Blood and Plunder

He’s a knife-in-the-teeth type, a run-hell, fast-go, wound-tight, son-of-a-bitch, so when he yelps down by the creek—out of sight (again)—I don’t think much of it. He comes roaring back and I can see blood dripping from his ear. The cut is perhaps a quarter of an inch in length and right at the tip and not bleeding very heavily. Yet. As a horseman friend of mine would say, “It’s a long way from the heart.”

The Bloody Duke pauses only long enough to check in.

And we’re a long way from the truck. It’s 15 below zero and the pheasants are holding tight. There’s about one point five minutes of debate. We push on. If he could vote—and he can—he’d vote “aye.”

This is the way. His way. He’s pretty good at it. Full-fricking-tilt until he’s completely gassed and done. This is also the way of Western pheasant, those savage bastards of greasewood and buffaloberry, their craws stuffed with Russian olive pits, their hearts full of bitter fuck-you fire. No other bird evokes the chaos, the running pandemonium beneath the wide skies. Wild bird, of course. Feral is more apt. You hit the ground running and you need a “Katie-bar-the-door” dog. Barbwire, thorn, bur, be damned. Late season? Snow? Even more so. Those runnin’ sons-a-bitches. David Alan Coe, or perhaps it was Chris Ledoux captured it this way: “Oh, it’s forty below and I don’t give a fuck, got a heater in my truck, and I’m off to the rodeo.”

So we continue, despite the bleeding, because, darn it, the pheasants are holding tight and the injury is superficial. It is worth a repeat: the pheasants are holding tight. It’s too cold to hunt. But the pheasants are finally, for once, holding tight. This is the epic once-every-seven-years cicada hatch on the Green, for crying in a bucket. The pheasants are holding tight and you may not see this again in his lifetime. Maybe even yours. It’s too cold to hunt? Yeah, right. Unless you are a cold-hearted bastard. So, onward, blood flying from sliced ear. Hey, we’re hunting late season wild roosters. Call the ASPCA. Go ahead, call ’em.
In the whitewash of eastern Montana’s winter, he is lost quickly and then I pick him up again. The ear is bleeding freely now, and he’s frozen on point. I huff up and watch the blood dripping into the snow. He’s oblivious to anything but the smell in his nose and when the cock bird goes up and the shotgun barks, he’s on it. Hard on it. A 24-inch-tailed rooster and he retrieves, then blasts onward. I think for a moment, “Maybe I ought to do something about that ear.” But as soon as that thought enters, he’s gone again, romping into the snow, blood-be-damned, as if affirming my “long-way-from-the-heart” mantra.

Swingin'

By the time we get back to the truck (with three stone-dead rooster pheasants being flash-frozen by Montana December against my back), he’s a red and white setter. He looks like something out of a slasher movie, all from the flopping of an ear splattering blood everywhere, a minor cut with a major bleed. He doesn’t care, though. I tape him up as best I can, but the tape comes off and the ear bleeds more. I wrap his head and he digs into it and off comes the bandage. Screw it, he says, I’m a tough guy.
That night in the motel room, the bleeding finally stopped, he gobbles his feed, then promptly pukes it—and a wad of cocklebur and pheasant feather—up on my bed. Twice. “Get off the stage, you god-damned goof,” sings Ledoux. What an animal. Both. Or all three of us.

–TR

Begin Anew

It begins with hearing the creak of the stove door opening, with someone throwing a few sticks on the coals from last night. Before long, you hear a little crackling and periscope one eye toward the still tightly drawn opening of your sleeping bag to find a greyish hint of daylight. No one really moves much, but a gradual, collective realization that morning has arrived seems to pervade. Before long, it’s almost too warm in the wall tent to stay inside the bag, and a restlessness follows and people start to emerge. A dog stretches before curling up and laying down again, a little closer to the heat source.

Photo by Ty Traxler

Muscles are stiff, and there’s the faint remnant of retribution from last night’s whiskey, preventing much conversation. Or coordination, for that matter. An empty bottle or two get knocked over in an effort to get the coffee pot on the stove. Someone throws on boots and trips over the tent door, cursing, on a relief mission.

Presently, frying garlic and onions awake what is left of dormant senses and the mental fog begins to lift. Sausage and peppers get added to the mix and take it to a new level. Something which probably wouldn’t be funny in an otherwise full state of consciousness cracks all of you up. Soon glorious caffeine is infusing the body with fresh fire. Yesterday’s beatdown, traversing steep cliffs, slipping and falling on greasy rock, and the ensuing aches, forgotten. Tails start to wag and a cup of coffee goes over. So the day begins anew and nothing else really matters in high, windswept country where humans and dogs and chukar sometimes cross paths.

– Smithhammer

The Other

He may be the best dog I will ever walk the ground with. Perhaps not. Perhaps there will be another dog that will display and dazzle. But there will never be another dog like him. And there will never be another time like his. That I do know.

Some would say he was just a dog, but there are those of us who know the other plane. That place of which Henry Beston wrote: “In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

There are humans, though, who at a minimum understand Beston’s other nation. They may even live there. Perhaps. Many are my friends. Hunting men mostly, men who hunt because they have a dog and if they did not partner with a canine, they would find no pleasure in walking an autumn field with a shotgun no matter how much they enjoyed the taste of roasted pheasant. They certainly would find the cliffs and crags and rough tough of the chukar partridge much more empty. Perhaps they would draw upon the wildness and raw beauty of the desert, but without a dog pal the picture would be incomplete like Mona Lisa without her smile. Can an old woman with a Peekapoo experience the same kind of other plane, that melding of human and dog mind into a mutual understanding that transcends verbal language? Perhaps. But I think not. The reason is quarry. There is something very different about an animal that lives to hunt for you, that pursues what you pursue. You are caught up in a mutual joy of the hunt, a mutual drive that sinks deep to the soul into the core, the heart, the bone, the very cells that make up a living creature. This is in our DNA, those of us who hunt. I am sure that dogs that hunted held a different status in the ancient nomadic tribes of which we are rooted than dogs that plodded along at heel, eating food and in the end becoming food. Each type of dog—the food hunter and the food “on the hoof” certainly played a role in the survival, but it was hunting dog that actually earned its keep by living, not dying.

It was hot that day. Christ was it hot. June. People do not think of Wyoming as hot. Wyoming is snowy peaks and ice, wind and empty. That day it was over 100 and the sweat poured over my eyes. I took a half-splintered Pulaski bandaged by black electricians tape and a half-sharp shovel and made little progress. A more prudent man might have a sharp shovel and a strong-handled swinging tool, but I did not expect to be burying my dog. Maybe at twelve. Definitely not at six. He lay next to me in black plastic and I did not look over there very often. I swung the Pulaski and water ran off of me, out of me. I was miles from nowhere and the desert made me small. Tiny. Alone. Only a half year earlier, I had walked the same piece of ground with a shotgun in my hands and him out there before me. And now he was wrapped in black plastic. The desert had never made me feel so small. True enough it is a big place with sky flung in all directions, miles from water, miles from those snowfields on the Bighorns and the Absarokas. No it was not the desert that made me feel tiny, it was death. I was no longer a man with one hell of a bird dog. I was just a man.

– TR

Bounty

Here’s to a bountiful 2011, friends.

May you spend as much of it outdoors as possible, muddy and wet and cold and hot and sweaty, a good dog aside, sucking deeply from the marrow.

A brace of ditch parrots

 

Bullet Points

There were long hours behind the wheel. There was more snow than we’d expected. There were roads that could have stuck our vehicle for days. Roads we turned back from. There were blown shots on what should have been easy covey flushes. There was a jaw-dropping running point by a setter that has taken her craft to the level of artistry. There was cold, biting, open country wind that leaves you feeling ragged and still slightly on edge when you finally get out of it. There were practical jokes, which some found funnier than others. There was setting up camp in the dark, in the snow. There were deep discussions about the relative virtues of one cheap beer over another. There was forgotten dog food (yours truly…). There were, at the end of 3 days with the combined effort of 3 guns and 6 dogs, half a dozen chukar in the cooler.

But then, there were also moments like this:

Basin and Range. Have some.

– Smithhammer

Getting low

He’s running now. Bowling-ball sized chunks of rock are spilling down behind him as he races uphill. Sweat is dripping down his brow and you can read the profanity-laced tirade on his face.
This morning, he was hesitant, waiting for the birds to stop as if this was some kind of gentleman’s hunt where he wouldn’t have to break a sweat and the birds would cooperate.
Two coveys later, the thorns, cacti, brush, hills, rocks and sand have brought him to a more basic understanding of the guerilla warfare that is desert quail hunting.
Sometimes you have to run the bastards down and when they flush wild, you empty your gun at them.

– GM

MOF Luxury Tours Now Accepting Reservations!

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Beer

My beer has been stolen. Pabst. Blue. Ribbon. It’s been stolen by the bro-bras. You know them. Nice enough guys, well-intentioned. Fun to hang out with. But the fuckers stole my beer.
My dad drank it. So I did too. Drank it for years. Chanted the famous Dennis Hopper quote: “What kind of beer do you drink? Heineken?! Fuck that shit!!! Pabst! Blue! Ribbon!!!” Thought about making the t-shirt. Didn’t. Better to just drink it.
Then I noticed everyone was drinking it. It was served in the trendiest bars in the trendiest towns. For four freakin’ dollars a can! You know the towns: the ones with good stuff on the edges like rivers and fields full of Huns. The kinds of places that sadly show up on Top Ten Outdoor Town lists. The places where people move and get the “Insert-Town-Name-Here Starter Kit.” Example, the Bozeman, Montana, starter kit is a drift boat, a Tacoma and a bird dog.
Then I overheard things like: “Bra, want to go drink some Peebers?” and “Hey bro, ‘nother PBR?” To which I thought: “WTF?”
This for a beer that won the blue ribbon in Chicago in another century. This for a beer that has been held in the calloused hands of loggers and miners and union head-crackers and oilfield trash for decades. Now poached by the New West minions and the Subaru cavalry. Alas. One of my pals, a bro-bra, even puts Clamato into his Peeber. To which I say: “WTF?”
So I’ve got a new brand. Or maybe I should say, a new old brand. Stay the fuck away from my Hamm’s. And my Oly. And my Old Milwaukee. And my Schlitz.

Sign of the times

– TR

Chukar Recess

A scrape on my right knee, reminiscent of a ten-speed crash. A bruise on my shin, running knee-cap to ankle. Another on my ass. My shotgun has similar injuries. No matter. I’ve been playing.
I’m doing it again. Now running. She is on birds again, on the slope below, nose in the wind, working them. No doubt. Birds. Here we go boys! I skip over stone and slip on scree, and vault over cactus and long-jump small arroyos. I carry my shotgun in my right hand and sprint. She works the birds with care and expertise and still they go up out of range, no doubt spooked by the stampede of hunters to the white setter’s playground. No matter. It is good to be young again. I can’t stop giggling.

The school yard

– TR