Mouthful of Feathers

The photography of Chad Chorney

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In this country, a bird is irrelevant.
This land of basalt and dry earth always been hard. The flush times have come and then been winnowed by the lean years that must always follow.
Here, a mere season of abundance cannot be meaningful. Only a covey, persistent for a thousand generations begins to be something.
Over the decades, if we are fortunate we may come to know this place or one like it.
A spot where over a few dozen seasons we will watch the coveys rise and fall, see the roads come and the fauna that marks shorter time spans than our own go.
But we will never really see the place change. This land marks time only through its own weathering. The decay of boulders chronicles the ages like a giant geological metronome, and we can last no more than a single pulse of the pendulum.
And though we shall wink out, the covey may live on.
A single entity – the first covey no different then the 1,000th – the birds will read their history on the face of basalt and in the dried earth.
Though the logical truth of it all cannot be changed, for us it is different.
A single bird, a single moment of perfection will leave a mark on the boulder that is my center, marking a time of geologic importance.

GM

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Filed under Conservation and legacy, Fodder, Giving thanks, Talegate

“Properly trained, a man can be dog’s best friend.” -Corey Ford

Spring brings promise to the land, a newness to things—a freshness carried in sleeping schools of young beeves, a sharpness in green hues of new grass and popping leaf, a cleanness that washes out of the high country and purges the rivers of driftwood and winter’s flotsam. But this spring carried something else, another kind of hope, the hope that floats the hunter’s heart: a new bird dog pup. A setter.
He turned 77 in May and he is hard on himself. Too hard, I think, for I know of no other 77 year olds who can still fork a horse and take the high country. He kicks himself for not riding his young red horse much, and he laments the aches and pains of a man in his eighth decade on this Earth. But he is still going and he still goes. Last fall we drove to the end of a road and set up an elk camp in his travel trailer. In the darkness of pre-dawn, he rose and he walked slowly with a rifle in one hand and a walking stick in another down a snow-clad trail. This spring, he rode a horse on the winter ranges, looking for sheds, watching redtails wheel in the sky overhead. When he got tired he said, Let’s turn back. But he still goes.

His old dog died last summer, just shy of the thirteenth year. His younger dog blew out a tendon, then had another health problem and another. He did not heft his shotgun much. He could have hunted behind my dogs, but it’s different when your own can’t go. You don’t have to explain that concept to the hunter.
This winter, we talked about a new pup. He did not say much, but I wondered if he thought about those times he had called me and begged off of a hunting or fishing trip because he was wasn’t up to it. There had been a few. Not many. I wondered if he thought about not hearing a grouse thunder up from behind a nearby Doug fir, or sometimes being not quick enough to track and fell a speeding Hun. If he had those kinds of thoughts—whispers of doubt from an old outdoorsman with miles behind, they did not surface.
He sent his deposit in when the snows were deep on the flanks of the mountains around his home. He wanted a female. His life had been spent in the company of big rangy affectionate male setters. This time, he wanted a female.
Spring finally came and we drove across the sweep of it, alongside those rivers swollen and thick with a winter’s worth of snowmelt, past tender brilliant aspen leaves bursting into warm sunlight, around snowdrifts making mud in their wake.
There were four females to choose from and his wife and I had our preferences—dogs that one or the other of us would have chosen. But speaking those words would have been wrong. This dog—this dog in the 77th year in the company of canines—was to be his, perhaps more than any other dog before her. The pups romped in the yard, chasing each other, grabbing sticks, rolling over each other, bounding awkwardly and eagerly at a whistle. Twice he asked us for help in the choice and both times, we refused. This belonged to him, not to us. Perhaps only a half dozen years ago, I might have made a remark about the eagerness or the feistiness of one pup over another, but this time, I sat back and I watched him make his rounds through them until he finally bent to one and put his hand on her head and said This one.
She is a small and fine boned bird dog with a bright orange patch over one eye and a sharpness to her look. She is as clean and promising as spring on the land.
She is growing now and learning about horses and alfalfa thick in the fields and the rhythmic music of wheel-lines spreading water under the summer sky. She is learning about smells and bugs and mice and the occasional river of scent that is a hen pheasant and her chicks scattering through the field.
He watches her interact with the older veteran dog and speaks sternly when the big male growls at the precocious pup. And he talks. He talks of places he wants to go this fall with his young new bird dog. He talks of trails he wants to ride, and places he wants to fish. I like that about him. There are trails left to ride. Bird dog pups to watch grow up.

–TR

This story first appeared in Wyoming Wildlife News, a publication of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and is also posted on the author’s website: www.tomreedbooks.com

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Nearly half a year of memories wash over me. Five months of following a fleet of setters across the hills and fields. Five long months of birds before the gun on some days, and no birds anywhere on others. These memories will keep my blood pumping in the months ahead and now the thoughts turn to other things, mountains to climb, rivers to float, fish to catch, horses to ride. But at this moment, there is memory.

Awaiting the burst.

Opening day in the rain and snow of September, following all four bird dogs onto a wet carpet at the foot of the Madison Range. Pushing up through tall wet grass and soaked only a few hundred yards from the truck. Slogging through the foliage still green in summer’s last gasp, chilled but thrilled. And a flurry of grouse before the gun, off points and backs that are etched deeply into recollection.

Windblown days on high Montana prairie and rooster pheasants peeling across the sky with a jet-stream tail wind and the shotgun barking. A rattlesnake in mid-October buzzing up out of the grass and hitting Duke only inches from his eye and then a frantic rush to the vet’s office. Ruffed grouse from the home coulee. Blue grouse from the high ridge down by Idaho where a slap of October snow has turned the high peaks ivory. Eating lunch on a high rock in the Nevada desert. And a last hunt in young February with an old friend whose best dog drew her last breath after one last hunt. A hot springs soak after a long day of hunting.

And there are the shots too, the sight picture good, the chukar mask at your bead and the pull of the trigger and crumple of feather. Same sight picture, a miss, leaving you wondering if you are getting feeble. Other times connecting well and never seeming to miss, but then back to missing. Streaky. It’s part of it. Part of the memory of the months behind.

I do an inventory of these days past and take stock of what lies ahead. A shotgun that needs cleaning badly. A right knee–hyper-extended in a badger hole in early September–that needs a good long rest but belongs to an impatient leg. A truck that needs to have a transfusion of all liquids and a tail-light bulb replaced. A dog herd that is aging too quickly; Ike, 11, has hunted his last chukar cliff. Sage will be 10 in May and Duke 9. Even Echo is 6. How does this happen? How can it happen that such a flock is suddenly so old? I’ve got a deposit down on a 2013 female, but the anticipation of that event is hardly solace to a batch of veteran pals who are past their best days and who I will some day have to bury at the base of some lonely cliff somewhere. Too soon. Five months can fly by, but ten years somehow go even faster. But I will not think of that now, for there are four great bird dogs and another season up ahead before a recalcitrant pup joins the gang.

Ahead now is spring and summer and then another fall. I will pray for rains at the right time, for snakes that go into hibernation early, for cooperative pheasants for the old dog, for good hunting companions and for a shotgun that swings as smoothly as the prettiest girl in the dancehalll. Until then, we wait.

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I could go on about how the season came and went too quickly, although now that I think about it, a lot has come and gone since it began last September. I could lament not having gotten out more, though I think I did pretty well this year. I could allow myself to be reminded, every time I look at the dog, of regret at not letting him revel in what he is bred for, every second and every day that he is legally allowed to do so. But then again, neither am I, and that’s life.

Instead of giving in to remorse, I opt to wander through the ever-expanding topo map of places I’ve hunted which lives in my head. I think of fields full of sharptail, warm and yellow and glowing on an October afternoon, now harsh and iced over and windswept. But still, these tough birds reside. I think about new chukar land I walked this past year. About how dry it was – even for that country; about how those birds of the Eurasian steppe are surviving in their adopted basin and range. Blue grouse now burrowed into snow, and a lone wolverine, high above tree line on a February morning, trying to sniff them out. Huns, normally spread out and elusive for much of the year, now coalesced into a large covey that has moved into the undeveloped sage scrub near my house to wait for the days to grow long again.

Somewhere deep in the big empty.

Maybe my drive is evolving. Walking country for days, with nothing in the game bag to show for it, doesn’t feel so much like “failure” anymore. While sitting down to a meal of chukar enchiladas, or pheasant pot pie, is a yearning I hope never to quench, it’s more important simply to know that the country is there. That the birds are there. That I know these things irrevocably, because I’ve personally been cold, dirty and hungry in such places, and it’s left its mark on me. I’ll wake up hungry again tomorrow, no matter how amazing the meal was. But these intimate connections to wild country are a longer-lasting feast. Either way, you are what you eat.

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Filed under Reloading, Surviving the off season, Talegate

January wilts and the wind whips. It is cold and dry and barren as an old cow. No winter really, or no snow that is. Doug fir pops in the wood stove and piles of gear lie around the shop, waiting to be stowed. A wall tent, last used a month ago in chukar country, hangs loose in the barn, as if putting it away for the winter is too much, too painful. Or perhaps it is just laziness, nothing more. No special or secret meaning to a tent un-stashed. But it is there and it will stay there for a while longer.

There is one more ahead. One last trip south. The runs there this year have been a thin broth–birds few and scattered wide. Land there as dry and parched as this cold Montana range. But the season is open a few precious days in February and then it’s done. After that point it will be time to stow and clean and repair. Time to give the right knee a break, to run patches through the auto-loader, to let the dogs rest and sleep and gain weight. But there is one more hunt. A meeting with a friend you’ve hunted with hundreds of times, a person who knows your moves and pace as you know his. It is a reunion of friendships, with some drinking, some cigars, lots of laughter. Some new country too, and some old. Good dogs and big hikes. Muscles hard at season’s end and fishing season still off there so far you can’t even imagine it.

Tomorrow and the next day you load the truck and then the next day, you will turn south with 12 hours in front of the hood and then five days of hiking talus and scree, smelling the sage on the dry high desert wind, the big open. Five days. Five last days and then that’s it. There will be time enough ahead for all that other stuff. But now, one more round. And that’s it.

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Filed under Chukar, Talegate, Undaunted by Futility

In the flung-out.

It is the land.

This place of bitter winds west, then north, then south, then east. This place of sagebrush taller than the running lights on a diesel one-ton. This place of clattering shale. This place of cold stream in a thirsty land, clear water that nurtures cutthroat left over from a great inland sea. This place of high mare’s tail clouds and thin blue tint. This place of rawness where the land itself is the lure, the challenge, the reason.

You go there for the land. It reduces your old knees to pain. It reduces your herd of dogs to hide and bone and sinew and honed muscle and bleeding pad. It tears the paunch from beneath your forty-thousand dollar four wheel drive. It grinds the heel and toe from your three hundred dollar boots. It abrades and scrapes and lacerates the stock of your one-thousand dollar shotgun. And you go.

This is the place you dream of when, at long last (for some) and too soon (for you) the season finally closes. This is the place that you have captured on camera and put on computer so–late winter–you can see those haunts again and again as the screen-saver at your work place folds through an autumn’s memories.

Only part of why.

You remember the stealthy creep of Sage in the sage, birds ahead, heart racing, finger at safety, waiting, waiting for that flush. You remember thinking: swing on one bird, pull the trigger. You remember one side of your face turning raw and frozen in that tear-jerking west wind. You remember the music of dinner-plate shale. You remember the taste of Kentuck bourbon, Dominican cigars. You remember laughter around the wall-tent woodstove. You remember the sound of wind stroking the desert stream willows and the pop of juniper on the fire. You remember the “whit too, whit too, whit too” of a fleeing chukar with the wind at his back and the Rebel rally cry from atop the far canyon wall. The smell of sage beneath boot and tire. The feel of an artifact from another time and another people in the palm of your hand. The deep glossy shine of obsidian. The hope in your heart when you cut new chukar tracks in old snow.

But most of all, you remember the land.

Dance floor of the Devil.

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In the span of eight decades on Earth, the man has seen much. World history, to be sure. But pheasant history too. He has seen the rise and fall of borrow ditch and shelter belt. He has seen the eradication of weedy fence lines and weedy row crops. He has seen the genesis of CRP and, in the next Farm Bill, its possible extinction. Pheasants have come and gone, risen and fallen, risen again, and fallen again. Each time, the peak of the curve is significantly lower than the last peak years before. He has seen fields where he hunted pheasants as a child in eastern Colorado and western Kansas turn dry and barren and fill with weeds. The rows of corn he hunted in college have sprouted condos and shopping malls. He has seen the termination of a time when one simply found a patch of good cover and started hunting and the emergence of orange-painted fence posts and red-faced farmers. The end of “go ahead and hunt” and the onset of “it’s one hundred dollars a day.” He has seen the team-drawn plow fade into rusty history and the dawn of the $100,000 combine. He has seen the birth of pesticides and herbicides and the death of many living things as the result.
For seven decades, he has been hunting these Chinese ditch parrots. He hunted the first-ever season in Colorado, shooting his single-shot 20 at everything that rose before a black pointer of mixed lineage. When he finally started hitting, Dad told him, “Okay, that’s enough. Now you can shoot only roosters.”
He doesn’t lament the fields turned under, the loss of shelter belt, the consumptive appetite of clean farming. Instead, he looks back on seventy years of pheasant hunting and says, “I’ve been lucky.”
Today, with the wind whipping off the Rocky Mountain Front, drawing tears to the eye, snot to the nose, he turns his young setter into the wind and walks the tree rows on the lee side of a 40 mile per hour blast. There’s a walking stick in the truck, just in case, but he doesn’t reach for it. Instead, he balances a Belgian Browning, bluing worn to bare steel, in a gloved hand and he follows his young girl. She points.
A pheasant rises, banks, and falls. She brings it in. Seventy years before the gun, memories like elm leaves on a west wind.

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Before you grab it from the mouth of the dog, make sure it’s dead.

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Sometimes, they let us down.
At the end of a season, half-a-dozen years in, you expert a certain level of professionalism.

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Filed under Dogs, Fodder