Talegate – Page 22 – Mouthful of Feathers

Pony Luck

I can’t believe my luck. I came up to the bar for one drink–a gin and tonic, naturally–and left with $2,000 damage to my car.
The Pony Bar. The world famous Pony Bar, Pony, Montana. My bar. Three miles up the road from the ranch. “Come on up for one drink,” a neighbor texted. It was a Thursday night and my other neighbor was slinging swill at the bar. What the hell, I thought.
When I got there the bar was full of cowboys and ranchers. Neighbors. They were well in. Shots and beers. Then they all piled into their pickups. I was mid-sentence in some lame story: Crunch!!!
My car, parked across the street, met the rear bumper of a ranch pickup.
And the biggest landowner in Madison County met the biggest bird hunter in Madison County. If I’m not the luckiest son of a gun in Montana, I don’t know who is. Good luck in Pony, Montucky.

Next season: “Um, hey Bob, this is Tom. Do you mind if I take my setters out for a spin on that chunk of ground up behind my house? I’ve seen some huns up there.”

Damn, if I’m not the luckiest guy in the whole bird hunting world.

IMGP2744 — Ponies and ranchers and bird hunters all gather at the Pony Bar in Pony, Montana.

The Winter of Our Discontent

It is a poor substitute, to say the least. We go through the motions – I make him sit and hold while I go hide the dummy in the brush, make him wait till I return to his side, release him with a ‘fetch’ command. At this, he explodes, his hard-wired enthusiasm escaping in high-pitched barks as he charges toward the location.

He drops it at my feet and sits. He will do this with me all day, if I have the stamina – his, on the other hand, is not in question.

But there is no rich panoply of smells typical of an October day in pursuit of wild birds. We are not riding currents of air and ground scent, not feeling the same, simultaneous explosion in our hearts at a bird that launches skyward, not savoring the sharp tang of a spent shell carried on the breeze. There is only a feeble smell of rubber and plastic, the familiar heft of something bird-like in shape and weight. Something that, for reasons he probably can’t understand, is not a bird.

I feel cheap. I feel like I owe him a lot more. I feel like I’m trying to explain sex to my son, and I just copped out and bought him a blow-up doll instead.

But it is March and the snow continues to fall and another season is so goddam far away that I have no choice but to focus on more immediate distractions and put the thought of it out of my head. I imagine that his approach is not much different.

He drops the dummy at my feet.

Prickly

It is the beginning of the longest season and temper flares now and then like bursts of gas refinery burn-off. Prickly. Irritable. Sloth. No long walks with dog and gun. Those are far ahead. Too far ahead. Irritable itch. We’ll get through. Somehow. Somehow. Some way.

I think.

–TR

Avocation

A bird scented.
The world compressed into a moment of single moment of sure as hell, not-a-second of doubt this-is-what-I-do confidence.
All is as it should be.
To be a dog in tall grass…

Week-old chukar

It was a romantic dinner. Candlelight. A fire crackling in the woodstove, splashing orange shadows on the walls of the old ranch house. A decent Malbec. Some tunes.
And chukar. Sauteed in olive oil with an excellent mild curry paste added on low-simmer. Red peppers, cloves of garlic, slivers of sweet onion. Served on a bed of rice. Delicious white, wild meat, spiced just right. A most successful evening.
A week later, my old die-hard bachelor habits resurface. I dig in the refrigerator, find the remnants of that spectacular meal. I’d sent half home with my lady and she prudently ate it the very next day for lunch. My half I forgot about and now, like a treasure discovered at a garage sale, it resurfaces. Eureka! I’m not shoveling in microwave popcorn after all.
When was that meal anyway? I wonder, asking my canine friends. They don’t remember. Surely this has still got to be good, right? They agree. Offer to eat it for me.
Without female wisdom this night to guide me, I dive in.
I can put it on a tort! Melt some cheese! Dab a little Indian hot relish to top it off!

And so I do. And it turns out well. Nearly as delicious as the first time, with only the lovely company lacking.
Two hours later, a rumble. Hark! What was that? Distant thunder. A crack of gastric lightning! Silence rent with a sound much like a stepped-on frog. From under. Fumunder. What?! I’m tore up. Battered in a bile hailstorm!
I sprint from bedroom to bath and fling porcelain out of my way. An explosion! Then silence. A thunderclap!! Another! What?!
Two hours later, I shiver and sweat in bed, timidly sipping water, awaiting the next distant rumble and thinking: Goddamndable chukar partridge. Even in the off-season, they win. Little bastards.

Rain

They were waiting for the rain, but the rains came late.
Instead of wetting the ground and bringing shoots and bugs and cover that just hatched quail so badly need, the monsoon came when the chicks were on the ground.

The rain came in a torrent, mixed in equal parts with hail and sleet, hammering down on the desert. While the succulents drank it in, the quail were victims of its fury. Innocents swept away by the very thing they so badly needed. Add in years of drought, exacerbated by overgrazing and it’s tough times for New Mexico’s uplands.
Low survival rates mean few birds, scattered widely across the desert in small bunches. These are not the easy birds of wet years. There are no lay ups now.
These birds have been hunted, by man and beast.
At the flush, they go low and fast. Bird, tree, bird, nothing.
No shot, just a quiet curse for myself. On a day like this one, in a year like this one, the opportunities are few and far between.
The dog is exuberant and I laugh at how much energy she regains from her success at finding a single.
“Go on,” I shout at the scalie, rocketing downhill out of sight. That bird is a survivor. A worthy sire for another year’s covey.
It’s been three months of quail hunters, hawks, coyotes, bobcats, skunks and foxes.
Now the season is done.
The men and dogs are gone from the fields.
Time to dodge the raptors and predators and wait for the rain.
The dog and will I settle in and wait for Nov. 15.
For them, it’s merely another chapter in a long dry spell.
They wait for the rain.

Not Today

Opening weekend. This is my place, goddamnit. My name may not be on the deed, it may even say “public” on the sign, but it’s mine nonetheless. I’ve purchased it with the coin of time and sweat and shoe leather and blistered skin. And I sure as hell don’t want to share it.

Yet here they are, the bastards. Rich ones in their new trucks pulling shiny trailers. Poor ones in rustbuckets with plywood boxes thrown in the bed. And all of them – regardless of social class – here to take what’s mine; what I thought I was jealously guarding by keeping my big mouth shut. Self-delusion: I was born to it.

I drive around the area – my area – and the license plates read like a litany of the dead for what used to be bird country: Alabama. South Carolina. North Carolina. Tennessee. Florida. Kentucky. Virginia. Georgia. Arkansas. Louisiana. Mississippi. The In-state-but-out-of-towners. The Mongol hordes of landless Texans. And me.

I want to hate them all for being here, for fucking up my little set-piece dream of solitude and birds and the pup and me and not another living soul under this brilliant bowl of sky. But of course I can’t. Because they are me. He is us. Not enemy, but kindred seekers trying to sate the desperate hunger for a moment when sky and birds and dogs converge into an instant of pure meaning.

And how can I begrudge my kindred their quest for such validation of existence? I can’t. So my little set-piece dream is returned from whence it came, shoved back in the mental file labeled “unfulfilled.” I load up the pup and drive home. There will be no solitude, no magic and no first point this day. Today belongs to others. And as road dust obscures the receding prairie in my rearview mirror, I must convince myself once again.

I don’t begrudge them. Really, I don’t begrudge them. But you can bet your ass I’m gonna beat those kindred sonsabitches out here next weekend.

– CL

A Texas Quail Hunter’s Haiku

Today is the end
The quail season that wasn’t
The drought lingers on

Home

Wind wedges its way between the boards, slowly deconstructing at a pace that could only be observed via time lapse imagery. A place where the roof was repaired with scrap tin lifts up, levitates for a few moments, and slams down in the breeze like a bad combover. Shards of glass and porcelain and square head nails and the remnants of a kettle litter the yard.

Was it a family that lived here? Did children grow up and fertilize their foundational memories in this eastern Idaho soil, sweating through hot, dry summers, shouldering the bitter winters with tough, rural stoicism? Did the children continue to think about the imprint of this place as they got on with their lives elsewhere?

Was it all harsh, toil and drudgery, or were there days when you could take in that view and feel the heart lift a bit from what was no doubt not an easy life?

Did they sometimes take an evening to stroll these fields in search of a few grouse for dinner, as I’m doing now? Did they venture into the high country not far from here in hopes of an elk to fill the winter larder?

These thoughts swirl around as my attention from the task at hand wanders and I explore the old house, testament to the existence of ghosts. But then I hear barking far in the distance, and a young GSP, who likely held a point as long as a revved-up two-year old pointer possibly can, is trying to leap in the air at three flushed sharpies, and he’s barking at me as much as he is at them, and rightly so.

Wall tents

In the age of high-tech fabrics and two-man tents that require you to spoon your hunting dog and leave your boots out in the rain, I had a revelation.
Wall tents are awesome.
The Romans knew it. And the Souix, the Vikings, the gold rush miners, the military, the Bedouin…
You can stand up. Room for the dog? Hell, there’s room for the dog and her kennel. Not to mention chairs, gear and that holiest of holy, a stove.

Yes, it weighs 60 lbs and no, it will not replace my dog spooning, ultralight, no-room-for-boots backcountry excursion tent.
It will however, keep me out of bed-bug infested hotel rooms where you can play “what’s that shape” with the stains on the sheets.
I don’t like hotels. I often don’t sleep very well in them and if it’s warm, I prefer a bedroll near the truck off some Forest Service Rd.
Of course, late season bird hunting and frigid, wet weather can sometimes mean cheap hotels. Not that I mind that they’re cheap. I like that part.
It’s the smell of stale smoke and mildew and lingering doubts that anything has recently been washed that makes it tough.
I stayed in a hotel a month back and as my dog surveyed a donkey-shaped area of discolored carpet, I wondered, “was DDT really that bad?”
Enter the wall tent.
It’s warm, roomy and comfortable and it is really no different from the tents used for hundreds of years by outdoorsmen of all sorts.
In the age of polypro, Gore-tex, nylon, pop-up campers and ultralight dome tents, it’s good to know that you can’t really improve on 10oz treated canvas.
That’s to centuries-old technology, I have a base camp. It’s dry and warm, free of bedbugs and since it’s mine, I can be sure there was never a burro massacred inside.