Taking Her Along

Mark Anderson and I were walking on his farm along a side hill above a pothole. Across the water from us were my daughters, Tessa and Molly, moving through the tall grass. Mark is a North Dakota farmer during the crop season and a guide during the pheasant season. Mostly, he plants wheat—miles of wheat. But around Regent, North Dakota, where he lives, they do things differently once the wheat is gone. Years ago the farmers put together a cooperative called the Cannonball Company and invited hunters to harvest their pheasants.
    Tessa, my eldest daughter, is 32, and she is a paramedic and a teacher in Fargo, North Dakota. She has been my hunting buddy since she was 12. She is a beautiful young blonde woman, a fine shot, and the owner of Apollo, a yellow Labrador retriever. Molly, 18, is my youngest. She is also beautiful and a fine shot, but she is dark haired like her mother. At 16 Molly acquired and trained her own yellow Lab named Jack.
    These are the kind of young women who turn heads when they walk by in street attire, but this day they were wearing mismatched hunting clothes, chaps and orange caps—an eclectic wardrobe of their own selection based upon personal experience, comfort and function. As for guns, Tessa was carrying a 12-gauge Remington Model 11-96; Molly had her Beretta Model 391, also in 12.
    The Labs were smashing ahead through the cover with youthful enthusiasm, although Jack, being older and with a year’s more experience than Apollo, knew what he was looking for. He found it, too. A rooster came up and banked left across the water. Molly had the shot and, in my opinion, waited too long. The rooster crossed the earthen dam behind Mark and me—looking almost smug as he headed toward Bismarck. Molly shot once. The bird dropped his head and clenched his wings to his body, falling with a half-twist almost straight down into the bluestem. Mark and I were dumbstruck. We looked at each other and then back at the swamp hole where the bird had fallen. Mark began to trot toward the spot.
    “Wait,” I said, “here comes Jack.”
    I have been a spectator on a lot of these events. Sometimes, especially with pheasants, they don’t work out well. But they do when the bird is dead and the dog is a fine marker. Jack came out of the ditch with the pheasant and returned to his lady—proud, proud and strutting.
    Earlier in the day Tessa and Apollo had combined on a tree-row rooster. The prettiest left-to-right crossing shot of the day: a puff of feathers, the pheasant dead on the ground, and then the bird bouncing back to Tessa in the Lab’s mouth.
    “How’d you do that?” Mark asked.
    “I didn’t; Molly and Tessa train their own dogs.”
    “No,” he said. “I mean, how did you get your girls interested in hunting?”
    The question caught me off guard. I paused for a step and stopped. Then I shifted my old 16-gauge Model 12 to the other arm, buying time. I turned to speak, but all I could give Mark was a blank stare. Well, not entirely blank. In my mind’s eye I was rerunning the early days and our previous years of grouse hunting back home in Minnesota. I desperately searched the tapestry for some insight, some magic formula of words and deeds that had created these two enthusiastic shooting women.
     I knew I couldn’t say that it was the good groundwork I had laid when my wife used to come hunting with me, before babies. The best I could say about that experience was that she had gained a lot of insight. Everything from the four-inch pile of snow on her duck-hunting hat to that crackling cold morning when I said the water seemed awfully still and she proceeded to skip a stone across the frozen surface. “See you in the truck,” she’d said and walked up the beach.
    At least I hadn’t done to my daughters what my Dad had done to me. He’d bought me a long, heavy, 12-gauge Remington pumpgun with a tight Full choke. I can recall to this day the ache it gave my arms to carry it from the Jeep to the duck boat. In those days pheasants were available at about three flushes to the day. The fields were long and so was the barrel. I knew my children would have none of that.
    I bought Tessa a Franchi 20-gauge autoloader with a 26-inch Skeet barrel. It was—and still is—an ideal lightweight grouse killer. She was carrying that gun on a day I remember well. We were hunting, you understand, but mostly we were covering ground. In those years I had a lean and fast English setter named Salty, and she was a premier grouse finder. That day I forgot the early season strolls when the birds had been hidden by leaves—the same leaves that my young daughter now smoothed out and placed in her vest pocket like so many playing cards.  My focus was on the hunt. The foliage was down and the birds vulnerable. It was time to strike! What was I thinking? I had my pearly girl with me, but I received no complaints from her. That day Tessa got four grouse, more than me. She also got blisters, and they bled.
    The tapestry of memories has pictures. Not all are pretty.
    Grouse hunting is a tough place to begin. In a good year, even with an experienced dog, a hunter can flush four birds in an hour of hard hunting. It takes five flushes to get one chance to shoot. There is a danger in doing it the hard way. A beginner can be lost through discouragement. It didn’t occur to me that my child might be different than me. If nothing else, I am dense in the matter of what children want.
    It did, however, occur to my wife. Apparently there were conversations between Tessa and her. When Molly got to be 12, I bought her a 20-gauge Beretta 391 semi-auto with a 26-inch choke-tubed barrel. We shot some clays, she got her firearms certificate, and she was ready for her first hunt. Her mother took me aside. With her words punctuated by a poke to my chest, she said, “Remember: It is supposed to be fun!”
    Molly and I walked in the woods, had a great lunch, gathered pretty leaves and watched as my dog, now a German shorthair, went on point. I placed Molly to my right, where I expected the bird to go, and walked in. Of course the grouse went out straight in front of me. I shot once, over it, and—not being very concerned with the easy shot—shot again, under it. I stared after the grouse in astonishment. Then I looked over into Molly’s brown eyes, gripped my double 20 with both hands, physically pressed down the expletives and said, “Oooooooh . . . d-a-r-n-n-n-n.”
    It takes a strong dam to hold back that much profanity. Maybe I was becoming a better man, but this hunting with my girls was going to kill me.
    You see, grouse hunting can be too hard on children, but it also can be too hard on the father, causing apoplexy. The curse of being a good example is a risk for us male types, but daughters forgive; sons never forget.
    Oh, I wish I had known about Regent, North Dakota, when my girls were just starting out. Bird hunting doesn’t have to be a vision quest. When a father takes his girls fishing for the first few times, he goes to the lily pads and catches sunfish. After a few simple trips with worms and bobbers they can start talking about fly rods and trout streams. At one time pheasants were rare—a subject for serious technique and long arduous walks—but not now, and not in North Dakota. What is more fun than shooting down a flying circus wagon? The walking is long but not as complex as it is in grouse cover. The prairie is a wide-open world to girls accustomed to woods and leaves.
    So my response to Mark’s question should have begun with a long pause, a casual shift of the shotgun to the crook of my other arm, and a long lighting of my briar pipe. Then the answer given framed in worthy images of a loving father and adoring daughters, autumn leaves and flushing gamebirds.
    That’s not how it came out. The better man in me said, “Hell, Mark, I don’t know. I just took them along, and they put up with me.”

Author’s Note: For more information on North Dakota pheasant hunting, contact Cannonball Co., 800-920-4910; www.cannonballcompany.com.

Ted Lundrigan is a lawyer and freelance writer in Pine River, Minnesota. He has contributed to a number of sporting publications and has authored the books Hunting the Sun, Grouse and Lesser Gods and A Bird in the Hand—all of which are available from 800-685-7962; www.shootingsportsman.com.