Pride of the Prairie

    Ten minutes, 100 yards. Eight ringnecks, nine shells.” A hundred years ago, such is the shorthand I might have sent home from the field over telegraph wires. During a hunt in northeast South Dakota last fall, however, I used e-mail to gush the news to my wife. Her response was immediate: “How did you shoot so well? You left your gun here!”
    It’s true. And that’s why the 20-bore Beretta I borrowed from Bruce Prins, owner of Prairie Sky Guest & Game Ranch, made that November day all the better. Just as a sommelier remembers the taste nuances of great wines, I often recall the details of bird flushes. Such is not the case with that South Dakota experience, though; months later, as I write this, the details are still a Technicolor blur. Roosters burst from the shelterbelt in singles and pairs in a kind of choreographed craziness. Most of the birds flew my way, where I walked alone parallel to two 100-pound yellow Labs that were rousting them from the ash trees, bluestem and plum thickets that comprised the shelterbelt. Because my hunting friends were on the other side of the dense cover and refused to join me, I had the sweet spot to myself.
    I’ve pass-shot enough liberated pheasants to know how warm the gun barrels can get, but these birds were running and then flushing, goosed aloft by those minesweeper Labs. After downing five birds, I paused. “Should I stop shooting?” I hollered to our guide, Bob Hull.
    He stepped from the thick cover, his glasses steaming from exertion, his bird vest bulging like an orange donut. “Hell, no!” he said. “This is what you came for, isn’t it?”
    Well, yes. And so I made a pig of myself. Rooster number six was another head shot. So was number seven and then eight. “Enough!” I said aloud, breaking open the gun. One of my friends appeared through the cover and stepped in as designated shooter. He killed three more birds while I followed him. Lying in bed that night, I was still tingling from the fastest and most exciting pheasant hunt I’d ever experienced.
    Forgive me for bragging a bit there. If you have ever been “in the zone,” you know about emoting. In truth, on a good day I’m a so-so shot and will prove it quickly if you ever share a duck blind with me. Ducks, incidentally, were the key reason I had come to this mostly ignored corner of South Dakota, where a hunter can squint and see both North Dakota and Minnesota. The region of rolling native prairie and wooded slopes, coulees and draws lies between the glaciated Coteau des Prairies and Minnesota’s river lowlands. Nearly 200 glacial lakes range from a few acres to 17,000 acres in size, and there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of potholes.
    Puddle ducks nest here, and migrating waterfowl pile into the area, which gets little hunting pressure. That’s because of the popularity of better-known South Dakota haunts but also because the game department issues only 3,500 nonresident waterfowl permits statewide each year. Lodge owners and outfitters like Bruce Prins need a backup plan for guests who don’t score in the state lottery. That’s where the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux tribe of the Little Traverse Reservation comes in. Bruce has an agreement to secure some of the 400 tribal permits, assuring that all guests at Prairie Sky get to hunt if they so desire. In addition to the 2,000 acres that Bruce owns, he has access to about 15,000 acres of leased property and tribal lands.
    I signed up for three consecutive morning hunts, each different in its own way. The first morning found two partners and me helping guide Robert Rudder break ice on a frozen pothole. The air was cemetery still, the temperature 18 degrees. Hiding in the marsh grass, we squatted on stools and listened to the whir of RoboDuk wings as dawn cracked open a bloodshot eye. We didn’t have to wait long.
    “Ducks—two o’clock,” Robert grunted behind us. I heard the whoosh of wings as a knot of birds dropped in before we were ready. Barrels flashed in the tentative light. Robert’s yellow Lab, Sport, whined in complaint when we missed. The ducks were gone as quickly as they had come.
    Nothing is more embarrassing than to blow gimme shots like those. Standing up, I stretched a bit, trying to transect muscle memory with mental memory. Be ready. Finger on the safety, gun across the knees. Like a pinch-hitter, I dug in, adjusting the bill of my cap, driving my rubber toes into the pond bottom. Bring on the ducks! And Robert, who hails from Alabama and is an expert caller, did exactly that, suckering doubles and small flocks into our little spread of only a half-dozen decoys.
     One of my friends iced a mallard; the other killed a ring-billed duck. I felt sorry for the whining Sport, whose weight the ice couldn’t support. I could hear him pacing behind us and Robert’s shushing between chattering on his duck calls. Eventually I found the groove and started building my own limit. Our guide would come back later with a johnboat to retrieve the gadwalls, wigeon, ringbills and single greenhead we shot that morning.
    Besides our own gunfire, the only shots I heard were from other guests hunting a pothole a mile distant. I don’t believe these prairie ducks had ever been shot at.
    A good waterfowl guide earns his pay and then some. The guides at Prairie Sky spend afternoons scouting potential sites for the following morning’s hunt. They monitor duck flight patterns and feeding behaviors, and they check the weather constantly. For our second hunt, Robert chose the back of a huge pasture that jutted like a peninsula into a wrap-around prairie lake. Walking through the cattails in the dark, our coal-miner headlamps jiggling like train engines in the switching yard, we nearly stepped on several pheasants that blew up in our faces. In the headlamp glare, puffy cattail heads looked like moldy hot dogs. Again there was no wind, and warmer temperatures had melted the ice.
    Four of us kept Sport busy during a grand shoot that morning, thanks to Robert’s excellent calling. Surrounding hills soaked up the Crump! Crump! of our gunfire, which sent pheasants scurrying from the marsh like refugees before an invading army. They might have saved their energy, because we were on tribal land, where shooting pheasants is verboten. One of my partners killed a brace of drake buffleheads and decided to get both birds mounted. With limits secured, we had just unloaded and cased the guns when a swarm of Canada geese rowed overhead within range.
    What a way to finish! And I had the afternoon, with that helter-skelter shelterbelt experience, still ahead.
    On the third morning Bruce matched our party with guide Drew Davis from Fort Collins, Colorado. Riding shotgun in Davis’s pickup, I noticed a Garmin GPS on his dusty dashboard. “I’m new to Prairie Sky,” the 25-year-old said, “but not new to waterfowl guiding. Last year I guided 59 days during Arkansas’ 60-day season. Before that I spent 72 days in Saskatchewan. This year I came here.”
    “Why?” I wondered.
    Drew grinned. “I heard there were lots of ducks and not many duck hunters. The GPS helps me keep track of all the good places to hunt. Yesterday afternoon there were thousands of ducks right where we’re going.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “Hammer, South Dakota.”
    Presumably to put the hammer on some ducks; after all, what kind of name is “Hammer” for a town? Ah, but the best-laid plans . . . . The 40-knot wind that had been whistling around our cabin all night whimpered to silence by dawn, and the expanding prairie light revealed a Mediterranean-blue sky and a chamois-colored earth that had sucked away summer’s green. It was a beautiful morning to be on the prairie but a lousy day for duck hunting. There was no shortage of ducks; skein after skein inched across the sky before spinning, tornado-like, to an enormous raft of waterfowl resting a half-mile from our hides. We estimated there to be 5,000 or more birds. Drew called until his throat was peeled, while his black Lab, Swat, whined endlessly. I managed to shoot a hen bufflehead, and Swat made an honest retrieve.
    Prairie Sky is located six miles southwest of Veblen (established 1900, population 321), in Marshall County. On the drive back, past grainfields with sheet water glaring under the sun, I talked Drew into driving through Hammer. His “Nothing there” wasn’t quite accurate. One of the half-dozen broken-down houses was occupied. An Indian, his ponytail in a long braid, walked from the clapboard shack, past the satellite dish in the backyard, and to his beater station wagon. I wondered if he hunted ducks, but didn’t stop to ask. Instead we stopped at the local cemetery. Some of the 30-odd tombstones were legible, including “Ludwig Hammer, 1869-1895.” Mystery solved.
    The spacious and comfortable 5,000- square-foot lodge at Prairie Sky was built in 1986, but it had been vacant for 10 years when Bruce Prins and his wife, Corinne, bought it in 1999. Four cabins cluster near the lodge. Each cabin has at least two bedrooms and a loft and can sleep four people. The rustic cabins have heat, air conditioning and a wood fireplace but no TV. “If guests need to watch television, we’ve screwed up,” Corinne said.
    Open year-round, Prairie Sky also caters to horse lovers who want to ride the trails and take pack trips. From mid-September through mid-November, however, hunter orange and camo are the prevailing color schemes. The lanky, soft-spoken Bruce is 6 feet, 6 inches—a true seven-footer in his Stetson. He and Corinne scour resumes each year to pick staff. Our cook was Shannon Money, a Dallas chef who wanted to work with game before opening his own restaurant. We enjoyed duck Wellington, seared pheasant breast with honey/dijon cream sauce, and other treats. Hunters are served a continental breakfast at 5:30. AIT (asses in trucks) is precisely 6:15, with legal shooting time about 7:30. Breakfast is on-demand when duck hunters return. Lunch is from 12:30 to 2, with the afternoon reserved for pheasant hunting and possibly sharp-tailed grouse. One afternoon we shot three sharptails from a small flock we chanced upon.
    “Most hunters book us for the ducks,” Bruce said, “but if you come to South Dakota, you expect ringnecks, too, and that’s why we added the pheasant hunting program.” The pheasant hunting is confined to about 500 acres of food plots and prairie grass. Guides are locals who either bring their own dogs or use Prairie Sky’s resident German shorthaired pointers.
    The birds are long-tailed, high-flying roosters, and when routed, they streak for the half-mile-long shelterbelt. I recommend the west side—and bring plenty of shells.

    Author’s Note: For more information on duck and pheasant hunting in South Dakota, contact Prairie Sky Guest & Game Ranch, 605-738-2411; www.prairieskyranch.com.

    Tom Huggler is a Contributing Editor for Shooting Sportsman.