. Two chile rellanos, two soft chicken tacos, two fajita tacos, six bean-and-cheese tacos and one iced tea, to go.

The kid behind the counter looked up from his notepad and asked, “Is anyone else with you?”

I could have explained that I was hungry, had a long drive across four states ahead of me and knew it would be a while before I ran into an excellent taco again.

But earlier in the day, I’d found a cactus man in the desert. I’d seen some weird shit in New Mexico and I didn’t feel like I needed to explain myself.

So I handed over the cash and replied, “No.”

I wonder if cactus man gets quizzed about his taco addiction?

From our friend Josh Duplechian…

The old girl keeps plugging along, slow and steady. This wing-tipped rooster made the mistake of trying to hide instead of run. At a dead run in the thin grass he might have slipped away, but even now there is no hiding from her nose.

As I type, hordes of angry labradoodle owners are besieging the walled compound where I store my collection of Stetsons, my wardrobe full of Wranglers and my motor pool of Chevy C-20’s. Since I penned “Posers” and posted the classy response “Hardasses” from This Long Haul’s Kyle Smith, I have heard from several of the MOF faithful writing in passionate defense of fanny packs, pen-raised birds, 7-shot autoloaders, 40-inch tires, soap-on-a rope, wiener dogs, and a host of other objects or animals that I haven’t yet had a chance to offend yet (have no fear, I’ll get there.)