Lost But Found

The front blew through midmorning, whistling in the aspens, rattling the curled leaves of the oaks. By early afternoon the skies had cleared and the high had settled in, the sun bathing the North Country in pale autumnal light. The air had a glassy edge, and what wind there was came in random eddies, swirling up gustily only to shudder, ebb and amount to nothing.
I swallowed the last of my coffee, shook the cup out the open door of the Jeep, and screwed it back on the Thermos. It was Butch’s turn in the rotation, and when I opened his crate, the black-ticked setter stood stoically, his front paws on the bumper, while I strapped on his beeper. I already had laid the Fox on top, and as I slid it out of the case and prepared to close the tailgate, I said “All right, Butch, let’s go. Find a bird.”
Butch clambered down, lifted his leg on a tussock of sweet fern and bounded into the cover: an aspen cut festooned with hazel, briers and maple-leaf viburnum. Dropping No. 8s into the Fox’s tubes, I closed the gun and followed him.
An hour later the same shells were in the chambers. We’d scraped through that first piece of cover without moving a bird, crossed a sandy two-track and dipped into a hollow that reeked of woodcock but proved as desolate as the moon. There was a bowl, its rim shaggy with popple, that I had in mind—a place Donny Steffin had showed me the only other time I’d hunted here. I was sure it lay more or less due north (we’d been heading west), and although it took some zigging and zagging, we finally found it.
Unfortunately, it was obvious that other hunters had found it, too. We flushed just two grouse, both of which blasted out silly wild before Butch got the first whiff of them.
We circled in a clockwise direction, angled through an oak woods, followed a logging road and came to another dandy-looking cut. I didn’t remember it from the time I’d hunted with Donny and figured that somehow I’d drifted east. Good cover being good cover, though, I decided to push it out.
That spot proved birdless as well, and although Butch continued to press on gamely, it was clear that his interest and energy were waning. Mine were, too, and on top of that I was getting a little uneasy. We’d fetched up against a fortress-like wall of spruce and balsam fir, and now I knew for certain that I’d entered terra incognita. I had no doubt that I was north of the truck, and I suspected I was east of it. But not knowing the lay of the land, I was afraid that if I tried to cut southwest, cross-country, I might miss the truck entirely and, like an orbiter that takes a bad reentry angle, go shooting off into space.

Of course, if I’d had a GPS with the truck’s coordinates punched in, there would have been no debate. I could have taken a beeline straight to it. And I suppose if I’d had a cell phone and the OnStar system (or the equivalent), I could have done about the same thing.
Neither of those alternatives being on the table, I sat with my back against a lichen-scabbed boulder, called in Butch and dribbled some water into his mouth. He shook, dropped and scrabbled in the leaves before standing, shaking again and resting his head on my knee.
I reached out a hand, kneaded a silky ear and said, “I hate to tell you this, Butchie, but we’re a little lost.”
In his Complete Book of Outdoor Lore, Clyde Ormond observed: “While it is true that very few people become permanently lost and meet with disaster because of it, there are few outdoorsmen who have never become confused in the woods.”
That phrase “confused in the woods” sums up the majority of these events among grouse hunters. We may get a little wet and cold, we may lose some hunting time, we may even get back to the cabin late and miss the cocktail hour, but seldom does lasting harm come of it. A group that included a friend of mine hunting country new to them in northern Minnesota got turned around on a rainy day and marched some ungodly number of miles in the wrong direction. Borderline hypothermic, they finally came out on a road, where they flagged down a passerby and arranged a shuttle back to their trucks.

That’s about the most extreme example of lost grouse hunters I know of, although I have no doubt that some have spent nights under the stars. The real cautionary tale in this regard, however, is the story of Ed Scherer, the Hall of Fame skeet shooter. While his companion stayed with their vehicle, Scherer and two dogs headed into the Ontario woods about 150 miles north of International Falls. A few hours later one of the dogs straggled back. A freak blizzard clobbered the area that evening, hampering the search, and no trace of Scherer or the other dog was ever found. Yes, he may have gotten lost—however you care to define the term—but it could be that he had an accident or suffered a stroke or a heart attack. No one will ever know.
This brings up the distinction between “lost” and “missing.” A lot of grouse hunters have been lost. Unlike Ed Scherer, though, I’d wager that very few have gone missing for longer than a few hours.
As you’d expect, Gene Hill weighed in on this subject. “For safety’s sake,” he instructed, “you should always tell someone where you’re going when you hunt alone. Unless, of course, you’re going to prime woodcock cover and the flight is down.”
This recalls that staple of the literature: the story of the citified guest who is driven around in circles by his canny host, becomes hopelessly lost by the time they reach the covert, and wouldn’t have been able to find his way back for love or money—the whole idea, of course. It seems to me that Corey Ford riffed on this in his “Lower 40” series, and trust me when I tell you it’s no fiction.
The first time I went grouse hunting, the guy who took me drove to the covert via Guatemala. I could have sworn we passed the same farm three times, but I was new to Wisconsin then and supposed that, to my eyes, all farms with red barns and black-and-white cows may have looked alike. Once he determined I was trustworthy, Ken took the direct route. The “secret” covert, I learned, lay about five miles due west of town.
These days such scheming is largely a thing of the past, pensioned into gilt-framed antiquity by the emergence of portable GPS technology. Unless the battery fails, you needn’t ever be lost again —or even temporarily misplaced—anywhere on planet Earth. There are grouse hunters of my acquaintance who not only have their coverts programmed into their GPS units but also the hotspots within those coverts: thickets of gray dogwood and autumn olive, stands of thornapples, and so on.
Offshore anglers have been doing the same thing for years, marking wrecks, reefs and the like. But somehow this feels different. It seems like it violates the code, although it’s hard to articulate the specifics of the charge or argue the case convincingly. Don’t we all want to spend as much time as possible in productive cover? Don’t we all want to hunt “efficiently,” husbanding our resources and avoiding areas likely to be barren of game? Isn’t the GPS simply another tool for achieving these ends?
Apparently, a hell of a lot of people in brush pants are answering these questions with a resounding “yes.”
A lot of hunters are carrying cell phones into the woods, too, putatively in case of emergency. Again it’s hard to argue with that, as long as the damn thing’s turned off. Recently in the woods when I heard “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” I thought I must be hallucinating, but then I saw the guy I was hunting with reach inside his vest and flip open his cell phone.
“I’ll have to call you back,” he said. “We’ve got a dog on point.”
Welcome to grouse hunting, 21st Century style.
Tar me with the Luddite brush, but at some point you have to draw a line in the sand and make a value judgment, a judgment separating technology that enhances one’s experience of hunting from technology that blunts and dilutes that experience. It’s as if we keep adding layers, insulating and distancing ourselves from the game and its environment and making us less reliant on the hard-earned skills that, once upon a time, it was assumed a sportsman should possess.
The electronic dog collar is a case in point. Many hunters these days use it as a matter of course, quipping that it’s their dog’s “hearing aid.” I use it when I hunt Butch’s kennelmate, Ernie, but I wish I didn’t have to. Ultimately, it’s an admission of my failures as a trainer—yet another example of technology filling a hole in the human skill set.
Then there’s the electronic beeper—the technologically “improved” version of the bells that grouse and woodcock hunters used to hang on their dogs to keep track of them in heavy cover. This is where I have to come clean and admit that I’ve been utterly dependent on this innovation since the days when my first setter, Zack, was paying only the vaguest attention to my whereabouts but holding his points as if he were hewn of marble. The beeper—its steady beacon guiding me through the dark and bloody tangles I frequented in those days—saved my sanity. If I’d had to find Zack based on my memory of where his bell had stopped ringing, desperately attempting to triangulate that silence, I’d have been reduced to gibbering idiocy.
So-called tracking collars are now in widespread use as well—the same telemetry technology that enables biologists to follow the movements of wildlife. Houndsmen—bear and lion hunters in particular—were the first to adapt this technology to dogs. The first bird hunter to use it, as recounted in his memoir Zip Zap, may well have been my friend Mike Gaddis. In those days, circa 1980 or so, the units were heavy, cumbersome and hard to get your hands on; now they’re streamlined, weigh next to nothing, and can be shipped overnight. Gaddis, who’s absolutely phobic about losing any of his homebred English setters, never turns a dog loose without buckling on a tracking collar... and making sure it works.
This, too, is a position hard to argue with. I can imagine things that feel worse than losing a dog, but I’d just as soon not be on a first-name basis with them.
The latest marvel is a unit that combines the functions of a tracking collar, a beeper collar and a portable GPS and allows you to follow your dog’s every move in real time. In addition you can download music, trade stocks, watch ESPN and order Chinese takeout with it.
I ’m kidding about the latter—for now. The bottom line, though, is that the juggernaut of technology rolls on, and it’s becoming harder all the time to get lost in the woods. I appear to be one of a dwindling minority of grouse hunters among whom it’s not only still possible but also still happens on a regular basis. And I’m not so sure I don’t like it that way.

Unlike being pregnant, being lost is very much a matter of degree. You can be “a little lost.” In this respect the word itself, “lost,” seems too inflexibly stark to convey the fine shadings we intend it to. In the same way that Eskimos are said to have many words for snow according to its freshness, granularity, water content and so on, grouse hunters should have a more robust vocabulary for expressing the different gradations of lost, from “a bit turned around” to “This doesn’t seem right” to “Where the f—- am I?”
It wasn’t until I became a grouse and woodcock hunter that I had any experience with this. In Iowa, where I was born and raised and where I cut my teeth hunting pheasants and quail, getting lost was simply beyond the realm of possibility. The country was open, gridded with roads running north-south and east-west at unvarying one-mile intervals, and there was always a silo or windmill to reckon by. I never knew or even heard of an Iowa hunter who carried a compass. It made as much sense as carrying quinine.
When I moved to Wisconsin and got into grouse hunting, I learned pretty quickly what can happen when it’s a cloudy day and you’re hacking around in the swamps. Add a dog who’s a roamer like Zack—as my friend Andy Cook observed, Zack saw places no white man had seen in a hundred years—and the equation gets even dicier.
After a while, it dawns on you that you don’t know what direction you’re heading; that you don’t have a clue where you are or, more specifically and importantly, where you are in relation to your vehicle; and that nightfall’s drawstring is implacably tightening. If not fear, exactly, you feel a kind of alarmed apprehension—a cold hand pressing on the back of your shirt.
The first time I found myself in this situation, what I finally took my bearings from was the throb of the Lake Michigan surf. I knew that as long as I walked away from that I’d be heading west—in the direction of the road I’d parked on. I came out a couple of hundred yards north of the truck as happy as anyone ever was to see a rusted-out Chevy 150 with bald tires, rotten floorboards and a faded decal of a bobwhite quail on the tailgate. Eventually Zack showed up, too.
The next day I bought a compass—an inexpensive but reliable model in a flip-top plastic case—and although I’ve been known to forget it, I always try to have it on me whenever and wherever I go grouse hunting. Ernie is every bit the roamer Zack was, and I never know when he’ll lead me over a hill or across a swamp and we’ll find ourselves in a place we’ve never been.
The thing is, sometimes these places have birds in them. Over the years my dogs’ inclinations to ramble have tended to pay off, although this is not a behavior I’ve explicitly sanctioned; I’ve had little control over it and have become accepting and even philosophical about it. I’ve noticed, however, that Ernie’s far-flung points seem even more remote than Zack’s did—a corollary, no doubt, of the rule stating that once you hit 50 the fences get higher, the creeks wider and the walks between birds longer.
I can think of any number of choice pieces of cover—gnarly alder humps surrounded by sedge marsh, spiky popple cuts hidden by walls of balsam fir—that I had no clue existed and that the dogs get all the credit for leading me to. But first I had to be willing to get a little lost.

Butch eventually scratched out a bed in the ferns and sprawled there, taking a load off. I counted our options and finally resolved that the smart move would be to head due south. Sooner or later we’d come out on the county road; from there I could find the two-track I’d driven in on and follow it to the Jeep. It was going to be a hike, but at least it had a concrete endpoint. And maybe we’d stumble over some decent cover on the way.
When we topped a hill and saw what lay ahead, I thought at first that somehow —and this was really unnerving—we’d walked a circle and come out above the bowl again. The landscape had that same configuration: a sort of boggy, teardrop-shaped flat, carpeted in wiry scrub and flanked by slopes of broomstick popple.
But then I realized that this flat was significantly wider and longer and that the slopes surrounding it were gentler and broader. It wasn’t the bowl; it was the bowl times three. And as Butch and I soon discovered, it was lousy with grouse —grouse that, by all appearances, hadn’t felt much hunting pressure. When you step no more than 10 paces in front of your rigid dog in late October and grouse start popping up all around you, it tells you something. Butch pointed a couple of woodcock, too, and I could only imagine how many there might have been a week or two earlier.
I christened this spot “The Super Bowl,” and, yes, I know how to get back. I’m just happy I got lost enough to find it.

Tom Davis hails from Green Bay. His stepdaughter recently has expressed concern that perhaps it isn’t such a hot idea for him to hunt alone.