Upland Hunting – Mouthful of Feathers

The Gift of Nothing

Bird dogs are a gift. Each one a potential treasure trove of incredible points and unbelievable retrieves. They’re also something much grander. Their lifespan provides us with a window into our own lives. A snapshot over 10 to 15 years of our careers, our families, our evolution as bird hunters and as individuals. When a new puppy comes into the family, it’s a time for reflection and joy, as a new period in life has begun.

My first bird dog, a pudelpointer named Sawyer, came into my life when I was fresh out of grad school. She was with me when money was so tight I lived in a garage and steelhead were my top priority. She joined me on spawning surveys on coastal creeks, learned to swim by falling off the front of a jet sled en route to a summer steelhead spot, and we learned the ropes together as aspiring waterfowler and occasional preserve pheasant hunters. She’s seen me through six different houses, a marriage, and the birth of our son.

Our second bird dog, an English setter my wife named Sadie, arrived amidst a global pandemic and more upheaval than any of us could have expected. Headed home from her breeder in Idaho to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, I made an impromptu decision to divide the trip in half and take a detour to see my mom and stepfather in Spokane.

Mom instantly fell in love with our new puppy. Those memories today are dreamlike and uncertain two years removed from that unplanned visit. A few weeks after I returned home with our new puppy, mom lost consciousness following a hair appointment. The next two months were filled with trips to emergency rooms and doctor’s offices, countless tests, and complete uncertainty over what was causing her low blood pressure, chronic fatigue, and intermittent fevers. It wasn’t until after she passed that we’d learn of a rare and undiagnosable cancer with a name too hard to pronounce.

Two months after she passed, an annual chukar camp with a few kindred souls seemed like just the salve for my grief. Two others in our group had also recently lost parents, so in a way, it seemed like the most organic of support groups for guys who don’t do support groups. With high hopes, I loaded Sadie into my truck and headed for a week amongst sagebrush and rimrock with dreams of her first point on a wild Nevada chukar pulling me south.

On the last day of my time at chukar camp, with the new puppy showing little interest in birds, I headed out with an Ithaca Model 37 in 16ga I’d acquired a few days after mom’s passing. The gun turned out to be made in the same year mom was born, so it seemed destined that I’d shoot the pup’s first pointed chukar that day.

After a full day’s hunting and only glimmers of interest in birds from the new setter, I picked my way down a rimrock ledge back towards the truck. I resolved that the dog was too young and that perhaps later in the season, she’d put the pieces together and we’d get her first point.

With the truck in sight, skies parted in the most dramatic fashion on the western horizon. As the sun shone through the clouds, the setter made a hard right and lifted her nose into the wind. My fingers tingled as her back flattened and her tail rose skyward.

As I walked in to make the flush, my heart sank as I realized the only bird on the business end of Sadie’s point had fallen victim to a hawk the day or two prior. A pile of feathers lay strewn about. As the puppy broke point and sniffed around the remnants of a covey worth of bird shit, I took a seat on some rimrock and was overwhelmed by the beauty and grandeur of my surroundings and the moment in time I found myself in.

When my son was born, one of my mom’s first gifts was a book by Patrick McDonnell about a dog that doesn’t know what to give his friend the cat for her birthday. After much searching and stress, the perfect gift turns out to be a big empty box with a bow on it- “The Gift of Nothing.” The moral of the story is in valuing time spent with those you love doing absolutely nothing beyond enjoying the moment and the company and the mutual love and respect you have for each other.

My new puppy’s debut at our annual chukar pilgrimage hadn’t gone as I’d hoped. But sitting on that rimrock with the soft muzzle of a five-month-old puppy in my lap, skies doing their best impression of a Nevada Visitor’s Guide cover photo, and six days in the bag with good friends, good food, campfires and whiskey, I couldn’t help but give thanks to my mom for reminding me what this short, precious window of time is all about.

For Those Who Know

It’s stubborn dogs and disappointed spouses, pigeon shit and pissed off neighbours. It’s early morning training sessions and an ever-growing to-do list. It’s puppy blues and terrible twos, pocket kibble and “it gets better” promises. It’s failure and frustration, two steps forward and four steps back. It’s ecollars and kennels, bells and beepers, leashes, launchers and leads. It’s living on good credit and bad coffee, staring out the windshield with half-lidded eyes. It’s out of date maps and middle of nowhere flats, busted ball joints, bent rims and blown fan belts. It’s scraped skid plates and gas price laments, dusty dead ends and permission denied. It’s heatstroke under an all-conquering sun or frostbitten fingers and sideways sleet sting. It’s thistles and thorns and slivers, sand and grit, mud and blood and sweat and tears. It’s rattlesnakes and forgotten snares, badger holes, barbed wire and “Are they bluffing?” bears. It’s tailgate trauma centres, porcupine quills and vet bills. It’s the ghost of gone dogs and all the heartbreak you can handle.

All for a few fleeting moments here at the confluence of nose and scent, where lead just might meet wing and time holds in brief suspension before the blur beckons and begins again.

And if you can’t find the beauty in that . . .

Well, you wouldn’t be here would you?

Waving the white flag

My first gun dog, a pudelpointer I bought fresh out of grad school with almost no research into other breeds, pedigrees, or breeders, has made a wonderful family dog. She’s gentle with our toddler, keeps my wife happy with her minimal shedding, and has been a serviceable companion both in a duck blind and in chukar country. Her start was anything but ideal, as her early upland hunting was largely limited to planted pheasants at the wildlife refuges and pay-to-play preserves near our home in the Willamette Valley. While I have some fond memories and glimpses of brilliance on epic retrieves and staunch points, I can’t help but feel like I failed her with a lack of time training and exposing her to the kinds of experiences that make for a solid gun dog. As she approached her eighth birthday, my thoughts turned to the next dog that would join or family, the lessons learned and the mistakes made, and what I’d change with our next pup.

Those thoughts all came to a head two years ago, with a much-coveted invite to join the MoF crew at a chukar camp comprised of four setters and two shorthairs in the wilds of the Great Basin. Often described as elegant and stylish, my impression of the camp’s setters reminded me more of a Rage Against the Machine mosh pit than some old white guy in tweed and a necktie. Those dogs absolutely ripped through the sage and bitterbrush in search of birds and after five days of following them around, I was firmly sold on the English setter as my new breed of choice. I went home and put down a deposit on a litter that shared pedigree with Tom’s Mabel.

The following November, on my second invite to the MoF annual chukar camp pilgrimage, Tom and Greg were both cool and encouraging as then five-month-old Sadie romped around without much interest in birds or scent. “These dogs train themselves, all you’ve gotta do is take ’em hunting,” was the constant refrain back at camp as I returned time and again with an empty vest and the nervous edge of a drug addict in need of his next fix. I couldn’t bear the thought of failing another gun dog. With a three-year-old son and a full time job waiting for me back home, intrusive thoughts on my own ability to give Sadie the future she deserves were with me on the lonely drive home to the Willamette Valley.

Sheepishly, last winter I began researching gun dog trainers. Much like the feelings I’ve long harbored over guys who only fish with hired guides or pay others for home improvement projects rather than admit their skills aren’t up to the task, sending Sadie to a trainer felt like cheating. I wavered whether or not to even tell my hunting partners of the decision I’d made. So I wasn’t surprised by the guilt mixed with excitement that washed over me as the hood of my Ram crested over Santiam Pass en route to a mid-point visit to see Sadie, after her first five weeks at a bird dog trainer outside of Bend.

After some small talk with the trainer, he brought Sadie out on a long lead and directed her to a couple of pigeons strewn about his training grounds in launchers. A light breeze bent the field’s tall grass as she quartered back and forth, nose held high into the wind. As her saunter slowed and she froze, tail rising skyward, any feelings of guilt or remorse I had were far from my mind.

I look forward to the day when I’ll have the time, space, and freedom to train a dog on my own. Much like tying flies, reloading ammunition, or refinishing your own kitchen, there’s a sense of pride and accomplishment that comes along with figuring things out yourself. But unlike a fly, or a shotshell, or a kitchen cabinet, there’s no do-over with a gun dog. The choices I’ve made over the last twelve months of Sadie’s life will be with both of us for the rest of her life, and will echo across my memory until my time comes as well.

I’m kid-on-Christmas-Eve excited about the career Sadie and I will have together and I can’t wait for the lessons I’ll learn about training and companionship she has to teach me. And as for the rash of shit I’m bound to get from the chukar camp crew, I’ll take my lumps a little easier with a few birds in the bag.

Direction

Compasses are fascinating things, with much to teach for being an inanimate object. I’m speaking of course, of an analog piece, little changed for centuries, not the app on your phone.

There can be a number of things that affect the proper reading of a real compass, causing one to lose direction. Unlike your phone, a dead battery isn’t one of them.

Other things in your pocket may be interfering, pulling the needle from true. Take this as a sign that you may have too many things in your pockets, and that it might be time to simplify. Don’t let other things confuse your compass and cause you to lose direction. True direction is the highest priority.

It seems inevitable that cheap compasses develop bubbles over time. These too will affect the needle. Don’t trust your life, whether it be your ultimate safety or only your current direction, to cheap things. You’ll get exactly what you paid for.

Compasses are only useful when you can see them, and the less accessible they are, the less likely you are to use them. Keep your compass handy and refer to it often.

There is an old adage to the effect of, “if you keep checking your course regularly, it’s much harder to get lost than if you wait until you’re not sure where you are.”

Sage advice.

Let’s Go

First frost in the valley, patches of golden aspen beginning to pop on the hillsides, the occasional mountain maple, as if overnight, lit up like those neon Rolling Stones lips, blowing tawdry, seductive kisses your way through the living room window…

First frost in the valley, patches of golden aspen beginning to pop on the hillsides, the occasional mountain maple, as if overnight, lit up like those neon Rolling Stones lips, blowing seductive, semi-obscene kisses your way through the living room window.

This is no tme for staring at a laptop.

A couple handfuls of purple shells.

A stout, trusty pump gun with an action scarcely changed in a century (thank you, John Moses Browning). A straight stock and a forend of scratched, pedestrian-grade walnut.

The old, simple canvas vest seems right for this, not the fancy, feature-laden modular one. As if it’s a choice.

Briefly wonder what choke is in the gun, but then figure that it really isn’t that important – whatever choke you left in it at the end of last season is probably just fine. There’s a danger in over-thinking this.

Jeans and Red Wings and a wool shirt.

A shorthair beside himself at the emergence of a long gun case from the closet.

Let’s go.

No poetry

I wanted poetry. But that’s not the way it happened.
I wanted one last spin through stem and stubble, one last sudden pivot on wobbly legs. One last point.
One last rooster.
A burst of feather and wing to slate sky. A swing of double gun, a pull and a puff and the old boy on it, smelling it, mouthing it. His last rooster.
But that’s not the way it happened.
His ass-end gave out two hundred yards from the truck before we were in the really good stuff. We had to turn back, the old man pulling himself on his front legs, fickle back legs making drag marks in the snow. I offered to carry him, but he had none of it.
One last point, one last rooster. One last shot. I wanted that for him. I wanted that for me. But that’s not the way it happened and it occurs to me that poetry is a precious thing, a whisper on the wind, a blink.
A friend’s beautiful wife dies of leukemia before she turns thirty. There is no seventy-five years of shared life, no watching children and grandchildren grow and laugh. No poetry.
Another friend whose law enforcement career had spanned two decades spangled with accolades and decorations spent his last day investigating the disappearance of a woman while standing within feet of where her corpse lay hidden beneath a pile of trash. Days after the laughter had faded from his retirement party, his former colleagues discovered her body and arrested the boyfriend. No last day heroics, no “one last bust,” no poetry.
An Olympic miler steps off a city sidewalk and shatters her tibia. No poetry.
And so. An old bird dog on his last hunt ends up pulling himself home by his front legs. Two months shy of his thirteenth birthday and there will be no final pheasant. There was, but it was placed in the game bag months before without thought that there would never be another. Forgotten. Not even realized.
He sleeps now on his bed downstairs and I know that someday soon, he won’t be able to get up and walk from it, that he will have to drag himself and then I will know it is time. And I think about moments that have passed for him and I on our journey together.
And I think about the look of him then, all tri-colored and feathered, pivoting out in brambles, pointing and casting and moving in rhythmic upland music and I realize that in fact this is why I love bird hunting. For in that motion of dog into wind, in that movement of fur and nostril, it is there: Poetry. When all else in life lacks, upland behind a setter provides.
Sometimes life is just life. Sometimes it sings and the melody is bird dog.

—Tom Reed

Waiting

I often seem to procrastinate when it comes to cleaning birds, and then I hurry through it mechanically. But tonight, I’m in a different mood…

So tired, I could easily blow it off.

But the birds have been hanging in the cool crawlspace plenty long enough and it is time. “I’ll have a beer first…” and I do. And it’s so good, I have another. It is already late fall and the sun is long gone and it feels later than it is, even though it’s barely dinner time. The birds are laid out on the cutting board, waiting. Although they really aren’t waiting, because they are dead; if they ever actually “waited” for anything while alive.

I often seem to procrastinate when it comes to cleaning birds, and then I hurry through it mechanically. But tonight, I’m in a different mood. Almost as tired as the shorthair curled up in the corner of the living room by the stove. The good kind of tired, where whatever you’re going to do you’re going to take your time doing.

I lay the bird spread out on its back. Game shears remove wings and head and legs. Feel through the deep mahogany and purple-tinged belly feathers for something more tangible. The knife slides in easily, and the thin skin parts up the length of the cavity. The pungent odor of pheasant hits the nostrils. Rich pink flesh exposed. A pile of technicolor feathers accumulates. A few crimson spots where #6 did its thing.

Flushed under cold water, thoroughly.

And then its time to ponder a recipe. Maybe a sautè in sage, bacon and port. They deserve nothing less.

The Book

A project we’ve been kicking around for some time is finally happening, and frankly, we’re damn excited about it. In early December of 2013, Mouthful of Feathers: Upland Hunting in the West will be released…

A project we’ve been kicking around for some time is finally happening, and frankly, we’re damn excited about it. In early December of 2013, Mouthful of Feathers: Upland Hunting in the West will be released, featuring a collection of original, full-length essays by:

Tosh Brown
Reid Bryant
Michael Gracie
Chad Love
Greg McReynolds
Tom Reed
Bruce Smithhammer
Bob White

With an introduction by Miles Nolte.

The book will be published by Pulp Fly, Ltd. and available on Amazon, iTunes and Barnes & Noble for Kindle, Nook and iPad platforms.

More to come soon – please stay tuned. And if you haven’t done so already, the best way to stay tuned is by signing up as a follower of this blog, which you can do on the menu on the right side of this page, and by “liking” our Facebook page. Thanks.

Rethinking the Relationship

We had completed a fairly thorough loop for one guy and one big running dog to do through the field, and were on our way back to the truck. Downwind. The dog absolutely hates hunting downwind, and will do everything he can to veer from it, since for him, hunting downwind is dumb, and because for him, the hunting doesn’t end when you’ve made the decision to head back to the truck and are returning via ground that you already covered on the way out. No, it doesn’t end for him until we’re at the tailgate. He’s taught me the value of this lesson many times before, but my hard-headed human brain tends to forget.

So when he veers off at a 90 degree angle to the wind, and the direction to the truck, I don’t think much of it, but then I forget how quickly he can cover ground when he wants to. I let him range because I tell myself that we’ve already covered this, and the day is done and truth be told, I’m fantasizing about dinner. I probably should have noted that he wasn’t just meandering, but heading in a pretty specific direction.

There is a common adage in the bird dog world that, “you must teach the dog to hunt for you.” I used to firmly believe this was the case, with no room for interpretation. After all, the only other option is an out-of-control dog, right? In some cases, that’s certainly true. But I’d like to think I’m growing and learning as a bird hunter (and hopefully always will be), and have come to realize that too much stubborn control over everything your dog does can betray a lack of trust in your dogs’ inherent, amazing abilities, not to mention impacting what ends up in the game bag.

The reality of the relationship – if it’s a good one – is a far more nuanced, “give and take” than that; an interdependent push-and-pull across the landscape. At least in the situations I most often find myself hunting in. This isn’t a quaint, 2-acre patch of errant apple orchard, but a wide open, hilly field 20 times that in size, and it wouldn’t even be considered “big” country by our western standards. I need a dog that has no shortage of initiative, not one that is going to be plodding along dutifully right in front of me. And in these scenarios, the reality is that we have learned to hunt for each other. Just as he is obliged to find birds for me in a vast and sometimes daunting landscape, I’m obliged to trust that he knows what he’s doing; that his desire to find birds is unwavering (the occasional rabbit or deer scent aside…) and at least as great as mine. Trusting this arrangement means that in general, he needs to go where I want him to, but it also means that it’s a good idea for me to pay attention when he clearly wants to head in a certain direction. Knowing a good bird dog well means trusting that he probably has his reasons.

I watch a couple skittish sharpies bust wild a hundred and some yards away, as he is quartering toward them, nose held high, before he has a chance to lock them down and point them. His sudden, 90 deg. detour now becomes clear – he somehow knew they were over there, even from that distance. I mark where they go down on the hillside, not far away. It could be tempting to raise my blood pressure regarding my “out of control dog” upon seeing this, but the truth is that he’s doing exactly what he should be doing, and the mistakes are honestly mine. Instead, I call him in, and as a team, we double back and move in together and get them. Birds we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, if it had been left up to me. Another lesson has been reinforced. Luckily, my dog is a forgiving and patient teacher.

Postscript: The following day, the little bastard ran all over hell and back, ignoring commands, whistles and every setting on the e-collar. I accidentally left the laptop open the previous night, and I’m now convinced he must have read this post.

A Bird Hunter’s Table

A Bird Hunter’s Table is about cooking, eating, and sharing friendship. It is also about gundogs, gamebirds, and getting outside to enjoy the land. Featuring contributions by MOF’s Tom Reed and Greg McReynolds, among other notables…

A new, “highly recommended” addition to the upland hunter’s bookshelf has just been released – A Bird Hunter’s Table by Sarah Davies.

A Bird Hunter’s Table is about cooking, eating, and sharing friendship. It is also about gundogs, gamebirds, and getting outside to enjoy the land. Featuring contributions by MOF’s Tom Reed and Greg McReynolds, among other notables.

A Bird Hunter’s Table includes over 130 recipes, stories from the field, and a smattering of natural history. To learn more, see a sample of the book, or to purchase, visit www.birdhunterstable.com or contact the author at birdhunterstable@gmail.com. Trust us – this one is worthy, friends.