Not just for the birds

Author: Bob McMichael

  • What Happens: A Tribute to Barry Lopez

    What Happens: A Tribute to Barry Lopez

    The quickest door to open in the woods for a child is the one that leads to the smallest room, by knowing the name each thing is called. The door that leads to the cathedral is marked by a hesitancy to speak at all, rather to encourage by example a sharpness of the senses. If one speaks it should only be to say, as well as one can, how wonderfully all this fits together, to indicate what a long, fierce peace can derive from this knowledge.

    “Children in the Woods,” from Crossing Open Ground

    When you’re out there. Head. Thoughts. Observations. Hidden rocks the size of a golfball take you down, all stone of you. My experience is mine. Yours yours.

    Here’s something of mine, what happens during and after, and also before the hunt. Not the hunt, but a hunt, and I’d be surprised if most chukar hunters don’t do this, too: things I’ve read that week or that stuck in my graycraw wash into the footsteps and missteps and breathing and hearing. When you’re climbing you’ve got the goal you can see — the ridge, the outcrop, the abutment, the hawthorn vein — but it’s never a straight line, especially with a pointing dog who, after all, is your partner. You repeat that, sometimes out loud and sometimes not, as if some or even you won’t really believe it. The fact of gravity resented. The failure to lose the weight you promised yourself you’d shed. Math. The sharp pain in the back of your throat. Is it Covid? It can’t be. I’ve been careful. Or have I? During a short rest a sound.

    Howling. I hope it’s a wolf. We’ve seen prints nearby in the snow years ago. Suddenly I’m transported back 15 years to a solo elk hunting trip. The two nights I was camped featured nightlong wolfpack serenades. Ecstasy. Prescient or not I’d brought Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men to read. On the second day of the hunt a tall wolf — one of the singers? — and I met at 15 feet on undulating ground. It vanished before my eyes while I marveled. Lopez’s book added to my admiration of these dogs, deepening the irony of living in a state seemingly committed to committing the sins Lopez documents in Of Wolves: extermination without cause. Worse: the science shows wolves improve elk numbers and genepool, but if only the politicians and ranchers would read and think they’d make a place for this predator. But that’s asking too much.

    Reading while listening to wolf music

    Caught up in this thoughtmemory, I’m a little further up the hill. Peat’s on point. I get over to him. Because they’re in the rocks they spot me miles away and bust wild. I reorient to the climb and return to the thought which now is more like a dream, triggered by another howl. I appreciate Lopez again and think of some of his other work, writing that — in part — led me to Idaho because I wanted to be like him, or at least write a little bit like he did, or at least about the kinds of things he wrote about. River Notes, Arctic Dreams, Crossing Open Ground. I had this romantic idea about the land and trying to fit into it and onto it and let it get through me and through to me. I still do. Without work like his, and others of his ilk (David Quammen, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Edward O. Wilson, Farley Mowat, John McPhee, Robin Kimmerer, Rachel Carson, Diane Ackerman, and Annie Dillard, just to name a few), what happens when I’m outside would be, I’m certain, much different. Worse, I think.

    And then, nearing the ridgetop, I remember my favorite piece of Lopez’s, “Children in the Woods.” My mom, an art teacher, tricked my brother and me into competing to become the bird identifying champion of the Back Bay. I don’t know why. I also don’t know why my dad, a poet, built a cabin in the woods of Idaho but it set us free to explore and learn so many names of things in the forest that we didn’t even need to speak them anymore because we’d prefer to pay close attention to what we sensed and think about relationships between those things and us. When I think about it, as I did on this hunt, this, this is really the only peace I have. It’s as good an explanation as I have for why I keep wanting to hunt.

    While recovering yesterday from this momentous Christmas Day hunt (momentous in so many ways, not least of which was the wolf howl and what it conjured), Leslie told me Barry Lopez had died. May he rest in fierce peace.

  • Droning

    Droning

    I’d bet every chukar hunter has wished at some point that they were a hawk or an eagle or a falcon. Being able to survey the terrain from above, not to find chukar but for another angle from which to appreciate the landscape’s beauty, just seems fantastic. Yesterday, after busting a chukar into a rocky outcrop I noticed a larger bird emerge from the area. A peregrine falcon. It swooped and swirled a bit, came in for a closer look at Peat, and landed in a hawthorn bush. I wondered if it had noticed some tender alectoris revealing itself, or if it was just having fun flying around.

    A few minutes later, in hot pursuit along a cliff bottom, marveling at the loads of fresh chukar guano at the base of the rocks, I nearly stepped on something that liminally seemed foreign. It was a drone, belly up and missing one set of rotors. The battery was gone. It clearly had gotten away from its owner, never to be found again. Until I came along.

    I folded it up and put it in my bird pouch on top of the one chukar already there, and moved on. But I kept wondering from whence its owner had launched it. I couldn’t imagine.

    When we got home, I looked to see if it had an SD card in it. Sure enough. Leslie was nervous. “What if there are weird movies on it?”

    “I hope so!” I put the card in my computer and — voila! — it was readable. I looked through the files: about half images and half videos, some going back six years, and all but two were of non-chukar things and places.

    The most recent, and final, two files — an image and a short video — were a bit over two years old. They were of an area I have hunted and know well. At first I didn’t recognize it because I’m not a soaring bird. It was fascinating to see the terrain’s familiarity reveal itself from altitude. It was a bluebird day. The two figures, clearly chukar hunters, were perched on a rocky knob admiring the view. No dogs were visible.

    I keep a hunting log. I looked at the date of these two files and checked my log. Although I’ve hunted this area a lot over the past 10 years, the only time I hunted it in 2018 was on that same day. We were there, “just” across the ridge from these two men. We never saw or heard them. I might have passed within feet of the crashed drone.

    I considered getting a drone at one point, for the reason that seeing this 37-second video is pleasurable. I’m a hawk. I’ve always wished that. I threw the drone question out to this blog a while ago, and got a lot of anti-drone comments that raised issues I hadn’t thought of, and which ultimately convinced me to delete the idea. Yesterday I posted on Instagram a rare tailgate photo of the drone next to the two chukar I got and got comments of the same sort: What size shot do I recommend for drones? I laughed. Sometimes we can’t have everything we want, and sometimes we shouldn’t want things we can have.

    If this is your drone, I’m holding it for ransom. 🙂

    Just above where I found the drone, in 30 mph wind. The bird numbers in this area, by the way, are SEVERELY down. For the work involved getting there (see the elevation profile below), I recommend it to super-masochistic 20-somethings who don’t have a UTV or a big appetite for bird protein.
  • The Irony

    The Irony

    Peat’s first season hunting, five years ago, began quite stressfully for me (and, consequently, Leslie and Angus). The first six chukar I killed that season Peat stole from the retrieving Angus and ran off into the brush and ate them. Any normal person would have been quite upset about this. I was literally livid and utterly distraught. There was, literally, no hope for the future. The only solution would be for me to kill the bastard and then myself. It was the end of the world.

    Wait for it… I yell to Angus, “Don’t give it up!” Then you can hear the sound edited to eliminate my creative language…

    Many people who love hunting talk about losing oneself in the activity as the real benefit from and attraction to the endeavor. I’ve written a lot about that in one way or another. The impulse to take with absolute seriousness a dog’s behavior in the field — when it doesn’t go right — as the beginning and ending, the totality, can be a drawback, a mitigation of the blissful removal of the world hunting sometimes offers. It goes with the territory. It’s also awful to be around someone (me) who surrenders himself or herself to these kinds of imagined tragedies. The price of intensity? Or is that just an excuse?

    Well, I was dead wrong, and Peat told me so. The seventh chukar he watched fall to the ground (shot actually by my brother, on a different hunt than the one in the video, about a week later and not far from the same spot in Hells Canyon) he brought at a full sprint straight to my hand. Talk about bliss. Talk about the impossible.

    Peat has not erred since. He’s made some impressive retrieves on birds that fell in places I physically could not get to. He’s tracked down wounded birds that ran a long way from where they fell. He’s found birds I didn’t realize I’d killed. He’s just been consistently great at finding and retrieving birds. Yes, ironic.

    Yesterday, in the midst of one of the worst shooting slumps I’ve ever had, I managed to wing a chukar on a steep ridgetop. I watched it sail away a little wobbly, and headed in that general direction. Peat found and pointed it, and I missed my second shot at it, and watched it jet straight to the bottom of the canyon and land in a hawthorn patch. With no birds in the bag, and a lot of hope it would die down there, I descended the 1000 feet to its landing spot, which took about 15 minutes because of the rocky and icy steep slope. It wasn’t there. My heart sunk.

    Not Peat’s. His tail modulated madly and he clearly had the scent of the bird that had run out of the hawthorn and farther down the canyon. Knowing I’d lost about 1000 feet more elevation than I’d planned and had to regain to return to the truck, I waited and hoped. I watched Peat on my Alpha screen, his GPS collar telling me how far he was every 2.5 seconds. With a normal range of about 150 yards, I watched him go out past 300, then back to 200, then pinball back to 300. A minute or so later, he returned to me, no bird in his mouth. He reconnected to the scent of that bird, and headed back out. He did the same thing, going past 300, bouncing around there, and returning sans oiseau. I gave him some water and gave up, starting back up the long climb.

    I winged the chukar at the peak of the left side, and spent 30 minutes at the bottom while Peat searched for the bird even farther down.

    Peat got on scent again, and retraced his steps as I watched on the Alpha. Again he ranged past 300, 310, 320, bounced around, and then came back to me, this time with a large adult chukar, dead and broken wing, in his soft mouth. I looked at my watch. It was 30 minutes past when we arrived at the hawthorn patch.

    Angus blessed us with so much beauty and greatness and left huge shoes for Peat to fill. I’ve been rough on Peat, victim to the comparison game. But I’ve also sung his praises, while never fully eluding the shadow of Angus. It’s a complication most of you who’ve had more than one dog understand. But this irony — Peat-the-bird-eater > Peat-the-retrieving-phenom — now instructs me to let that shadow go and give Peat unequivocal acclaim.

    Peat is every bit as good a hunting companion as Angus was.

    Peat leaves Angus’s (and my) shadow
  • Wee Culture

    Wee Culture

    She’d never do this herself, so I’m doing it. Part of the “culture” of this blog’s title is off-the-hill stuff. Leslie, retired from a long career in healthcare, spends most of her non outdoor time in her studio making jewelry and scented soy candles. She sells her jewelry on her Etsy site “Taisie Design,” but the candles (as well as some of her jewelry pieces) are only available in a few local stores (Kaye York’s gallery in Cambridge, The House That Art Built in Ontario, Oregon, and Barn Owl Books in McCall).

    I admit I’m biased, but I’m a big fan of her precious metal clay jewelry, even though I don’t wear any of it. Each piece is a one-off, handmade piece of art relating to the outdoors and the landscape we spend our best time in, including Hells Canyon. She’s a perfectionist, and won’t list anything on her site if she wouldn’t buy it herself, so many pieces never make it.

    Leslie is more inspired in life by her time chukar hunting than I am. I just write about it occasionally. She makes art that brings the sensuality of the terrain, the intensity of the bond with precious dogs, and the profoundly rare simplicity of losing oneself in an experience all together in wee dear things that capture a little of all of that in ways that obviously resonate with others. It’s a culture thing.

    Take a look.

  • Black Friday

    Black Friday

    Yesterday, Thanksgiving, we hunted a beloved area that got burned in a big fire that started on Labor Day. We weren’t sure what to expect, but have been anxious to see it up close for a while now. From the road, you can only see so much.

    Inside it, the devastation was both unsurprising and heartbreaking. Along the creek, you could see temperature changes in the fire’s path, and the flames’ duration from spot to spot. I found myself weeping at times, and terrified when imagining what it might have been like to be there as the inferno navigated its way up the canyon. I felt grateful that the birds and mammals who called that place home are stronger and swifter and smarter than we are. I’m assuming they moved and hope they’ve found suitable habitation.

    One of the reasons we chose this place was that I hadn’t bagged a grouse this year. Up high, fir stands in tight draws usually housed good numbers of dusky grouse, the biggest bird we hunt (although next year I intend to hunt sage grouse for the first time). Within five minutes I killed probably the only pair of ruffed grouse left down there. Gorgeous creatures, but the remorse I used to struggle with blind-sided me while looking at their feathers and blood dripping from their beaks before putting them in my bird bag. Clearly, and gratefully, only a temporary resolution.

    No sign of chukar in the usual places on the way up. At the top, in the forest, the fire had been greedy thinning the undergrowth, and the large population of dusky grouse had obviously flown the coop. We angled up higher to more open areas whose robust blankets of bunchgrasses were toast, singed into a blackened crewcut. These rolling slopes covered in bunches of grass had made oases for chukar, provided protection from raptors, and now were desolate, bereft of blades.

    At closer look, though, a happy sight: almost undetectable sprouts of green emerging from the scorched tufts. I wished I was a botanist so I could predict how long it would take these beautiful plants to reach maturity again and stand firm against the noxious invasion of medusahead, spotted knapweed, rush skeletonweed, and star thistle (among others) that seriously threaten this unique but delicate habitat. I’m eager for spring so I can see how these grasses have fared. I love them. I named one of my favorite beers after them (Bunchgrass Rye IPA).

    On one knob that pre-fire was dense with sagebrush, large charred polka-dots showed only the charcoal base of these important and gorgeous plants. Another happy sight, though: in several of them, healthy deposits of chukar poo. Chukar have been there, but we didn’t see any and Peat didn’t find any on our 6-mile (and his 20-mile) hike.

    The terrain lured us farther and higher than we’d intended, and on a snowy north-facing slope we found fresh dusky grouse tracks. Seconds later, Peat pointed into a stand of conifers. Two of the pterodactylic galliformes launched simultaneously. Leslie and I each shot at the only one without trees in its way, and we each killed it with shotgun shells I’d loaded containing some of Angus’s ashes. He loved grouse hunting.

    On the way down, it was fascinating to see springs in places whose pre-fire plantlife concealed. There was much more water on this terrain, coming out of it, than I ever dreamed in the decade I’ve hunted there. It shouldn’t be surprising: this high desert landscape is stingy with water, so pockets of large plants on the otherwise arid land should signify a spring. Plant-bare, though, you can see it now. But the lack of cover at these springs meant we wouldn’t see any birds that used to chillax there.

    Bagging three birds on this hike, despite the remorse, helped make it feel successful. I suppose I should assign more success to the fact that some of the vegetation is rebounding already. But the completely toasted creek bottom dampens the hope for recovery, there at least, because — unlike Hart Crane’s river — the fire did not quickly flee that particular watery spot. Fire and water, hope and sadness. Life.

    An early ruffed grouse gift
    Pick up your &%$@!# shells!
    Bunchgrass comeback
    Phoenix
    Other resurrections
    Signs of life and death
    First dusky of the year (actually, only 1/2: Leslie & I both killed it)
    Big birds with excellent, appreciated protein
    Angus’s legacy