I could hear birds flushing ahead and though I couldn’t see her, I knew the young setter was gleefully chasing them off the edge of the abandoned road and watching them glide out over the 500-foot drop off to our right.
If I slowed to a walk and looked through the trees, I could probably have seen a few of the big bomber blues that hang out on this ledge nearing the end of their downhill glide.
This is part of it. Young setters will flush birds, by accident and on purpose; unintentionally and without remorse. I have learned to accept this season as a learning experience, one where I will possibly not shoot a single bird behind this dog.
So it came as a quite a surprise when I rounded the corner and found her holding an unsure point.
I stumbled up the hill to my left and when a big blue got up, it surprised up both.
I scratched it down at 15 feet, a shot so close it wouldn’t have been a stretch for me to whiff it.
The young setter raced to the bird and pounced, excited and confused. She wouldn’t pick it up, but when I put it in my vest she simply stayed with me.
We turned for the truck, my gun broken open over my shoulder, my young setter dancing along behind, wanting nothing more than another look at her first bird.
In front, the snow is a clean white page, waiting for the words to be written.
Behind, a story of a man afoot begins to unfold.
The springer quarters ahead and when I cross her track I stop to look at the prints pressed into the powder, marred around the edges when her warm furry foot pulled at the edges of the cotton-candy snow.
I move on to clean snow, a new page.
Rooster tracks emerge from the sage, their edges sharp and intact as they race along a parallel story line to intersect with the quartering tracks of a springer.
I look up from the page and quicken my pace.
Dog, snow flying, shaking sage, a whir, a cackle, a long tail streams out behind mad wing beats.
A gun shot, a shout, a retrieve, an ending.
A crimson and blue bird lies on pure white snow, a single drop of blood colors the snow near a jumble of tracks from man and beast.
The crazy part is, you don’t even have to teach them to do it.
They just know.
After all those flushing dogs, it’s hard to fathom.
When I paid the deposit, my bird-dog mentor told me, “It’s simple, just show them a lot of birds and try not to screw them up.”
A 10-week-old pup, chubby and mostly confused, sometimes unable to run across the mowed grass without tripping, freezes solid, pointing a pigeon wing hidden in the grass a few feet away.
All the technology in the known universe can’t replicate this.
This brings new meaning to the phrase “ground sluicing.”
Not that I haven’t been there. Particularly this year on chukar, where the dog can point them, but I can’t seem to close the gap before they flush.
This video, however, takes it to a new level.
The dog is on point, you can see a few skylined birds and he takes a knee?
Folds out the bipod?
And snipes them?
What planet is this filmed on?
I was out with the dog in shirtsleeves just a few days ago. Now he looks at me with a pathetic mixture of loathing and remorse when I try to coax him into the kennel in the back of the truck. He tries to squeeze into the cab as I throw my gun and vest in, and learns that “denial” ain’t just a river in Egypt.
“Buck up kid, you’ll be lying on a fluffy bed next to the stove again as soon as you find me a couple birds.”
His head cocks at the word, “birds.”
He jumps into the back and curls up in the kennel. He’s not exactly happy about it, but he’s at least realized this temporary suffering has a purpose.
Good thing for all of us to keep in touch with, I guess.
A friend of mine has a golden that barks “treed” on forest grouse. At first, I found this annoying, the high-pitched yelps of the kind that only goldens can produce and usually only when the owner is cocking an arm to rocket a tennis ball across a lawn in Suburbia, USA. I asked myself, briefly, if it were the bias I have for tennis ball dogs or just bald-ugly jealousy. Briefly.
I was hunting with one of my setters, feeling the kind of sophisticated snootiness that occasionally plagues us setter owners, the kind reserved for pipe-smokers, smoking-jacket donners, double-gun only-ies. From the dark woods to my left came the yelp. Frantic. Ear-drum-stabbing. Frequent. Fucking goldens, I stewed. At first, I thought she had been caught in a trap or hurt herself somehow and I chided my early thoughts of prejudice. Goldens are friendly, lovely dogs and certainly do not deserve pain.
Then, I heard Tim instruct one of his hunters to get in position. Northwestern Montana grouse are not known for their intellect, particularly spruce grouse which commonly fly up into the nearest tree and await the well-thrown stick before flushing for real. The end of this story goes like this: Tim threw the stick, the grouse launched out of the tree and the hunter had his first spruce grouse and the dog stopped barking because she had her mouth full of feathers.
We walked on, listening to the tinkle of the bell on my setter, sniffing the air like some snobbish cartoon character. Grudging. A few hundred more yards and the annoying golden barking came again and now Tim’s hunter had two grouse. My hunter had none. We were guiding three gentlemen from the South who wanted to experience a grouse triple: blue, spruce and ruffed. I felt a competitive ire which, when it washes over my tortured soul, makes me feel ashamed. Tim’s guys had two grouse. Sure they were spruce grouse that flew stupidly into a tree and waited like feathered statue until a stick preceded a wad of six shot. But still, he had two grouse. I had zero.
Thick woods are not my home cover. I’m a hunter of high crag where sagebrush is the tallest plant. Not a denizen of thick fern, tall larch, staggering cedar. I am of light, not darkness. Except, of course, my thoughts when I’m getting my ass kicked in the hunting game. Competition is something that sneaks into our hunting lore, no matter how we purists think it doesn’t belong there. But there it was. I was losing. Damnit.
Here in the pheasant fields of South Dakota, I had no clue that I was in the presence of a talented “tree” dog.
I was jealous. No way around it. Indeed, very jealous. My setter got some good points and grouse flushed, but they bent around trees, stooping and ducking and diving and in a forest, I had little clue where the went. My hunter had not one chance to even mount gun to shoulder. Sitting incredibly still on a spruce branch, you quickly learn just how invisible a spruce grouse can be. Which is pretty damned cloaked, frankly. As a survival tactic, very effective, actually. Perhaps these birds aren’t so bird-brained, I thought. A blind troll through the timber, grouse gone and not to be found. Unless one has a dog that barks “treed.” I didn’t.
The next day, I pulled my big male, Echo, out of the kennel instead of my veteran female from the day before. I had two hunters on this day and we headed into a cover known for ruffed grouse. I belled the dog and released him. He worked close and I watched and listened for the bell. It stopped. From somewhere off in the dark timber. Then I heard a whir of grouse wing. Followed, strangely, by panicky, high-octave yelping. In fact, an annoying yipping from deep in the woods. I thought, split-secondly, that he might have hurt himself, but there he was, looking up into a tree at a mature ruffed grouse. Holy crap, I have a pointing dog that barks treed! I told myself.
The hunter shot the grouse when I shook him out of his roost, and we pressed on. Then, hark! Another yelp from woodland interior. No fluke this. There’s a grouse in that tree. Two grouse for my hunters. Two in the bag. And ruffed grouse, I told myself, not these sesame-seed brained sprucers. Ruffed! A gentleman’s bird. Yeah, right. Whatever.
I have a dog that barks treed at treed grouse. A gentleman’s setter? Perhaps not. But we are back on level ground with the tennis ball dog. Let the competition commence.
It isn’t personal, but there are those places you keep to yourself, maybe even from your closest hunting buddies. Pocket stashes.
In part, you don’t share these because they’re an ‘ace in the hole,’ or at least you tell yourself that. Those places that are a little more out of the way, a little more under the radar, not on the usual list of spots you hit with friends. Even better if they offer a place to park out of sight. Maybe they’re even of questionable legality, and a low-key approach is best. But you didn’t hear that from me.
Of course, sometimes the irony here is that some of your co-conspirators have these same stashes. You can go along for several seasons, thinking you’re the only one that bothers with that particular marginal field or covert. And then one day you get there and find your buddies’ truck already parked. Of course, the appropriate response in this case is to leave a beer on the tailgate and move on to the next.
The other reason for having a few pocket stashes on your list is because these can be spots that are only big enough for one person and one dog. Limited spots that you might be able to cover in 20 minutes. But, this can be very productive. And some days you link these little pocket stashes together into one glorious, full day with just you and one dog.
I’ve been kicking my own butt these past few days.
Seems as if I know exactly where a few blue grouse are and they are only about 15 minutes from my house, and somehow, I haven’t found the time to go up there with a shotgun.
This past weekend, I found the grouse while horseback helping a neighbor rancher round up some recalcitrant cows and calves that were refusing to leave the high country. Stumbled right into a couple of young grouse in the Doug fir, and just at the time that I was thinking: This looks like good grouse habitat.
Spent the whole day looking at guacamole-assed cows. The next day, I started to get nervous about the coming snowfall and gathered more firewood out of the hills. The next day–and yes, it was a three-day-weekend for me–I spent another whole day at the neighboring ranch helping sort cows for preg-testing.
Then work. Here I am. At work. It’s sunny outside. Damn my hide. Sometimes, I guess, life has difficult choices.
–TR
Like the surprise that is autumn—the suddenness of things that happen while you are living it instead of watching it—I’ve found myself with a herd of old dogs. I have a college friend whose oldest child is a freshman at the university. I wonder, how did this happen? Weren’t we just drinking pitchers in our dorm room and hunting quail in the desert? How is it that time marches yet the human brain does not recognize the beat of its feet upon the tarmac?
The first dog to go was the oldest and it was his back-end. One spring morning I was out on a horseback ride with the crew, limbering up for summer coming, un-kinking winter’s sloth. We noticed old Ike was missing and rode back to find him panting beside the trail, unable to go farther. He got to ride home on the saddle. Late in the season two years ago, he hunted his last chukar cliff. We didn’t kill any birds. I felt bad for him. He’s eleven now and he totters about on pencil legs and wheezes and barks at nothing much. But he is happy. Perhaps there will be one more pheasant. He was always best at pheasants. Just yesterday, he was a pup before the gun in a Nebraska CRP field with my brother at my side . . . .
I’ve noticed it in Duke too. Duane’s dog. I got Duke when Duane left this world too early and he fit right into the mix. He runs flat out and points tail-high. He’s a good one. I remember hunting with Duane in Arizona whenever I take Duke for a zip. He spins happy circles a lot: feeding time, walking time, shotgun time. Duke is a happy dog. He sprints with the pedal-to-the-metal and can be out of your sight in a moment. Yet, if you are not careful, this nine-year-old dog that acts like he’s two will be completely gassed and gone for the day. I love old Duke, but he’s old too. Good for maybe a half-day on the chukar crags of Nevada. A half-day in the hot rising September grouse tangles.
And now Sage. She has turned a decade old. And then some. Just like my college drinking buddy’s daughter going from an infant to a college entrant, this happened overnight while I wasn’t paying attention. A little female setter with a world of drive, energy and talent. A cargo-hold full of zest and zip and blast. She’s now an old lady.
We were in the Tobacco Roots this past summer when it happened. Hiking to a lake up a steep trail, far back in the country, heading to a high mountain lake, and then even higher. Perhaps we’d do a loop trip. In a dry summer, the mountains were baked to powder and Sage faded quickly, running one moment in grouse whortleberry and winded the next minute in the August heat. Mission aborted, trip truncated. I carried her over my shoulders part of the way back to the truck. Sage is by far the most talented bird dog I have ever been around and now she’s an old lady with only half-days ahead.
Years back, I had a bird dog that ruled the skyline. I was a younger man then and I let him drink the wind. We tore it up together and I probably will never have another one quite like him, nor another moment like that. I can see him now in a North Dakota pheasant field chasing a crippled rooster. The rooster rises against the setting sun and the hard-charging male setter leaps off the ground and pulls it by its tail to the turf. After a long retrieve, the bird is at hand. That dog died tragically young; he didn’t get to be an old dog.
And now, oddly, I have three old bird dogs in my fleet, dogs with years and miles behind them. Veterans of cap rock and corn-row. They sleep now, curled in tight knots, dreaming pheasant dreams or chukar nightmares. They deserve that—a warmth of woodstove heat, a dream, a good meal and just one more hunt.
—T.R.
This story is excerpted from the author’s regular Up the Crick column which appeared in the September/October edition of Wyoming Wildlife News.
They don their breeks and sporting coats and jaunty caps, as the hired help clean and polish their Purdeys, their Grullas, their Krieghoffs.
They pay upwards of $6000 a week to re-enact a pantomine of hunting; what it has sadly become a continent away in a place that lost its wild places centuries ago, lost the bulk of its public opportunities to hunt and fish, and was left with this ritualized costume party, for the select who could afford it.
And now, in a western state that is over 60% public land, where fantastic wild bird hunting opportunities abound for anyone willing to do a little homework and put one foot in front of the other, they are paying top dollar to do this, behind a fence, for pen-raised birds instead.
The birds pile up in the hundreds, considered little more than clays with wings. But no matter – many more are released. And some, I’d like to think the smart ones, high-tail it for the property boundary, where a free and wild life await on the other side. Those that make it quickly become wily survivors, constant predation being the price they pay for freedom.
I walk a field a few hundred yards away. I hear laughter coming from the expansive porch of the lodge, carried on the breeze. My jeans mostly muddy, a trusty 16ga. pump in my hand. The shorthair locks. Spins and repositions. Locks again, amber eyes ablaze. There’s a rooster in there, on this free, CRP land, adjoining exclusivity. I can’t help but laugh my ass off. Sometimes trickle down economics actually work.
Mouthful of Feathers 