Glutton For Punishment – Page 2 – Mouthful of Feathers

Road rage

The road there sings anticipation. Dogs grumble from the shell, butts and junk sniffed, dominance decided but as tentative and thin as September ice. In the cab, laughs and Dew and miles to go. This year a new place relayed by another with “don’t tell any-damn-one caution,” a place of memories yet made and you push it, this road. It stands in your way, between you and the reason, between the dogs and the birds, in the way of the canvas that awaits your paint and your brush. So you grasp steering wheel, cradle caffeinated drink in your crotch and shovel mini mart popcorn. At the end of the road, you will work it off on canyon rim and shale.

Once in a while you find a safe and lone ranch road–“no service”–and you pull down it and stand spraddle-legged and piss on cracked gumbo and tumble-weed scrap and let the pack out to piss on each other and sniff ass and walk stiff-legged around the stranger and grouch at him. Goddamnitttttttt, c’mon, Ike. Sonafabitch. And back onto the road, slab concrete beating radial in three-quarter time. When finally you hit dirt, ten hours of truck seat imprinted on your butt, BLM map folded out in your lap, camp circled in pencil, ridges marked with “CKR,” you crack the first beer and crescendo down gravel-clay. The dogs up on all four, nose to the crack-wind coming through. Wagging, whining. The blank sheet awaits your notes, maestro.

A week later the road home. Carrying one hundred pounds of Nevada gumbo in the undercarriage. One spare flat. Rock break. Cab stale cigar and jounced beer. Feet hot and damp in two-day socks. Legs tired and complaining of the hop from gas pump to steering wheel. Dogs flat and dead out, not moving for ten hours and then only to stiff-sore piss and back to bed. No whine no grumble. Founder on Winnemucca Basque, sleep in Motel Six between pipeline workers grilling Sunday dinner on homemade grills in pickup beds. Up at 3 into a gray dawn as overcast as your mood. Heading out, heading home and the road slapping on rubber . It went too quickly, this road, and a year is a long time.

Blood and Plunder

He’s a knife-in-the-teeth type, a run-hell, fast-go, wound-tight, son-of-a-bitch, so when he yelps down by the creek—out of sight (again)—I don’t think much of it. He comes roaring back and I can see blood dripping from his ear. The cut is perhaps a quarter of an inch in length and right at the tip and not bleeding very heavily. Yet. As a horseman friend of mine would say, “It’s a long way from the heart.”

The Bloody Duke pauses only long enough to check in.

And we’re a long way from the truck. It’s 15 below zero and the pheasants are holding tight. There’s about one point five minutes of debate. We push on. If he could vote—and he can—he’d vote “aye.”

This is the way. His way. He’s pretty good at it. Full-fricking-tilt until he’s completely gassed and done. This is also the way of Western pheasant, those savage bastards of greasewood and buffaloberry, their craws stuffed with Russian olive pits, their hearts full of bitter fuck-you fire. No other bird evokes the chaos, the running pandemonium beneath the wide skies. Wild bird, of course. Feral is more apt. You hit the ground running and you need a “Katie-bar-the-door” dog. Barbwire, thorn, bur, be damned. Late season? Snow? Even more so. Those runnin’ sons-a-bitches. David Alan Coe, or perhaps it was Chris Ledoux captured it this way: “Oh, it’s forty below and I don’t give a fuck, got a heater in my truck, and I’m off to the rodeo.”

So we continue, despite the bleeding, because, darn it, the pheasants are holding tight and the injury is superficial. It is worth a repeat: the pheasants are holding tight. It’s too cold to hunt. But the pheasants are finally, for once, holding tight. This is the epic once-every-seven-years cicada hatch on the Green, for crying in a bucket. The pheasants are holding tight and you may not see this again in his lifetime. Maybe even yours. It’s too cold to hunt? Yeah, right. Unless you are a cold-hearted bastard. So, onward, blood flying from sliced ear. Hey, we’re hunting late season wild roosters. Call the ASPCA. Go ahead, call ’em.
In the whitewash of eastern Montana’s winter, he is lost quickly and then I pick him up again. The ear is bleeding freely now, and he’s frozen on point. I huff up and watch the blood dripping into the snow. He’s oblivious to anything but the smell in his nose and when the cock bird goes up and the shotgun barks, he’s on it. Hard on it. A 24-inch-tailed rooster and he retrieves, then blasts onward. I think for a moment, “Maybe I ought to do something about that ear.” But as soon as that thought enters, he’s gone again, romping into the snow, blood-be-damned, as if affirming my “long-way-from-the-heart” mantra.

By the time we get back to the truck (with three stone-dead rooster pheasants being flash-frozen by Montana December against my back), he’s a red and white setter. He looks like something out of a slasher movie, all from the flopping of an ear splattering blood everywhere, a minor cut with a major bleed. He doesn’t care, though. I tape him up as best I can, but the tape comes off and the ear bleeds more. I wrap his head and he digs into it and off comes the bandage. Screw it, he says, I’m a tough guy.
That night in the motel room, the bleeding finally stopped, he gobbles his feed, then promptly pukes it—and a wad of cocklebur and pheasant feather—up on my bed. Twice. “Get off the stage, you god-damned goof,” sings Ledoux. What an animal. Both. Or all three of us.

–TR

Bullet Points

There were long hours behind the wheel. There was more snow than we’d expected. There were roads that could have stuck our vehicle for days. Roads we turned back from. There were blown shots on what should have been easy covey flushes. There was a jaw-dropping running point by a setter that has taken her craft to the level of artistry. There was cold, biting, open country wind that leaves you feeling ragged and still slightly on edge when you finally get out of it. There were practical jokes, which some found funnier than others. There was setting up camp in the dark, in the snow. There were deep discussions about the relative virtues of one cheap beer over another. There was forgotten dog food (yours truly…). There were, at the end of 3 days with the combined effort of 3 guns and 6 dogs, half a dozen chukar in the cooler.

But then, there were also moments like this:

IMG_0333_2 — Basin and Range. Have some.

– Smithhammer

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

Chukar Recess

A scrape on my right knee, reminiscent of a ten-speed crash. A bruise on my shin, running knee-cap to ankle. Another on my ass. My shotgun has similar injuries. No matter. I’ve been playing.
I’m doing it again. Now running. She is on birds again, on the slope below, nose in the wind, working them. No doubt. Birds. Here we go boys! I skip over stone and slip on scree, and vault over cactus and long-jump small arroyos. I carry my shotgun in my right hand and sprint. She works the birds with care and expertise and still they go up out of range, no doubt spooked by the stampede of hunters to the white setter’s playground. No matter. It is good to be young again. I can’t stop giggling.

– TR

Waiting For Godot (Upland Version)

Scene:

Late October, overcast. Two hunters are conversing in an SUV, driving through CRP fields somewhere in Idaho. Though it is 35 degrees out, windows are partially rolled down in defense against persistent dog flatulence. As a result, wind turbulence fades in and out in the background throughout the conversation. Both hunters have hardly worked at all for the last month in order to devote more time to chasing birds. Hunter #2, in particular, has hunted something like the last 25 days in a row…

Curtain Rises:

Hunter #1: Talked to Q last night. She said she’s taking tomorrow off.

Hunter #2. Cool.

Hunter #1: She said she’s got some stuff to do in the morning, but it sounds like she’s psyched to hunt the rest of the day.

Hunter #2: I thought you said she was taking the day off?

Hunter #1: Yeah, I did. She’s taking the day off.

Hunter #2: But….you just said she’s going hunting.

Hunter #1: Yeah. She is. She’s taking the day off.

Hunter #2: But…how can she be taking the day off if she’s going hunting?

Hunter #1: (Turning to look at Hunter #2) What? Yeah, she’s taking the day off – taking the day off from work. She has a job.

Hunter #2: Oh….from work….taking the day off from work…gotcha.

(Scene ends with both hunters now quiet and staring ahead at the road, dangling on the precipice of self-examination. Sandhill cranes are heard in the distance.)

Curtain Closes.

– Smithhammer

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

Bag o’ birds

It’s nearly midnight and I’m too tired for a glass of scotch.
I’m kneeling over a pile of dead grouse in the garage and in the tight space, the stench of wet feathers and bird shit is overpowering.
I flash back to a moment earlier in the day when my buddy tried to spare me this late-night foray into the garage.
“Should we clean these birds,” he asked, standing in the tall grass near the truck.
I barely stopped to consider.
My mind was engulfed by miles of golden grass filled with the promise of a flush.
“Nah, let’s get them later,” I said.
It’s later.
I wish I had done this earlier.

– GM

Camp coffee

The explosion wakes me from a mostly sleepless night
Outside the frost covered hood of my sleeping bag, a raging fire burns
My companions are huddled too close to the flames, one clutching a can of Coleman fuel
It’s too cold to stay in the bag
Out into the biting cold to rummage around for the coffee pot
The excesses of the previous night are evident
A tin coffee cup is frozen to the table; a solid whiskey and coke ice cube in the bottom
Stumble to the water, bust the ice, dunk the percolator
Coffee boils over a gasoline fueled fire of wet, frozen wood
Caffein
Early morning fix
Warms the body, defrosts the brain

When the Weird Turn Pro

There is a headspace you sometimes get into on road trips. Or a headspace that I tend to get into, anyway. In this particular case, it was the pernicious result of a hangover, a couple Reese’s, a bag of cheese puffs, some strong coffee and three surreal days of seeking chukar. I was driving home, the trip behind me and the Tetons in ominous storm shroud before me, killing time by playing the game in my head of trying to explain all this to someone.

Sometimes in the midst of these hell-bent junkets, it feels like the things you see along the side of the road have been deliberately placed there to conspire against your already zoned-out, chemically-fueled, tenuous grasp on road reality. These must be documented in the event that your sanity is some day put on trial. It may be the only defense.

An entire life lived in the West, and there are times when the scale of things still screws with me. I look up at vertical caprock, trying to gauge if it’s 500′ or 1500′ above, though it really doesn’t matter – I’m going up there regardless.

An hour or three later, I’m standing on top, looking at telltale tracks in the snow, the sore legs and lack of oxygen already an afterthought as the little bastards take control of my brain, yet again.

The dog vacillates between ranging too far and alternately doing exactly what he should, still working to find that fine, triadic balance between enthusiasm and focus and teamwork. He slams on point; as dramatic as if he’d hit a brick wall at full speed, and I try to get to him before one of the parties involved breaks this fleeting impasse. Later, it’s not the bird getting up, not the passing shot, not the satisfaction of finding my mark that I will remember – it’s that deranged, amber fire in his eyes as he holds point and lets me know that we’ve found what we’re looking for. This continues to haunt me as I type; those blazing, otherworldly apertures etched into an obscure corner in the back of my brain reserved for a few indelible memories. The same eyes that now just belong to a goofy pup laying on his back with his legs in the air on my living room floor.

In the end, what would I say to the uninitiated? That I had driven over 500 miles round trip, to stay in a cheap motel, eat a lot of bad food, spend hours driving on rough two-track across tragically over-grazed former bird habitat, with but one bird in the cooler to ultimately show for it? And that for whatever twisted reason, this had fed my soul?

– Smithhammer