Category: True stories

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.

– Smithhammer

In the span of eight decades on Earth, the man has seen much. World history, to be sure. But pheasant history too. He has seen the rise and fall of borrow ditch and shelter belt. He has seen the eradication of weedy fence lines and weedy row crops. He has seen the genesis of CRP and, in the next Farm Bill, its possible extinction. Pheasants have come and gone, risen and fallen, risen again, and fallen again. Each time, the peak of the curve is significantly lower than the last peak years before. He has seen fields where he hunted pheasants as a child in eastern Colorado and western Kansas turn dry and barren and fill with weeds. The rows of corn he hunted in college have sprouted condos and shopping malls. He has seen the termination of a time when one simply found a patch of good cover and started hunting and the emergence of orange-painted fence posts and red-faced farmers. The end of “go ahead and hunt” and the onset of “it’s one hundred dollars a day.” He has seen the team-drawn plow fade into rusty history and the dawn of the $100,000 combine. He has seen the birth of pesticides and herbicides and the death of many living things as the result.
For seven decades, he has been hunting these Chinese ditch parrots. He hunted the first-ever season in Colorado, shooting his single-shot 20 at everything that rose before a black pointer of mixed lineage. When he finally started hitting, Dad told him, “Okay, that’s enough. Now you can shoot only roosters.”
He doesn’t lament the fields turned under, the loss of shelter belt, the consumptive appetite of clean farming. Instead, he looks back on seventy years of pheasant hunting and says, “I’ve been lucky.”
Today, with the wind whipping off the Rocky Mountain Front, drawing tears to the eye, snot to the nose, he turns his young setter into the wind and walks the tree rows on the lee side of a 40 mile per hour blast. There’s a walking stick in the truck, just in case, but he doesn’t reach for it. Instead, he balances a Belgian Browning, bluing worn to bare steel, in a gloved hand and he follows his young girl. She points.
A pheasant rises, banks, and falls. She brings it in. Seventy years before the gun, memories like elm leaves on a west wind.