Author: Greg McReynolds

I’ll be leaving in the fall

For your consideration, I submit a potential new anthem for upland hunters, The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man on Earth.
It’s not really about hunting, but it’s a stunning song off a great album.

The opening verse and chorus goes;

There is a crow moon comin’ in well you keep looking out
It is the hollow month of March now sweeping in
Let’s watch phenomenon’s that rise out of the darkness now
Within the light she is my storming heroin
And old machine’s abandoned by the ancient racists and
I hear them hummin’ down below and hollow earth
Oh hell I guess I know no while I will go under to
But just for now I let the spring and storm return

I left my heart to the wild hunt a-comin
I live until the call
And I plan to be forgotten when I’m gone
Yes I’ll be leavin’ in the fall

Check it out Wild Hunt

Better days

Sometimes, they let us down.
At the end of a season, half-a-dozen years in, you expert a certain level of professionalism.

Mostly you get it.
Then there are the days like Thursday. Her blood was up. After a series of birds, we got into some chest-high sage where she was tough to see. I lost sight of her and when I saw a bird get up 100 yards ahead I realized how far ahead she was. I tried to reign her in.
To no avail.
Though I couldn’t see her, I could see birds getting up in twos and threes well out of range. While I shouted frantically.
I’ve used my whistle sparingly this season. Thursday, I didn’t even have it.
I’ve just expected her to do what she needs to do.
Thursday I regretted not just the lack of the whistle, but the lack of a training collar.
She let me down.
It took me a few days and a couple of trips to get over it. But she got back to center, I think she noticed the lack of shots or dead birds.
And I remembered the times I’ve let her down, with lousy shooting, or work, or poor planning or a million other excuses.
She’s far from perfect, but so am I.
So we hunt on and we hope to be better.

This is it

I hang a left at the stop sign and skid sideways in a little November fishtail.
Visibility is down to beer-can-chucking distance. I aim for the tire tracks in the snow and goose it before I get run down by one of the potato trucks that frequent this road.
The dog is panting in the front seat and the windshield is fogged to hell. I take a swipe and knock a pile of maps farther down the dash to clear the vent over the wheel. A circle clears in the dog-drool windshield fog, but it’s snowing so hard that my sight distance isn’t much improved.
On this, the last day of pheasant season in eastern Idaho, I could not have asked for finer weather.
“They’ll be holding in this,” I tell the dog, though I’m sure she already knows.
It’s been a late winter and we’ve hunted most of the fall in a t-shirt. We’ve seen the flushes get longer and we shouted at the TV weather report more than once about the lack of snow.
The storm was supposed to arrive this evening, but like a little last-day miracle it was hammering down snow by mid-morning.
We throw caution to the wind and knock on doors that have not been fruitful before. We figure it’s the last day and not many will hunt in this.
A farmer wearing house slippers answers at the first house.
“Sure,” he says, adding that we’re free to hunt another section not visible from the road.
A month ago, he was less free with the use of his irrigation ditches.
In ten months I’ll wonder what was different about today and if I might be able sweet talk him in October. But at this moment, why doesn’t matter, we’re hunting new ground.
The wet snow makes it through the waterproof layer and soaks me up to my belt before we’re out of sight of the truck.
It’s all I can do not to whoop. The dog works a tight quartering pattern with a little extra zip in her step and I talk to her as if she understands english or even cares what I have to say.
I’m feeling so good that my spirit is not one bit diminished when we get back to the truck without a flush. It’s early, barely lunchtime. I know we’ll find them. I know that at some point during the day, the dog will work a bit of magic and lead me into birds bedded in deep grass under two inches of snow.
When they flush, I’ll have time to examine the turquoise feathers on their shoulders as they rise to my gun.
The day will be fleeting, but the moments will linger. In the heat of July, it will be this afternoon that I think back to.
At season’s end the remaining hours stretch on before us, filled with promise.
GM

Pre-chewed

I waved at them as the drove past.
It seemed like the neighborly thing to do. I was hunting a narrow patch of public ground edged by a gravel road, they were cruising the road in their orange getups on a similar quest for ditch parrots.
When they jumped out of the truck a few hundred yards in front of me to hunt a prime patch of Russian olive I was obviously headed toward I felt a hell of a lot less like waving anything but my middle finger.
What kind of road hunting scum bags would cut in front of a hunter, park in the middle of a road, jump out and hunt a 50 yard patch of cover, then slam the doors and speed away?
The kind of guys who would wave as they drove past you knowing they were about to screw you, I guess.
I’m not sure if they saw any birds, but I know they didn’t fire a shot.
A few minutes later and 75 yards short of that sweet but now pre-chewed patch of cover, the dog put up three birds and I shot my first double of the season.
Justice is sweet.
If I see those guys again I’ll be sure to wave.

Less than ideal

This is not the cover photo from a $9 upland hunting magazine.
Red, high-brass 12 gauge hulls litter the ground, always three together – as in BANG, BANG, BANG.
There are no Land Cruisers or Range Rovers parked in golden fields.
Just tall sage, Russian olive and the broken fence lines that litter this patch of BLM conveniently surround by private (and inaccessible) ground that doesn’t suck.
These public-land roosters have been chased by every labradoodle and aussie-cocker cross in four counties and fired on by snipers, road hunters and ground sluicers.
So when the dog goes into high gear and I know there’s a bird close, I look ahead just in time to see him slip away from the fence line into the sage 60 yards ahead.
I leave the dog to her business, working his trail up the fence while I head farther out into the sage on my right at an angle hoping to cut him off.
The dog puts up another rooster that held a little longer. He swings off to the left and I’m so behind that I never even take the shot.
I click the safety back on and as I start forward, I see the dog working back toward me. Just as I realize the first bird has cut back towards us, he gets up behind me.
I fire twice on a bad shot, miss the first but manage to clip him the second time.
He goes down and hits the ground running. I can’t see him through the sage, but I can hear the jingle of Roxy’s collar as she runs him down.
She brings him back with nothing but a broken wing.
Near a pile of beer cans and empty 12 gauge hulls I take the long-tailed, crimson bird from her mouth and wring his neck.
There are few niceties here.
This is a battlefield.

We’re coming for you

I packed the dry box already.
A month from now, the bottom will be filled with empty hulls, spilled dog food and an indiscernible assortment of shotgun shells, granola bars, trash, mud, blood and feathers.
Now though, it’s neatly packed with organized boxes of labeled shells and dog supplies.
Meanwhile, the dog and I are aching to hunt. We took a walk early this morning. We jumped a fork-horn bull and saw the remains of a fox-killed ruffie. We savored the cool air of early morning, pretending that it wouldn’t hit 98 as the sun fell from its apex.
On the walk back to the truck, the dew fall glistened on the still-green grass in the high country. The promise of a flush and a fleeting shot against an aspen-filled backdrop are no longer idle thoughts of summer, they are valid mental exercises.
Before leaving, I turned back and looked across the hillside.
For the first time in an equinox, it wasn’t a look of longing.
I loaded the dog in her box and said softly to the unseen birds, “We’re coming for you.”

A hunting song

There aren’t a hell of a lot of hunting themed songs out there. Even in the catalogs of the less-than-famous troubadours of rural America that I prefer, hunting is a topic not often broached.

One of my favorite fall disks is Adam Carroll’s Lookin Out the Screen Door.

There’s a tune on that disk that might just be the best bird-hunting song I’ve ever heard. Of course, it’s not really about bird hunting at all. But I like it anyway.

It’s called Errol’s Song and it’s one of my favorite pieces of musical poetry.

Selected lyrics from Errol’s Song, by Adam Carroll

There’s coffee and biscuits on the stove in the kitchen
There’s a crack in the ceiling and a screened in front door
And as the fog starts to settle on the banks of Lake Arthur
I can still taste the whiskey from the night just before
It’s the Crown Royal whiskey from the night just before

And it’s hard to get up at five in the morning
Put your guns, put your shells, put your wine in a sack
We look like some militia in our boots and our camo
With a bird dog named Milo, he’s asleep in the back

He held my hand when my boots got too heavy
With the mud from the rice fields coming to my behind
We set out the decoys in the dark on the levy
And we walked through the graveyard of the rusted combines

Of course, there are other hunting songs. Ted Nugent has written more than a few, but personally I think Ted Nugent is a douchebag and a poser who’s bad for hunting. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to Damn Yankees (it was the 80’s after all.) But the fact remains, Nugent hunts over bait and inside high fences.

As far as I’m concerned that makes him an asshole of the highest order, not fit to talk about hunting much less sing about it.

We could use a musical ambassador for hunting, I nominate Adam Carroll solely on the basis of Errol’s Song, but I’m willing to consider others if you got ’em.