Less than Epic
My first pheasant hunt of the season was a solo affair from the start, except for the company of the dog. After avoiding the general busyness of opening day, I took off midweek when my usual hunting partners were occupied with day jobs and drove 30 miles north of town to a stretch of cover one Gun and one dog can hunt effectively on their own. The landowner is an elderly ranch widow I've known for years. When I stopped at her house, she came out to the truck to pat Rocky, my yellow Lab, and then we jawed about the weather (inevitable in ranch country) and her health (my medical background is fair game in such circumstances). She then began a long, wistful reminiscence about her childhood on a nearby ranch and eventual marriage to her late husband, whom I had cared for when he died. She obviously needed to talk to someone, and I found her account so sincere and engaging that by the time she finished I'd nearly forgotten why I'd come.
But when she'd said what she had to say, she pointed me toward the coulee that ran through the breaks behind her house to the grainfields on top. I liked what I saw immediately. In addition to ideal Indian summer weather, the stubble was in the right place this year, next to the fingers of grass and brush where terrain meets agriculture. Furthermore, she doesn't graze the place, which meant that the bird cover stood thick and lush, untrammeled by bovine intrusion. "This is going to be good," I said aloud to Rocky, and off we went.
The long, winding climb along the edge of the draw failed to produce a flush. As we crested the top, I noticed antelope grazing in a winter-wheat field up ahead and whistled Rocky to a halt before he could spook the herd. My medical partner had an antelope tag for this district, so I hunkered down in the grass and watched the animals, gauging their intentions and evaluating horns as best I could without binoculars.
Finally, we set off for what I regarded as the true heart of the cover: a cattail-choked swale meandering between plowed fields that hold wheat stubble every other year including this one. Rocky worked the cover diligently, but it remained silent and empty. Then as I climbed the bank to begin the long, barren loop back to the vehicle, he pushed up a rooster right in my face. Despite the close range, the shot proved trickier than it looked, for I had to pivot quickly on the steep bank to take the bird going away as he rocketed over my head. Then the noise of the shot yielded to the sound of the dog crashing through the cattails as he completed the retrieve.
That was the only bird we flushed all afternoon. By the time we arrived back at the vehicle, we had four or five miles of up and down behind us, and the dog looked as tired as I felt (in dog years, Rocky is almost as old as I am). I considered all of the effort we'd expended for the single rise, thought about complaining about what had obviously been a poor spring hatch, remembered the lone rooster startling me in a sudden eruption of noise and color, and reconsidered.
I'd told the dog it was going to be a good day, and I'd been right.
Hemingway once famously observed that all bad writers are in love with the epic-council that we who chronicle the outdoors should consider taking to heart. Big-game journals bristle with oversize antlers; angling stories often suggest personal versions of Moby Dick. In the world of wingshooting, one form of outdoor sport in which size really doesn't seem to matter, we compensate with descriptions of clouds of pheasants, skies full of geese and limits of more birds than most of us would care to pluck in one sitting.
Nothing wrong with any of that-and to the extent that I've described my share of such goings-on, mea culpa-but as I look back over a long, busy life in the field, it occurs to me that some of the most memorable days I've enjoyed involved not shooting much and sometimes not shooting anything at all. Perhaps we all need to fine-tune our appreciation for the days that end with nearly as many shells in the game vest as there were when we set out.
I learned this lesson naturally when I cut my wingshooting teeth as a kid in upstate New York. Back then one ruffed grouse made a great day. Add a woodcock and you had a spectacular mixed bag; jump-shoot a black duck off of a pond on the way home and you were operating at the edge of epic territory-all for the price of three shotgun shells (assuming good shooting). My subsequent life out West and in Alaska makes all that look tame, but the clarity with which I still remember those birds and how hard we worked for them startles me to this day.
Spectacular surroundings offer one easy way to compensate for a paucity of shooting. That's one reason why I've never acquired a taste for driving cornfields or wading through CRP despite the number of pheasants such cover can hold. (And please don't anyone misinterpret this as criticism of the CRP program. I may not love to hunt CRP, but I'm damn glad we have it.) When I'm chasing Gambel's quail through the desert on a still winter morning or beating the brush for sharptails along the Lewis & Clark route through the Missouri Breaks, the birds don't have to provide much more than an excuse to be there.
As those woodcock taught me years ago, adding even a little bit of variety to the bag can turn a good day into a great one: a sharptail at the end of a long slog through pheasant cover, say, or a covey of Huns when you least expect it. And no wingshooting venue offers more opportunity to make something out of nothing this way than the duck blind.
Geese are a great wild card that can turn around a slow morning over the decoys faster than you can change loads to accommodate them. As much as I've enjoyed the pageantry of dedicated goose hunts-digging pits, placing hundreds of shells, shivering in the dark and hoping for the best-incidental geese have sometimes left even bigger impressions. Lone, lost honkers respond especially well to calling even in the absence of decoys, which is why I always carry a goose call in my duck vest. Every season I talk a few single geese right into my mallard spread, at which point the day officially becomes a triumph no matter what the ducks decide to do. Maybe size matters after all.
Even without geese, a bit of variety can turn a slow morning of duck hunting into a feast... or at least a welcome snack. Here in my home county, 95 percent of the ducks we shoot are mallard drakes... a problem duck hunting friends living elsewhere assure me they'd love to have. Nonetheless, I miss the variety of waterfowl I've enjoyed while hunting in locations like coastal Alaska or the Canadian prairies. On a recent outing to a nearby pond, my partner and I had a flock of divers begin rocketing around us right after legal shooting light. I knew they weren't canvasbacks or redheads. "I think they're ring-neck ducks," I finally whispered as the flock completed its third circuit of the pond.
"What the hell is a ring-neck duck?" he replied.
Patience exhausted and certain that at least one bird would be legal, I stood and dropped the last one in line on the next pass. And when Rocky completed the retrieve, the bird's distinctive bill markings confirmed that we were examining the first representative of the species I'd ever seen in Fergus County, Montana. A lone, decoying gadwall was the only other duck we shot all morning, but of such small triumphs are memorable duck hunts made.
Great dogwork is another certain way to make something out of not much. With all due respect to my friends who run pointing breeds, nothing can accomplish that mission quite like a seasoned retriever, at least when there aren't a lot of birds around. On mornings when the sky is raining ducks, it's sometimes difficult to appreciate the beauty of individual retrieves. But slow days beneath largely silent skies afford better opportunities to savor retrievers at their best-and engage in some well-earned canine bonding when the dog has finished crashing through the ice. I still remember countless mornings when a single such performance by Sky, Sonny or Rocky made me forget all about the ducks that never showed up.
Of course day-saving retrieves don't have to take place over water. Years ago a hunting partner and I had logged several miles in extremely rugged pheasant cover before we flushed the first rooster. My partner dropped the bird with a broken wing, and from my elevated vantage across the coulee I watched the rooster hit the ground and streak off across a winter-wheat field toward the horizon. Sky was a young dog then, but when he returned 20 minutes later with the bird cradled gently in his mouth, I knew I had a great one. We didn't shoot another bird that day, but as far as I was concerned we didn't need to.
And then there is the shooting... I'm decades past keeping score, and frankly I grow uncomfortable around anyone who gets competitive about shooting in the field. But there's something about the occasional great shot-by any member of the party-that can turn the day around. And as with great retrieves, they're usually easier to appreciate in isolation.
Back when son Nick was first learning to shoot, we didn't have a local skeet range. He learned a few basics on hand-thrown clays in the backyard, and then it was time to go hunting. A hundred yards into the cover on the first bird hunt of the year, a lone sharptail rose in front of him and he dropped it in a cloud of feathers, duplicating the serendipity I'd enjoyed years earlier when I'd killed the first ruffed grouse that had flushed in front of me. Perhaps we both should have quit while we were ahead. That too was the only bird of the day, but I'm sure neither of us will ever forget it.
I'm not sure there's much logic to the phrase "cold as hell," but this morning there doesn't have to be. A December arctic high has locked the valley in ice except for the spring creeks, and the mallards should be concentrating on the open water when they return from feeding in the fields. Meanwhile, Rocky and I are huddled beside the decoys concentrating on staying alive. There are no day-job excuses on anyone's part for my solitude this morning. Everyone else just thought I was nuts to venture out in weather like this, and as legal shooting light comes and goes with no sign of ducks, it occurs to me that they may have had a point. Where would I be without the reliable enthusiasm of Labrador retrievers?
I've never had a duck dog that studied the sky as assiduously as Rocky, and suddenly he's offering me his own unique version of a duck-blind point: butt firmly planted in the snow, eyes trained upward, ears cocked forward. And then the object of his attention buzzes the blocks-not the mallard I was expecting but a lost and lonely looking green-wing, juking and dodging invisible aerial obstacles as only teal can.
The shotgun is halfway to my shoulder before I hesitate. No one has ever accused me of being a sentimental hunter, but I can be a philosophical one. The last of the teal should have been gone more than a month ago. As much as I love to eat teal, the right place for this one suddenly seems to be right where it is rather than inside my game vest, and I let him pass. Rocky plainly isn't happy with the decision, but I am.
Why has this particular teal remained behind in such a hostile and alien environment while all his mates have winged south? Someone once asked a comparable question about a leopard in the snows of Kilimanjaro. The answers may carry no Earth-shaking implications, but you never know. It's enough to keep me occupied until the greenheads arrive, and I suspect I'll remember the lone teal long after the mallards have been shot, fetched, plucked and eaten.
And the memory is always where the best of hunts live on.
Don Thomas and his wife, Lori, divide their time between homes in Montana and Alaska. Their kids are grown now and have been replaced by Labs, who are easier to care for and talk back less. Thomas's 15th outdoor book, a collection of essays on waterfowl titled The Language of Wings, is due out this year from Willow Creek Press.
But when she'd said what she had to say, she pointed me toward the coulee that ran through the breaks behind her house to the grainfields on top. I liked what I saw immediately. In addition to ideal Indian summer weather, the stubble was in the right place this year, next to the fingers of grass and brush where terrain meets agriculture. Furthermore, she doesn't graze the place, which meant that the bird cover stood thick and lush, untrammeled by bovine intrusion. "This is going to be good," I said aloud to Rocky, and off we went.
The long, winding climb along the edge of the draw failed to produce a flush. As we crested the top, I noticed antelope grazing in a winter-wheat field up ahead and whistled Rocky to a halt before he could spook the herd. My medical partner had an antelope tag for this district, so I hunkered down in the grass and watched the animals, gauging their intentions and evaluating horns as best I could without binoculars.
Finally, we set off for what I regarded as the true heart of the cover: a cattail-choked swale meandering between plowed fields that hold wheat stubble every other year including this one. Rocky worked the cover diligently, but it remained silent and empty. Then as I climbed the bank to begin the long, barren loop back to the vehicle, he pushed up a rooster right in my face. Despite the close range, the shot proved trickier than it looked, for I had to pivot quickly on the steep bank to take the bird going away as he rocketed over my head. Then the noise of the shot yielded to the sound of the dog crashing through the cattails as he completed the retrieve.
That was the only bird we flushed all afternoon. By the time we arrived back at the vehicle, we had four or five miles of up and down behind us, and the dog looked as tired as I felt (in dog years, Rocky is almost as old as I am). I considered all of the effort we'd expended for the single rise, thought about complaining about what had obviously been a poor spring hatch, remembered the lone rooster startling me in a sudden eruption of noise and color, and reconsidered.
I'd told the dog it was going to be a good day, and I'd been right.
Hemingway once famously observed that all bad writers are in love with the epic-council that we who chronicle the outdoors should consider taking to heart. Big-game journals bristle with oversize antlers; angling stories often suggest personal versions of Moby Dick. In the world of wingshooting, one form of outdoor sport in which size really doesn't seem to matter, we compensate with descriptions of clouds of pheasants, skies full of geese and limits of more birds than most of us would care to pluck in one sitting.
Nothing wrong with any of that-and to the extent that I've described my share of such goings-on, mea culpa-but as I look back over a long, busy life in the field, it occurs to me that some of the most memorable days I've enjoyed involved not shooting much and sometimes not shooting anything at all. Perhaps we all need to fine-tune our appreciation for the days that end with nearly as many shells in the game vest as there were when we set out.
I learned this lesson naturally when I cut my wingshooting teeth as a kid in upstate New York. Back then one ruffed grouse made a great day. Add a woodcock and you had a spectacular mixed bag; jump-shoot a black duck off of a pond on the way home and you were operating at the edge of epic territory-all for the price of three shotgun shells (assuming good shooting). My subsequent life out West and in Alaska makes all that look tame, but the clarity with which I still remember those birds and how hard we worked for them startles me to this day.
Spectacular surroundings offer one easy way to compensate for a paucity of shooting. That's one reason why I've never acquired a taste for driving cornfields or wading through CRP despite the number of pheasants such cover can hold. (And please don't anyone misinterpret this as criticism of the CRP program. I may not love to hunt CRP, but I'm damn glad we have it.) When I'm chasing Gambel's quail through the desert on a still winter morning or beating the brush for sharptails along the Lewis & Clark route through the Missouri Breaks, the birds don't have to provide much more than an excuse to be there.
As those woodcock taught me years ago, adding even a little bit of variety to the bag can turn a good day into a great one: a sharptail at the end of a long slog through pheasant cover, say, or a covey of Huns when you least expect it. And no wingshooting venue offers more opportunity to make something out of nothing this way than the duck blind.
Geese are a great wild card that can turn around a slow morning over the decoys faster than you can change loads to accommodate them. As much as I've enjoyed the pageantry of dedicated goose hunts-digging pits, placing hundreds of shells, shivering in the dark and hoping for the best-incidental geese have sometimes left even bigger impressions. Lone, lost honkers respond especially well to calling even in the absence of decoys, which is why I always carry a goose call in my duck vest. Every season I talk a few single geese right into my mallard spread, at which point the day officially becomes a triumph no matter what the ducks decide to do. Maybe size matters after all.
Even without geese, a bit of variety can turn a slow morning of duck hunting into a feast... or at least a welcome snack. Here in my home county, 95 percent of the ducks we shoot are mallard drakes... a problem duck hunting friends living elsewhere assure me they'd love to have. Nonetheless, I miss the variety of waterfowl I've enjoyed while hunting in locations like coastal Alaska or the Canadian prairies. On a recent outing to a nearby pond, my partner and I had a flock of divers begin rocketing around us right after legal shooting light. I knew they weren't canvasbacks or redheads. "I think they're ring-neck ducks," I finally whispered as the flock completed its third circuit of the pond.
"What the hell is a ring-neck duck?" he replied.
Patience exhausted and certain that at least one bird would be legal, I stood and dropped the last one in line on the next pass. And when Rocky completed the retrieve, the bird's distinctive bill markings confirmed that we were examining the first representative of the species I'd ever seen in Fergus County, Montana. A lone, decoying gadwall was the only other duck we shot all morning, but of such small triumphs are memorable duck hunts made.
Great dogwork is another certain way to make something out of not much. With all due respect to my friends who run pointing breeds, nothing can accomplish that mission quite like a seasoned retriever, at least when there aren't a lot of birds around. On mornings when the sky is raining ducks, it's sometimes difficult to appreciate the beauty of individual retrieves. But slow days beneath largely silent skies afford better opportunities to savor retrievers at their best-and engage in some well-earned canine bonding when the dog has finished crashing through the ice. I still remember countless mornings when a single such performance by Sky, Sonny or Rocky made me forget all about the ducks that never showed up.
Of course day-saving retrieves don't have to take place over water. Years ago a hunting partner and I had logged several miles in extremely rugged pheasant cover before we flushed the first rooster. My partner dropped the bird with a broken wing, and from my elevated vantage across the coulee I watched the rooster hit the ground and streak off across a winter-wheat field toward the horizon. Sky was a young dog then, but when he returned 20 minutes later with the bird cradled gently in his mouth, I knew I had a great one. We didn't shoot another bird that day, but as far as I was concerned we didn't need to.
And then there is the shooting... I'm decades past keeping score, and frankly I grow uncomfortable around anyone who gets competitive about shooting in the field. But there's something about the occasional great shot-by any member of the party-that can turn the day around. And as with great retrieves, they're usually easier to appreciate in isolation.
Back when son Nick was first learning to shoot, we didn't have a local skeet range. He learned a few basics on hand-thrown clays in the backyard, and then it was time to go hunting. A hundred yards into the cover on the first bird hunt of the year, a lone sharptail rose in front of him and he dropped it in a cloud of feathers, duplicating the serendipity I'd enjoyed years earlier when I'd killed the first ruffed grouse that had flushed in front of me. Perhaps we both should have quit while we were ahead. That too was the only bird of the day, but I'm sure neither of us will ever forget it.
I'm not sure there's much logic to the phrase "cold as hell," but this morning there doesn't have to be. A December arctic high has locked the valley in ice except for the spring creeks, and the mallards should be concentrating on the open water when they return from feeding in the fields. Meanwhile, Rocky and I are huddled beside the decoys concentrating on staying alive. There are no day-job excuses on anyone's part for my solitude this morning. Everyone else just thought I was nuts to venture out in weather like this, and as legal shooting light comes and goes with no sign of ducks, it occurs to me that they may have had a point. Where would I be without the reliable enthusiasm of Labrador retrievers?
I've never had a duck dog that studied the sky as assiduously as Rocky, and suddenly he's offering me his own unique version of a duck-blind point: butt firmly planted in the snow, eyes trained upward, ears cocked forward. And then the object of his attention buzzes the blocks-not the mallard I was expecting but a lost and lonely looking green-wing, juking and dodging invisible aerial obstacles as only teal can.
The shotgun is halfway to my shoulder before I hesitate. No one has ever accused me of being a sentimental hunter, but I can be a philosophical one. The last of the teal should have been gone more than a month ago. As much as I love to eat teal, the right place for this one suddenly seems to be right where it is rather than inside my game vest, and I let him pass. Rocky plainly isn't happy with the decision, but I am.
Why has this particular teal remained behind in such a hostile and alien environment while all his mates have winged south? Someone once asked a comparable question about a leopard in the snows of Kilimanjaro. The answers may carry no Earth-shaking implications, but you never know. It's enough to keep me occupied until the greenheads arrive, and I suspect I'll remember the lone teal long after the mallards have been shot, fetched, plucked and eaten.
And the memory is always where the best of hunts live on.
Don Thomas and his wife, Lori, divide their time between homes in Montana and Alaska. Their kids are grown now and have been replaced by Labs, who are easier to care for and talk back less. Thomas's 15th outdoor book, a collection of essays on waterfowl titled The Language of Wings, is due out this year from Willow Creek Press.
