Category: Surviving the off season

Batten Down the Hatches

I saw a quail last week.

Big whup, Tosh, you live in Texas.

You’re right, but it was the quail’s location within Texas that threw me into an extended ponder.

It was a single hen bobwhite, and she was standing in a little sandy patch next to the road. She looked healthy, and when she scurried into the grass I waited to see if she had chicks or a mate. It’s nesting season, you know.

Turns out she was single. A single bobwhite hen on Mustang Island, Texas. A single bobwhite hen standing next to the main beach road in Port Aransas. Sure, she had the dune grasses for cover, and I’ve seen wild coveys, before on the Texas barrier islands. But not here; not twenty yards from the surf and in the middle of town. I’ve never seen a quail mingling with the sunburned land whales, and the yowling rednecks, and the Natty cans, and the empty Funyon bags, and the cigarette butts, and the saggy-pants Latinos. A seagull can swallow a jumbo shrimp on a treble hook in one try; a quail chick wouldn’t stand a chance, for chrissakes.

Bobwhites are resolute little critters, and given a bit of fortune I suppose she could pair and mate and pull off a clutch in the midst of all that humanoid flotsam.

No fortune came her way, though. Hurricane Alex roared in the next afternoon, and the spot where I saw the little wayward hen got four feet of tide, sixty knot winds, and five inches of rain.

There’s a real estate office in Port Aransas that schlepps rusted-out condos and moldy beach houses. Their sign out front speaks that age-old axiom of real estate success.

Location. Location. Location.

– TB

The MOF Whiskey Review

Matt Crawford:

I love Redbreast Irish Whiskey for a few reasons:

* It’s immensely “flaskable.”
* You can drink it in coffee, too
* You can call it Scotch and piss off the Scotch snobs

Greg McReynolds:

Famous Grouse

A better bargain-priced, blended scotch you will not find.
The grouse is ideal for drinking when it’s raining, especially while surfing gunbroker.com or reading the greatest American novel ever written.
I was drinking it when I met my wife, so it’s pretty classy to boot.
Plus, it’s named after the king of gamebirds.

Tosh Brown:
If we are truly products of our respective environs, then that pretty much makes me a beer swiller. It’s hot where I live, and I rarely find the need to pull warmth from a bottle.
But, if I had to pick a favorite distilled product, it would have to be a Macallan single malt. A buddy gives me a bottle for Christmas each year, and I usually try to make it last until the next one arrives. I suppose owning a bottle of pricey scotch could spawn guesses that I might be more of a highbrow “Scotch Snob” than I appear. That’s why I make a point of leaving the red bow and the gift card attached.

Bruce Smithhammer:
I’ll admit to enjoying the occasional bottle of Laphroaig, if only because how often do you get the opportunity to simulate falling face down in a peat bog and not being able to get up?
I also used to dabble in the Irish Whiskeys, until an evil voice at the bottom of a bottle of Jameson’s whispered in my ear that 2nd story balcony railings are great places to dance. Surgery and 6 screws in my ankle later, I have an immense amount of respect, mixed with fear, for residents of the Emerald Isle.
But lately my tastes have gone firmly in the Highland direction, and I can’t get enough of the fine products emanating from the Glenmorangie distillery, even when I’ve been repeatedly told that I’ve had, “more than enough.”

Blood lust

I’m going to admit to a blood lust. I like to kill and I love to hate.
But only one thing in particular: starlings. Stinking, shitting, filthy starlings.
I stalk them in my bathrobe. They flutter and twitter about the eaves of my home and crap all over my porch. They tweet in nails-on-chalkboard tones while I sip my morning coffee and I slip up on them with a twenty and blast them while they sit. Sometimes I get out the twelve . . . really whatever is handy. The twelve sits upstairs where I can load fast and shoot from an open window. The twenty by the sliding glass door downstairs. It is work done in slippers on the front lawn, robe flapping. It’s good not to have neighbors.
A challenging wingshot, but I will take whatever shot there is. The dogs twist in circles, mistaking an uncased gun and a creeping owner for September partridge steppes. Little matter, for when I fell one of the stink birds with a load of sixes, they rush in and fetch, only to spit the mangled bird out.
I kill the parents first and then get a ladder out and pull four screeching nestlings out to drown in the creek while the setters dance happily.
A fella has got to do something with summer.

TR

There is little dignity for a bird dog posing next to a starling, but such is the off-season.

Expeditions in the city limits

I surreptitiously scan the rim, then the fence, looking for anyone with a badge, ticket book or binoculars. Seeing no one, I reach down and slip the leash from her head. She’s still waiting.
“Let’s hunt,” I tell her. There’s no whistle today and she rockets past the big white sign and its list of rules (No glass bottles. Dogs must be leashed. No hunting…) before she checks back. I hike up near the escarpment coiled leash in hand.
She knows there won’t be hups or yells, so she’s watching closely and only takes a few tenative steps after the big old jack she jumps.
Then she tightens her swing and I know they’re close even before I hear them. It’s a pair and when she puts them in the air, they stay low and only fly 50 yards or so before landing in a shallow wash not far from another sign listing the rules. Breathlessly happy, she comes to heel and I slip the leash over her head.
These are fat quail, gambels and scalies that thrive on sprinkler water and bird feeders before heading back to the basalt and cacti to hunker down at night. Like the patch of open space they inhabit on the fringes of the city, they straddle two worlds.
They shouldn’t be here. According to the big white sign, neither should we.

GM

Snakes in the grass

The solstice is weeks away, but the heat has arrived in New Mexico and the prairie rattlers are sun bathing. This guy was hanging out not far from my house last week. It may be the Hopi rattlesnake sub-species, but I’m no herpetologist and that’s only a guess.

It’s time to step carefully and keep the dog on a short rein.

GM

Materials

So little of what we’re left with at the end of the upland season is tangible. Sure, there are guns to clean, maybe some birds still left in the freezer (though I rarely show that much self-discipline), and inevitably, finding new ways to try and occupy highly-energetic four-legged athletes. Ultimately, though, most of it will live on only in memory.

But then there are these feathers laying in front of me on the tying table. Ruffed grouse. Sharptail. Pheasant. These aren’t detached, consumable products in neatly-labeled plastic bags purchased from the fly store, packaged and shipped from Dog Knows Where – these came from birds my dog and I worked hard to find, birds I caused to drop from the sky, birds that, well, to be totally honest, he only sometimes half-heartedly retrieved in that way that so many pointers do who can’t be bothered with such mundane tasks, tearing off already to find the next holding covey instead.

These feathers sit in front of me on the table now, haphazardly strewn about amongst threads, tinsels, furs, tying tools, in a system of highly-subjective organization that others would likely call a mess; raw material from which I hope something useful will eventually emerge. The flies that will come of these feathers will occupy a special place, if not in my fly box, then at least in my mind, easily recognizable as different than those commercially tied by others in Sri Lanka or the Phillipines from materials of mysterious origin.

And when I remove that ragged, grouse bedecked fly from the cutthroat’s mouth, and release it back into that little creek high up in the newly melted alpine, I’ll flash back to that day last October when I was up to my knees in mud, shotgun in hand, trying in vain to keep up with a dog tracing currents of bird scent across a sweeping landscape, pulled along by compulsions I’ve never fully understood or bothered to explore; satisfied instead by knowing that not doing these things would cause a slow withering of my soul, which is simply not an option.

– Smithhammer

Outside apps

A couple of weeks ago the guy in front of me at the grocery store was paying for his sixer in change and I was browsing the magazine rack when I came across a quarterly publication called iPhone Life.
There is a magazine ($6.99) that is dedicated to the iPhone? And it’s in its second year of publishing?
I’m sure I don’t have to mention that there were no outdoor magazines on the rack. Not even a copy of National Geographic.
Not a single periodical relating something of the human experience, or any experience. Just celebrity gossip and a magazine dedicated to a cellphone.
This news so disturbed me that when I got home, I went to said rag’s Web site.
The lead post on the Web site was titled “Why I Bought My Kids iPhones.”
The post starts out, “My kids are not spoiled (well, maybe a little bit), I bought them iPhones for economic reasons. Let me explain. The cost of a new Nintendo or Sony PSP is…”
My kids aren’t old enough to want anything other than milk and attention, but it seems to me that buying kids an iPhone might be counter productive to being a kid.
A phone is a tool. Hell, I have a Blackberry and I’ll be the first to admit that it makes my job easier and me more productive. Still,

I don’t want my kids to start obsessively checking their e-mail until someone is paying them to.
Much like a shotgun, it’s nothing more than a means to an end. I love shotguns, but the reason I buy them is the high lonesome country that I visit with them in hand.
The existence of iPhone Life suggests to me that some people might think their iPhone is actually part of their life or that it somehow matters what kind of phone you have or what you can do with it.
All this tells me that there are a lot of people who don’t spend enough time outside in the company of a good dog.

Gear season

The upland season is fading the rearview, sheds haven’t fallen and turkey and fishing season are not yet on the horizon. That makes it covetousness season.
Time to sort through mud-filled shotgun hulls and scrape bloody feathers off unfired shells.
Time to finally rinse out that dingy water bottle the dog and I shared for the second half of the season.
Maybe sharpen a few knives and relace some boots.
Mostly though, it’s time to browse the catalogues and covet things I do not need and cannot afford.
For example, the CSMC A10 shotgun.

I have no need for a sidelock stack barrel, but I have been looking longingly at used Beretta S2s for years.

Now, along comes an American made gun with hand detachable sidelocks for about what I would pay for a used S2.
Do I need a straight stocked 20 guage sidelock with case coloring and an extra set of 28 guage barrels?
Maybe not during the quail season, but right now?
Absolutely.

– GM

Mouse hunting

The setter people entertain themselves these days by mouse hunting. We take our daily walks on the bench above the home place now in the light of spring, not the dark of winter. North Willow Creek is still fairly clear, but it is coming up and will be over the banks in a few weeks. The ice has abandoned its shoulders. The geese are hooked up and flying in pairs. Mallards jump from the ponds beneath the high ditch and yesterday, I thought I heard the first sandhill of the season.

The classic hard point with two honoring.

My thoughts trend to fishing now and a new six weight in the quiver and a section of the Missouri I haven’t fished yet. Screwing around with a spey rod, as if I need another hobby. Reminds me of when I transitioned to tele from downhill skiing. More crap to buy, more gear. I rounded out the fly rod collection this spring and have a whole box full of articulated streamers.

Hunting is off somewhere on a far rim and if I follow the Solstice Rule–no conversations about hunting are allowed until the days start getting shorter–then I can’t even talk about it. We invented the Solstice Rule to avoid the pain of not hunting, but it really is poor salve for such.

And yet, the major trips are already blocked out for the fall: up to the Front the first week of September, down to Arizona (they are getting a lot of quail rain this spring) in December, Nevada chukar in late October . . . . But now I’m hunting big rainbows and browns and planning summer pack trips. The other day a lady friend and I rode the horses to the Pony Bar and flushed two sets of paired-up Huns on the neighbor’s ranch. I have permission to hunt there. I tried to not think about that–that time so distant.

The finest mouse hunter in all the Realm.

And so, sandhills and trumpeter swans and Candada geese and red-winged blackbirds. The guns are cleaned and gun-safed and the only shooting I’m doing is my .45 Kimber auto at targets. For fun. For something that goes bang. Kind of like how a brown hits a hopper. The smell of sap rises in the cottonwoods and there’s a drift scent of beefsteak sizzling over the alder coals of the season’s first barbecue. It’s gin and tonic season. Spritzer season. I’ll survive.

The setter people? Mouse hunting and chewing on the legs of winter killed whitetails. Damned carnivores.

–TR