Stupid is communicable

The first time we got stuck out there, you could probably forgive. The second time? Not so much.

Out there is Northern Nevada. Washed out, flung out, far out. Out so far that satellites don’t even pass over. We were there, me and the Jack Mormon brothers, for chukar. Or probably more correctly, for our dogs. Is there any reason to drive 14 hours from home to run around in some of the remotest country in the states, get your vehicle stuck for days, and end up getting stuck again . . . if not the dog? Come to think of it, there probably are, but those reasons are not the subject of this tale.

The first sticking came as we set up camp–a wall tent for cooking and a couple of sleeping tents. Two diesel trucks and an old Ford Bronco. Six bird dogs–four labs and two setters. Two cases of beer per person. A woodstove for the walltent. Firewood for the stove. A handful of cigars for the apre hunt. We got camp set up well enough, then I decided to move my old ‘92 Dodge and the frozen earth I’d parked on dropped out from beneath me like Grandma’s Angelfood cake. We tried to pull it out with the other truck and sank that one too. Then we spent the entire day and half the next digging. We had radio coverage, so we dug and listened to the first game of the first round of the NFL playoffs, then we listened to the next game and the next. Gained a foot. Sank a foot and a half. The diesels were too heavy for the old Bronco to pull out. We put all of our firewood under the truck tires and not in the woodstove. We dug some more. I crawled under the guts of my truck and dug with a hand trowel. Got the Bronco stuck. Unstuck it. Broke a Hi-Lift jack. Got into the beer. Broke a tow strap. Went to the wall tent for more beer. Climbed out of the wall tent and retrieved muddy wedges of firewood from beneath the truck, light a fire, ate elk burgers and went to bed.

The next morning, we were at it again, digging. Broke another tow strap. Gained two feet. Listened to another NFL playoff game. Sank the trucks deeper. Then, anticlimatically, were out. Out.

Went hunting, one brother one direction, the other the other, me another following a wash of pent up dog-dom wound tighter than an eight day clock after 14 hours in the truck and 36 waiting for their human partners at the campsite mud bog. Six chukars later, I staggered back to the truck and found the Jack Mormons also with limits. We’d taken out our revenge on the birds. Reverse karma. It usually goes another way.

The morning hung low and gray and depressing, threatening more rain. We hadn’t seen a soul in three days. Not even an airplane. Rain would mean more mud. We piled into the Bronco, three guns, three dogs, three beers each for the post hunt.

The chukar were at the far end of the valley, up on a torn up patch of real estate, rock and mountain mahogany and sage and cheat grass piled up like tossed laundry. Between us and them were two stream crossings. In other weather, the crossings were arroyos. In this weather, streams. The first went well enough, the Bronco grinding and spraying water in brown sheets and then we were across. The second was less honest–an eroded bank and a cold stream of mud water and a sharp drop of more than two feet to the water, and the run out was not pretty either–another sharp bank that the Bronco would have to climb and then up onto the two-track and onto the chukar ground.

There was little discussion before the trouble started and if you talk to enough accident survivors, this is a common mantra–all of a sudden, without discussion, you are screwed. And we were. The drop to the stream lurched us forward in our seats and then the water pushed us hard left, downstream and the throttle roared and we washed out into the stream and farther downstream and then water came up over the running boards on the upstream side and we were indeed, screwed, blued and tattooed. We bailed. Dogs out. Guns out. Packs? Out. We scrambled to empty the old truck and the water washed it farther downstream. For a minute there, like a herd of elk taking rifle shots from an unknown location, we milled. Then the moment was gone and we were going, frantically pulling gear and tools, wading knee deep in strong current, balls puckered. Damn. Really? Did we just do this? My friend’s face was the color of piss porcelain.

“I’ll start walking.”

There wasn’t much to discuss. It was mid-morning and camp was eight miles away.

“Okay.”

I ran for a while, then slowed. Hunting boots. Ike jogged beside me in that loose-jointed, toe-dragging gait of his and I walked fast then broke into a run for a while. I’d been running to train for the chukar hills and it felt good after a day and a half of crawling beneath the pickup and only a half day of hiking. So I did this for a while, thinking now and again, of our predicament.

We had two good pickup trucks back at camp, but there was that first crossing of the stream. No jack. A tow strap that had been broken and retied and was now about six feet long. A broken shovel.

I ran again. Then speed walked. Ran. Walked. Ran. Walked. Ike wondered where the hell the chukars were. Ran some more. Ike jogged.

I heard it before I saw it, an engine somewhere, so far off it sounded like an airplane and I looked skyward and saw nothing except gray bile. Walked some more.  It got louder and then, it came around the corner like some sort of yellow metal dinosaur–a backhoe. We were well and truly stuck and here came the one thing that could really make a difference–a backhoe. The operator slowed and opened the cab and asked with the heck I was doing out there and I told him and he said climb aboard. And so I wrapped my right arm around a strut on the outside of the cab and Ike jogged alongside, going back the other way.

The Jack Mormons welcomed me like a snowbound wagon train cheering Jeremiah Johnson to the rescue. I hopped off and slapped skin and the operator–who was traveling to his mine site in the desert and just had happened to come that way that morning–extended the arm of that big hoe and tied a tow strap to the Bronco and half lifted, half pulled it out of the water. We fired it up and water and gravel shot out the tailpipe but it ran and we backed up away from the stream and damn near kissed the ground. We promised a bottle to the operator and then looked at each other and shook our heads and, without consultation, waded out into the stream and forded it, to the knees, then thighs. There were chukar to hunt, by God.

There are no photos. You are just going to have to believe me.

The First

Killing a wild bird involves nearly flawless insertion into both the time and space continuum, you know, being in the right place at the right time.

Trouble was, I’d put the kid into those sweet spots a goodly number of times in the last two seasons in an attempt to get him his first ruffed grouse before the Sirens of high school – girls, cars and sports – chilled his wing-shooting ambition.

He missed, of course, or farted around with the safety or was too slow to mount the gun every time we hit that time/space crossroads and The King eluded the kid in a thunder of wings and flash of gray.

But the black Lab and me or my hunting partner and his French Brit continued to stack the odds in the kid’s favor. Eventually it paid off.

A grouse ran out from under the Britt’s nose and as the dog relocated in the tangle of alders, the kid moved off to my left, toward the cornfield abutting the thicket. The bird exploded from somewhere behind me, banking for the sky, giving the kid what amounts to a decent shot in the New England grouse woods. He pulled the trigger, the bird tumbled and mission was accomplished.

I snapped pictures, him proud and happy, the bird limp and warm. More than anything, I wanted somebody to hit the pause button on that constantly moving time and space continuum. I wanted to stay right where we were, to stop time from shifting the moment to memory.
- MC

The Borderline

“Pour me a drink from the bottle
And one for you
’cause we’re empty as the desert
As we drift from west to east
On the borderline everything is empty, even you and I…”

- “Borderline,” by Camper van Beethoven

We hunt the fringes, the transitions, the anomalies. We gravitate to this without much conscious thought; pulled to these points at the extremity of an amorphous compass by the lodestone of experience. You could say we’re merely following the dog, but there is more to it than that. The dog is pulled to these places as the birds are pulled as we are pulled – the collision of impulse and instinct between three separate species.

Why will we repeatedly cross an otherwise featureless crop field, drawn to a small rise that hosts a few sage, dragged along primarily by hope? There are the obvious reasons, of course – the fact that this negligible bump on the landscape gives a vantage point for the birds and possibly a slightly greater variety of feed, would be sound reasoning, but doesn’t account for all of it. Then there are the old hedgerows, the messy perimeter of the errant orchard, the sweeping line of scrub oak, the rocky edge of the bluff; all of them places that hold birds, all of them liminal zones of portent, possessed with a deeper significance if we care to stop and think about it.

These peripheries have an irresistible, innate pull, something hardwired into the collective limbic network we tap into when we take a shotgun and a dog in the field. It is something that gets at our soul and provides a glimpse of insight into this odd thing we love. Our pursuit, after all, doesn’t really stand up to much logic. From a simple, meat-gathering point of view, it is a net loss – we expend a great deal more energy than we ever hope to take in at the end of the day. But we do it anyway, and we have all sorts of other reasons that we tell ourselves; to simply get out in the great outdoors, to watch the dogs work, to keep one foot in the door of what it means to kill and procure your own food; all of them undeniably true.

Yet we’re fooling ourselves if we aren’t also aware that as an upland clan, we are a fringe unto ourselves, occupying but a small sub-group of an already minor segment in our society, comprised of those that still hunt. And thus, as much as we are drawn to these fringe places for the obvious, we also go there for reasons that reflect who we ultimately are. We are of the peripheral, stalking the transitional, drifting west to east along the borderline…

Wild quail or pellet-head?

Walking In

He froze in textbook style, and for a moment all thought of pursuit, of what we had come in search of, was gone. I stood there marveling at how I hadn’t taught him to do this, how I doubt that you really can. But there he was, locked up; the graven image of a genetic legacy on override.

I didn’t care about the bird – I just didn’t want this moment to end. I wanted us both to go on standing there, motionless, till darkness descended or the storm cut loose overhead. These are the things that will nurse me through the months of waiting. Waiting for it to all start again – these all too rare perfect moments, the many less than perfect ones, the sore feet, the hours and days with an empty game bag.  All of it.

Occupational Hazards

“Hey man, hold his head so he won’t bite me…”

The End of Days

You could count the number of days remaining in the Idaho sharpie season on one hand. It had been a tough year, with a bird or two here and there, but the coveys were few and far between. Still, with the help of an up-and-coming first-season pup we managed to put one in the bag now and then.

Yet with the days waning in a season that always feels too short, time spent in the field was becoming less and less productive. We’d go to formerly fruitful areas, cover them thoroughly, and find nothing. I began to question if I knew what I was doing – truth be told, a state of mind as familiar to me as my favorite old Browning boots.

In such vast country, you try to cling to informed opinions about where the birds may be, and sometimes that works, but too often they simply burst skyward from places that hold no distinguishing characteristics. We’d been walking for hours, working our way through the subtle highs and lows of the landscape, hoping to stumble across the one indistinct anomaly that, for reasons I may never fully understand, just happens to hold birds on this particular day, at this particular hour. Nothing.

It was becoming downright frigid, and I was beyond spent. We headed back to the car, with Hank valiantly still trying to find birds right up till I opened the door. We got inside and sat there for what I think were a few moments but could have been much more, listening to the wind range southbound, shaking the truck, watching the light fade. I started the truck and drove slowly out on the gravel road. Looking up from starting the radio I watched the sharpie fly across the road, right in front of us, and disappear over the horizon.

Ultimately, the birds are not particularly fond of being shot, and they owe you nothing. You better be able to laugh or this pursuit will drive you crazy.

Checks and Balances

The pointer named William breaks stride and pauses to investigate a small patch of wilted ragweed. He then continues on track along a sidehill and into the gusting wind that determines his course. It was enough scent to prickle his bird-senses, a scant whiff of something besides dust, but not enough to stop him from running full out across a parched and featureless pasture.

The federal judge sitting alone on the seat atop the dog box pounds with his fist on the cab roof, “That might’ve been birds, right there, Captain!”

It’s the fourth time this hour he’s done that and the quail guide behind the wheel imagines landing a roundhouse punch to a gin-swollen nose for each amount of unbearable racket that his client has caused inside the truck.

The guide glances in his side mirror and finds the judge’s stodgy red portrait filling up the view. “That bird-dog of yours couldn’t smell a polecat in a peat bog,” the judge nags.

Zach

He was three years old when I bought him and he came with that name. He never found many birds, but one day (before lunch) he killed a baby goat, got sprayed by a skunk, and ate two bobwhites that he neither pointed or retrieved. He ran off the first six times I let him out of the box. On one of those jaunts he was gone overnight. The next morning I found him snoozing in a hog trap where he had eaten and rolled in a vile mixture of rotten feed corn, molasses, and catfish guts. I eventually traded him for a cast iron smoker pit on wheels.

Revenge

“Leave me in the truck while you hunt? Just because that damn vet said I was out of commission for two weeks?!? Have fun putting your pillows back together, pal.”

Of Trust and Hope

If you’re of the sentiment, as John Buchan was, that fishing is “a perpetual series of occasions for hope,” I’d highly recommend trying to finding birds out here:

You will walk farther than you think, and look back to see that you’ve put precious little landscape between you and where you started. You’ll find yourself putting up the same bird repeatedly as you make your way across the field, always flushing just out of range, or, not coincidentally, taking wing just as you’re distracted by a bull moose the size of a small mastodon on the far ridge. You’ll invariably find yourself making your way back to the truck against the wind, no matter which direction it was blowing when you started; the dense grass grabbing at your boots and slowing your progress. I can only compare it to wading upstream against a stiff current. For miles.

You’ll lose your dog and curse him with a level of creativity you never knew you possessed, only to crest a rise and find him locked down on a covey, doing exactly what he should be with exemplary style, and you’ll turn the stream of invective deservedly on yourself. After picking up one downed bird and stuffing it in your vest as the others continue over the horizon, you’ll offer part of your meatloaf sandwich and it dawns on you that he will never, ever hold any of your shortcomings against you; that he will continue tolerating hunting with you until you undoubtedly tire before he does.

This may indeed be another one of those pursuits that is an endless series of occasions for hope. But then again, it was that wry wit Ben Franklin that said, “He that lives on hope will die fasting.” So no matter how boundless your optimism may be, don’t bother venturing into this country, in pursuit of sharptails, without one of these:

And by all means, trust him.