Crazy for Krull

I have a problem writing about Krull Lodge. On second thought, make that two problems: where to start and how to shoehorn everything there is to say into a single article. Having made five trips to this prairie paradise, I would love to describe so many luminous images, so many compelling experiences, that I can’t possibly do justice to them all.
    But that’s the thing about Krull Lodge. Yes, it’s a world-class bird hunting destination, one of the few places where it’s possible to attain the South Dakota “Grand Slam”: pheasants, Hungarian partridge, sharptails and prairie chickens. But for me it has become something more than that. For me, Krull Lodge is a memory factory.
    There was the morning that Tina, my petite English setter, pointed near the edge of one of the many glittering ponds that festoon the 11,000-acre property. Before I could get there to flush, however, my friend Steve Smith—yes, that Steve Smith—clobbered a rooster upslope of us over his young black Lab, Murphy. Tina broke at Steve’s shot, but when she determined that Murphy had everything under control, she wheeled, raced back and reestablished her point. It was a little hard to believe that a bird would hold through all of that, but when I kicked the slough grass a single Hun buzzed out. It took both barrels of the Fox, but I finally dropped it.
    That was the good news. The bad news was where I dropped it, which was more or less smack in the middle of the pond. A 50-yard water retrieve wasn’t in Tina’s repertoire, but Steve brought Murphy in, gave her a line and, with the help of a few carefully lobbed stones, she brought the episode to a successful conclusion.
    That was the only Hun we saw on that trip, and while I didn’t know it at the time, it would prove crucial to achieving what so far is my only Grand Slam. You typically get several chances on Huns during the course of a three-day hunt, and because you can pretty much assume finding pheasants, it’s the prairie birds—the chickens and sharptails—that pose the sternest challenge. They’re wholly wild and utterly unpredictable; the only thing about chickens and sharptails that you can count on is that you can’t count on them at all.
    And even on a place like Krull, which boasts literally thousands of acres of the shaggy native grass that makes veteran prairie grouse hunters weak in the knees, finding the birds is only half the battle. You still have to get close enough to shoot them—and that can be a tall order, especially by the time I get there in November.
    On the second morning of that particular hunt, however, I got it done. Terry Barker and I were following Tina up and down the rolling hills on the south side of the ranch when the setter pointed just at the crest of a rise. And just as we topped the crest to see that it overlooked a kind of broad, bowl-shaped depression, the sharptails started cackling up. They were out there—in fact, had our approach not been hidden by the terrain, I’m sure they would have flushed wild—but I swung hard, yanked the rear trigger and knocked one down. Somehow I had the presence of mind to reload quickly, and when another bunch got up a second or two later, again at long range, another shot from the Fox’s left tube hit home.
    “Nice shooting!” Terry yelled. I’d been between Terry and the birds, so he hadn’t been able to get in on the action. I felt badly about that—but not that badly.
    Still, I wasn’t really thinking about the Slam when, on the final afternoon of our hunt, Tina and I struck out across a grassy flat, got lucky and came back with a brace of chickens. At that point, yeah, I felt like maybe I’d accomplished something.
But mostly I was just grateful—grateful that a place like Krull Lodge exists and that I could enjoy the pleasure and the privilege of hunting there.

You can head to Krull with a specific goal in mind—killing a prairie chicken, for example—and for a certain percentage of guests that’s the draw. For me, though, it’s more about reveling in the opportunity to hunt big, beautiful country—country where I can turn loose a dog and roam to my heart’s content without having to worry about property boundaries, other hunters or much of anything, really. There’s no “bus hunting” at Krull; you hunt with your own group, period, on ground that your group and yours alone will hunt that day. You can hunt together or split off to hunt in different directions; it’s entirely up to you. There is plenty of cover of every description—feed strips, shelterbelts, creek bottoms, native prairie—and plenty of birds (within reason, anyway) to accommodate everyone.
    That’s another thing about Krull Lodge: It’s not about high volume—the lodge limit is a moderate six roosters a day—it’s about high quality. The lodge releases birds to be sure, pheasants and Huns both, but it is done artfully and selectively. Yes, you are likely to find yourself in situations where birds are flushing like a fireworks display, and that’s great, giddy fun. It is more common, though, to flush one bird here, one there, one a little farther down the line—the kind of good, consistent hunting most of us would gladly sign a lifetime contract for.
    Without wanting to push the comparison too far, hunting pheasants at Krull is, for those of us old enough to remember, like hunting pheasants during the heyday of Soil Bank or CRP. A couple of years ago Terry Barker hit the nail on the head when he observed that only when you realize that you’re flushing more cocks than hens does it occur to you that the population has been “supplemented.” There are plenty of wild roosters around, too, and trust me when I say that it’s rarely easy to tell the difference.
    It’s the same with the Huns. When a covey boils up all around you and you’re desperately trying to get your muzzles to settle on one bird, you’re unlikely to devote much time to wondering about their provenance.
    Of course that’s exactly how the Krulls want it. Lynda—vivacious, attractive, dynamic—is the lodge’s public persona, and in the manner of every successful person in this obscenely difficult profession, she wields an iron fist in a velvet glove. Her husband, Keith, is more laid back, more in the mold of the droll, laconic Western cattleman, and while he’s content to stay behind the scenes and let Lynda run “the front of the house,” he’s the one who assigns the hunting areas and generally oversees the ranching, farming and habitat management sides of the operation. If Krull Lodge’s 80-percent repeat clientele is any indication, the division of labor appears to be working.
    The main lodge is unpretentious but comfortable and tastefully appointed in a sporting motif. Starting around 5 pm, guests gather in the spacious lounge to recount the events of the day, nibble on a variety of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres and help themselves to the contents of what is surely one of the most impressively stocked bars in South Dakota.
    The guest rooms feature queen-size beds, and there’s a separate locker room for cleaning guns, drying boots, hanging damp clothes and bathing muddy dogs. Speaking of dogs, a kennel building with multiple inside/outside runs is available—although dogs are welcome in the guest rooms if they’re crated.
    In a previous life—before her last name was Krull—Lynda produced a series of cooking videos. So it comes as no surprise that the food at Krull is routinely superb. The prime rib, in particular, is unsurpassed in my experience, and I’m not alone in that assessment. (A word to the wise: If you like your prime rib rare, order medium-rare, and if you like it medium-rare, order medium. If you like it medium or, heaven forbid, well done, may God have mercy on your soul, because Lynda will have none.)
    If you’re beginning to suspect that this isn’t your normal, garden-variety hunting lodge, you’re on the right track. Did I mention that the guides are the most ridiculously overqualified bunch this side of Tierra del Fuego? I mean Bill Shattuck guides at Krull—and Bill Shattuck, ladies and gentlemen, is a goddamned legend. He taught me everything I know about prairie grouse hunting, which is roughly 10 percent of what he knows.

One thing you’re bound to notice quickly at Krull is that there are a lot of bristly, bearded dogs trotting around. Deutsch Drahthaars, they are called—and if you have the bad sense to call them “German wirehaired pointers” within earshot of their owners—a group that includes Lynda, Keith, all of the guides and a certain percentage of the guests—you’d better be prepared to duck and cover.
    You see, long before she and Keith opened the lodge, Lynda was an internationally recognized breeder, trainer and exhibitor of Drahthaars. Indeed, she was among the first Americans and undoubtedly the first American woman to win the respect of the notoriously insular German Drahthaar community.
    One morning a couple of seasons ago when there were only a handful of guests at the lodge, Lynda broke away to give Terry Loch, Don Carmichael and me a little demonstration of what her two “stars,” Jasmine and Katrina (aka The McNasty Sisters) were capable of. A certain sunflower field had just been combined, every rooster that had been hanging out there had relocated to a certain series of milo feed strips, and the beating that Jazz and Trina put on those birds was nothing short of criminal. If dogs could earn PhDs, Jazz and Trina would have them—and their degrees would stand for Doctors of Pheasantry. We even witnessed a sight that is only slightly less rare than the appearance of Halley’s Comet: one Drahthaar voluntarily backing another.
    The Guns did their jobs as well, and while there were a couple of harrowingly long retrieves (which only added luster to the dogs’ performance), every bird we shot at ended up in the bag. That’s not something you can say often. There was a moment when a rooster that barreled out on the left side of the line looked to have gotten away, but after fumbling with his safety Don made a miraculous recovery and folded it. In other words, he pulled one out of his you-know-what to preserve our perfect morning.
    The most memorable shot I’ve ever witnessed at Krull, however, came on my first visit. My pro trainer friend Bob Olson and I had rendezvoused there with the Knight family from Arkansas, a hard-hunting clan that ranged in age from 80-something Virgil Sr. (aka “Daddy”) to teenaged Tyler. They were pulling a dog trailer the size of an aircraft carrier, and when they arrived at the lodge and opened its doors, English setters boiled out in waves. They just kept coming.
The Knights, we learned quickly, were Setter Men.
    During the course of one action-packed morning, after scattering birds across a half-section or so of ground, Bob and I were circling back to the trucks when a single Hun got up at the edge of range. We both fired and missed, but as the bird streaked past the trucks about 150 yards out, Daddy leveled his 20-gauge corn-shucker and crumpled it.
    That in itself was hardly remarkable—as an old Arkansas quail hunter, Daddy Knight had dropped thousands of birds in his lifetime. Let’s just say that on this occasion his “window” of opportunity (wink, wink) was exceptionally narrow and leave it at that.
    On that same trip one of Virgil Jr.’s setters, a real knucklehead that Bob recommended he find a new home for, decided that herding cattle would be more fun than hunting birds. He slipped through a fence and, barking all the while, began racing around and through a small bunch of befuddled-looking Black Angus. Virgil climbed over the fence after him, and then Bob climbed over to help. The setter wasn’t eager to be caught, however, and the ensuing debacle resembled two hunter-orange rodeo clowns trying to tackle a greased pig. The mud was flying almost as thickly as the expletives. It wasn’t pretty, but it was howlingly funny.
    At the other end of the spectrum was the perfect decorum displayed on our most recent trip by Mike Wickman’s German shorthairs, Carmen, Rose and Bock. It was an impressive sight to see them all stacked up on a point-and-honor 15 yards apart. What was even more impressive, though, was all three standing steady to wing & shot while Mike dropped the bird—and then two of them remaining that way while Mike called the name of the dog he wanted to make the retrieve.
As Don Carmichael, speaking for all of us whose dogs are trained to minimum competency, observed: “You don’t see that every day.”

Something else you don’t see every day is a dog slamming onto point while carrying a dead bird in its mouth. I’ve witnessed it only once, and, yes, it happened at Krull Lodge.
    It was late in the afternoon, down in the flatlands to the east of the main ranch, and the prairies were glowing in the gilded light. Ernie, my talented but problematic setter, had done a masterful job on a covey of Huns, tracking a long way across a field of shaved alfalfa, his focus unwavering. I knew it could only be Huns in that sparse cover, and I figured that even if I were close enough to shoot, I’d be blinded by the sun when they blew out.
    Somehow, though, I was able to flank them. Even more amazingly, when they flushed I managed to scratch down a double.
I was prepared to quit on that high note, but Ernie had other plans. En route to the truck he pointed in the first of several parallel strips of grass. A single Hun flushed, and then dropped at my shot in the next strip. Ernie raced for the retrieve—and with the bird in his mouth shuddered onto point again. This time he had a pair of Huns nailed, and they both ended up in my game bag, as well.
    Is it any wonder I call Krull a memory factory?

Author’s Note: For more information on taking a South Dakota Grand Slam, contact Krull Lodge, 888-486-8731; www.krulllodge.com.

Tom Davis is an Editor at Large for Shooting Sportsman.