There is, in the hunter’s heart, a conflict that builds as the season descends. It is a conflict fed by many things: the state of canine, the state of the freezer, the need to expand the “rolodex” of place, and even the very date and timing of the hunt itself. Go where you have gone before and know there will be birds, or go where you’ve never gone but think there should be birds?

Each of these elements of conflict is driven by its own nuance as well. The state of canine, for instance, can be the age of the dog (old and last hunt or new and first hunt), how tightly wound the veteran who hasn’t been hunted in months is, and, sometimes, sadly, the health of said best friend. You’d like to put the new pup on her first birds, or if you’ve got an old timer, put him on his last birds. Or maybe you just want to find a new place to go because the old tried-and-true got discovered.
Idaho’s grouse season opened on August 30 and Greg and I had penciled a trip on the books months before. Pencil because with busy lives, sometimes the eraser comes out. We each did our best to erase and reschedule, but we each, separately, resisted the other’s attempts to bail. We actually pulled it off.
We’d seen “grousey” looking country on the Idaho/Montana line exactly midway between our two homes and talked often about that ground. Never been there, either of us. Knew some folks who lived in the area, but felt uncomfortable just cold-calling and asking to be put into their home cover. Kind of like calling up and saying, “Hey, mind if I take your wife out for dinner?”
So we used our decades of mountain grouse experience, a few good maps and a summer scouting trip and just went. Didn’t see shit. Well, actually did. Walked all morning long, didn’t see a bird. Saw some bird poop and had a false point and discovered enough to go back. We semi-sated our canine needs by each running pups whose age is measured in months, not years, then pivoted to the veterans. Got the dogs out is about all you can say about that. Saw some pretty country, a new place.
Saturday on Labor Day weekend, Montana’s grouse season opened up. Worst possible opening day ever.  Jason and I coyoted out Friday night at the for-sure-always-see-birds place. It has been discovered. By the time we were half way up the mountain in barely-shooting-light, the parking lot had five other vehicles and two more were bouncing in on the two-track. I already had a Hun in the game vest, and we were well ahead of them, so it didn’t really matter, but it was still a bummer to know that someone else had discovered a place we’d been hunting for years. Probably bummed them out too to see someone up the mountain while they were still pulling on their boots and maybe it was a place they had been hunting for years and just as much “theirs” as “ours.” Was running the veteran this time because it had been a long summer for her and for me without a whole lot of fun and the freezer was empty of both grouse and Huns. We filled it a bit and came down the mountain with that heavy, humbling, good weight in the back of the bird vest.
On Wednesday, my friend Tom Hanson, who is one of the crack employees for the great upland program at Orvis, and I got together for another hunt. Tom had never killed a western grouse, so getting one or two for him was my top priority. Problem is, he’s a busy guy. Just like everyone else. He had to be in Great Falls early that evening and Great Falls is a long way from my home ground and unknown territory. So I called another buddy, one that I knew I could impose upon, and asked for a general direction. He gave me one, like all good buddies would, and off Tom and I went, hunting in the cool of the morning with the Rocky Mountain Front over our shoulders. If nothing else, it was one hell of a pretty place to chase after good bird dogs. Which can be a problem if you’re looking at the scenery on the horizon instead of the canine scenery within gun range. Tom managed to kill his first-ever sharptail grouse off of one of Mabel’s points when we weren’t gaping at the skyline and then later in the morning, his first-ever blue grouse. On the same half-day. I didn’t kill a thing, but it hardly mattered. I had never seen that particular combo done before. It was pretty special.

So that’s how it has started. Completely blind on the first day, old reliable on the second day and semi-blind on the third day. Varying levels of success. But new country discovered. Let 2018 begin, at long last.

If you ask my vet, my kids or my wife, they will tell you I have three bird dogs. That’s three eating, shitting machines ready to chase birds, bark at the neighborhood deer and rack up vet bills at a moment’s notice.

Unfortunately this isn’t Sesame Street and the counting isn’t quite as straightforward as I wish it was. There is a different number of bird dogs that I have as the forest grouse opener approaches in six days.

That number is zero. Zero bird dogs.

I have an old dog – 13. Deaf. Mostly blind. Gives no shits about anything. Retired.

I have a young dog – 5 months. Energy like the sun itself. Obedient as a house cat. More likely to point bumble bees than birds.

I have a dog in her prime – 7. Steady. Trustworthy. Laid up from surgery. Probably not hunting next week.

The vet removed a benign cyst from her shoulder a couple of weeks back. We’ve cut it out before, only to have it return. She’ll be fine and probably ready in a couple of weeks, but the wound is healing slowly.

Come Thursday, maybe I’ll give the veteran a spin. The pup will blow off some steam. If she heals quickly, I might even give my starter a short run. But I won’t have three dogs.

It reinforces something Tom told me last fall; the line between one bird dog and no bird dog is thin.

In this piece of country, the mid-section of summer comes on July 15. Mark it down on the calendar. X it out. On July 14, the grass that has not fallen to sickle mower to make hay for beefsteak is green and tall. On July 15, the unstoppable tanning of that grass begins.

There is a tendency, particularly among those whose outdoors experience is a water park or a golf course, to lament the downward slope of summer into autumn. Shrinking are the long days of summer light, the barbecues, the evening cigars against mosquito whine, the gin and tonics on the back porch, the cycles of mayfly on clear water.

Good things, all. Viewed from the lens of February’s monochrome, great things. Wonderful, highly anticipated things. Who, in the throes of high country March does not dream, at least a little bit, of a June cutthroat trout brought to hand briefly? Captured and photographed only by synapse and gray matter. Unhooked. Released. Memory captured for the next long winter’s lament.

But now it is August and upon us is the dwindle. Mourn this?

Grieve the end of summer when one finds the thermometer at 40 on a cool dawn morning? Chill enough for a sweater, enough that morning coffee is not only a kick to the heart but a welcome heat to the palms. Bemoan the babble of young coyote pups from up on the sagebrush bench, stretching their lungs and legs in celebration of a late summer bounty that includes everything from chokecherry on the stem to barnyard chicken? One morning, up on that same bench, flush a covey of young Huns, eight or nine in all, little buggers that can barely fly yet somehow avoid coyote belly. Then flush another covey of the same size and vigor. Yes, summer is now fading and the tan on the land is coming on strong, covering the body from horizon to horizon.

One morning, the trail camera you put out on the cottonwood down by the trail from the neighbor’s willow thicket reveals a buck in full velvet, a massive buck that you’ve heard whispers of in prior seasons. Last December at the Town Haul Cafe, “Boy, I saw a huge buck cross the road down by your place yesterday morning. That sucker slipped through the season.” Now there he is on camera. In a few months, perhaps hanging in the shop ready for the knife work and freezer.

One early August day you drive the old Ford home from the post office and the corner of the eye catches movement in the borrow ditch. Pheasants. You pump the brakes, because that’s the only way to stop a 1970 F250, and there they are, three young roosters with just enough color on them to tell you their gender. Remind yourself to swing into the neighbor’s place and ask about October opener.

There are raspberries on the stem down by the northeast headgate. Lots of them now—if you can beat the birds and the coyote pups and the farmhands who come to change the water—to them.

You know that one morning, maybe soon, you’ll wake up and there will be a heavy frost on the ground. If you’re lucky, you will have listened to the weatherman and pulled all the tomatoes to vine-ripen in the barn, or at least have covered them with blue tarps every night.

Half of the shed is full of lodgepole cordwood, split, stacked. Five cords. Need ten. Just to be safe. Two woodburners will do that. The propane lady stopped by the other day. Remarked on how little propane was used last year. “Sure like your dogs,” she said, as Mabel jumped up on her for a scratch, despite the scolding and embarrassment over a four year old setter that suddenly forgets her manners. “She knows a dog lover, it’s awright,” she said.

August now and the hoppers are out there in the tall stuff that is left standing and that is now in full color. Hoppers for young pheasants and Huns and sharptail grouse.

This is no ending. This is no long slide to a dismal black winter. This is a beginning. There are four bird dogs on this place and now, as August gets rolling like an old Ford building momentum down the country road to the post office, there seems to be just a bit more zip in their zing. Sure, they still loll about in hot weather, but the mornings are cool now and there is a feel to everything that says hello. That says welcome. That says it is nearly on, let the games begin. Release us into this landscape of sky and tall grass. Release us to those young birds before gun and canine olfaction. Long walks are ahead. Perhaps on the loop back to the truck, soon, there will be the extra weight of the bounty of the land and there will be a sated, happy heart beating its old beat in the chest.

There will be no keen for a summer gone in this house.

Special to MOF –  Mike Thompson 

British Columbia – I was bear hunting in British Columbia with Primitive Outfitters.

I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw the grouse cubs flutter up into the trees. An angry sow grouse came charging out of the bush flapping her wings and hissing with rage.

Keeping my wits about me I dropped to the ground to show I wasn’t a threat. She circled me until the grouse cubs had enough time to get away and then she retreated back into the bush without a trace. It all happened so fast I didn’t have time to grab the can of Grouse Spray I had with me.

Mike Thompson is a hunter, angler, professional artist and a MOF kindred spirit.  You can follow him on Instagram,  @upland_ish.

When I was a boy, we would occasionally make a family trip up to Greeley, Colorado, to visit a couple of my dad’s aunts, sweet old crones in their late 80s who had lived together their entire lives. They were two of something like 15 offspring. They had big litters back then, unpaid labor for the farm no doubt.
Mabel and Edna somehow managed to live their whole lives in the same house all the way to the very end. Neither one killed the other, which is saying something when you live eight decades in the same house.
They drove cool old cars, Edna a 1954 Chevrolet Belair two door, aqua-green and white. It was like riding around in a roomy suitcase. We ended up with that car and I took it on fishing trips to the South Platte when I was just learning to drive. It drove like a suitcase too.
Greeley at that time was still a farm town, a place where my grandfather had a pool hall in 1922, then a farm, where he once accidentally cut a hen pheasant in half while hand-scything hay. The hen was on a nest and the eggs joined a nest of chicken eggs in the coop where they later hatched. The hen pheasant was salvaged and went into the pot. Grandpa shot a single shot hammer 12 of some off-breed brand, but he obviously was equally deadly with the scythe.
I remember little else about Mabel and Edna other than they were kindly old gals and they lived together in relative harmony. And their names stuck with me. Mabel first, then Edna. Here’s hoping their spotted namesakes get along as well as those old ladies did and here’s hoping they last well into their dog-year eighties. The setter Mabel is actually aunt to the setter Edna and now there is a brace to follow into the western skies.

I first met Ryan Busse on a river. A fitting place, really, because it seems as if we both spend a lot of time in rivers or in the woods or out on the big empty. More likely to meet there than in a mall or something. His favorite all-time fly is the Turk’s Tarantula, which is the kind of thing you learn about a guy when you spend a day together on a river. We run in similar circles, breathe some of the same good mountain air, share an ethic and parallel paths in the outdoors and the desire to get our kids out in it as much as possible. He lives closer to Canada than I do and I live closer to Mexico. We both live in Montana. He runs Brittanys, I run setters. One of us has bad judgment. Or maybe both. Or neither. He names his Brits after crusty old outdoor authors who drank gin, I name my setters after maiden aunts who liked, well, gin. And well gin. I do know this: He loves wild places, watching good bird dogs do their thing, wild fish and wild birds. Like us here at MOF, he’s low on pretention and high on irreverence and, sometimes, reverence. So I asked him to start writing for us and sharing some tales of his own for MOF because all of us who love that should have a place to land, even if just for a moment and just metaphorically or vicariously. We’ll enjoy his stories from time to time here on MOF. Be on alert for a post from Ryan soon.

MOF has a loyal fanbase (thanks to all 11 of you) but we also have plenty of one-time visitors, many of who were captured here (By accident) and here (Wrong URL.)