Author: Bob McMichael

…a thrush sings…
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork…

— Philip Larkin

Gestation

Thanks to my mom, I love birds. A barn swallow pair made a beautiful and precarious mud nest this spring on a beam just below the ceiling of our front porch. Their second batch of chicks is about to fledge.

I Am Here

I began this fourteen years ago as an attempt to share my attempt to understand what I liked so much about chukar hunting. My focus here has changed over time, more toward an attempt to share my attempt to understand what for me was the most vivid paradox I’ve had direct contact with: why I wanted to kill something I loved. Eight years ago, about, I began writing a story I thought would try getting at that in some other way. Like this, I’m still working on it.

A little more than two years ago Leslie and I experienced what I hope will turn out to be our purest direct contact with evil. It led to leaving bird country which led to many other unpleasant things. Now we’re back here. And we’re both hopeful and grateful.

Again

Grouse season opened two days ago. We didn’t go out and still haven’t. Lots of reasons. Chukar season starts soon. Yesterday, Leslie asked me if I was excited to get out there with the dogs. We’d yearned for a long time to be living in this place this time of year, and now it was here. Finally. I wasn’t sure how to answer. I’m muddled. But the best I could come up with was, “I’m identifying too much with the birds.”

Will

Anyone who hunts must sometime recognize the fact that taking an animal’s life means denying its will to live. Whether it goes beyond that depends on the hunter. Many will question from where or why they adopted or assumed that kind of power, and possibly wonder or even question if they’re okay with that.

Late fall in northwest Washington meant lots of varied thrushes, the cover bird on Sibley’s field guide. Until we lived there, I’d never seen one. We had lots of them in our yard. I felt very lucky. One day one flew into one of our windows. It lay dead on the porch. I went outside and picked it up, still warm. A drop of blood, globular and viscous and contained, had escaped through and sat on its nare. Its eye was open and I watched it change from reflective to opaque. I thought, “I hope it didn’t know what it hit,” and took it to the dense foliage on the other side of the fence, where I left it, safe from the dogs.

There are accidents and there are intentional things. Hunting is no accident. Duh. Unlike our ancient predecessors, we don’t hunt to live. Some of us live to hunt. But that’s a different story. My hunting story is a now downward-trending sine wave of desire that’s more or less loosely affiliated with my will to live and somehow affiliated with the will of whatever I’m seeking to kill. It’s that affiliation that continues to baffle me. But one thing’s clearer now than before: the more I try to understand it the less sense it makes. There’s a string that runs through everything, and no matter what you do to that string or what happens to it, it’s still there. You can fray it, burn it up, throw it away, lose it, but that doesn’t get rid of it. It’s Hart Crane’s memory all “things nurse.”

Grateful

Cree hunting tradition poses prey as grateful. With certain conditions. Animals will gratefully give their lives to hunters as long as there’s some kind of mindful reciprocity given back and acknowledged by the hunter. Usually this means, at the very least, making the most of the animal: food, clothing, tools. They are glad to know we understand and appreciate what they’ve given to us. Most of us have learned this, and try to remember and abide by it as much as possible, but inevitably we fall short. At least I do, more often than not. Even Cree today debate the practicality of this and some even disavow it.

This, falling short, requires reflection, which is a form of grace in constantly changing form. I know that soon we’ll go out with the dogs and when I have a shot at the first covey that busts I’ll try to kill as many of them as I can.

Went on a short walk with the dogs today. Following them across a freshly snowed baseball field, I noticed their prints paralleling each other, in sets of four paws, like words on a page. Morse code. Tab (if you’re a guitarist). Braille in the negative.

Then I noticed the two dogs’ sets were mirror images of one another. Peat’s tracks are right-handed, Bloom’s are left-handed. The first and last paw of each dog is on the same side; Peat’s on the right, Bloom’s on the left. Bloom is Leslie’s dog. Peat’s mine. Leslie’s left-handed. I’m not.

In some coincidence, by one, I’ve found myself reading a lot about the Arctic lately. I’d always known it was up there, waiting. Well, not really. It never needed me. But I’d always felt a little guilty somehow. Ignorance. Maybe that accounts for why.

Anyway, first was Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, which took a while because it’s a big book. I could go on about it, but I’ll just suggest you read it. It’s really good. Better, for me, is the next one: Hugh Brody’s The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-Gatherers, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World.

Both books deal with Eskimos. Among many of the things that have stuck with me, language comes up highest. You need to read it; I can’t explain it justly. But the crux of it is that what we try to say about our experiences in and with the wild — those of us who don’t come from a hunter-gatherer background — is defined almost totally by an absolute inability to convey that experience. Okay, so let’s move on. We try. We fail. We want to share. Some seem to get it. Some let you know. It feels shared somehow. But there’s still a lack, something’s missing. And that’s the piece, the lack. The land itself isn’t coverable by what we want to say about our moment in it. It, the land, is almost inconsequential while being essential. The arrogance. The assumption. It’s the farmer in us, and it’s what will end it all, in the end, for everyone.

Brody has a chapter on Creation that focuses on the first book of The Bible. This chapter, ironically, while limning the distinction between hunter-gatherers and farmers, and thus the basic tension in the shape of the world as anyone knows it, did more for this atheist in suggesting God as a reality than anything I know yet. This is how: farmers live in the easiest places, while the only remaining hunter-gatherers live where they’ve been pushed, areas not amenable to farming (either too cold or too hot). If anyone should relate to the land as another being, it should be the farmer. But it’s the other way around. God, then, makes this almost like a joke: in the places it’s basically impossible to live precisely because the land is so vicious and inhuman, those who live there (hunter-gatherers) relate to it as though it’s another person. It’s too perfect an irony not to come from God. (And, believe me, I get the irony of this idea.)

So all this comes to me as an accident right around the time we got the last chukar hunt of the season. The cap on the second of what I hope are the two mainly missed seasons. The hunt was epic. I’ve never seen more chukar on any single hunt. The spread of bird guano was uniform across the entire ground we covered: everywhere, and I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere. It was a place that had been hunted a lot, and it was easy to see why: lots of chukar. But, as often happens in January, they busted pretty wild. They could hear us coming a mile away, with the crunchy snow. Still, lots of points, lots of long chances, and one stealthy, solid, long hold from Peat that got me a good enough shot for my rusty brain to connect. And Bloom, who honored Peat, found it and brought it right to my hand. The whole thing was a blessing, and it was hard not to see it as a kind of thank-you from the place and those in it.

Somehow — I really don’t know how — I’ve ended up with a sense of the places I walk looking for chukar as other people. And not just those places: all land. I feel lucky to have come to this, and it’s an assumption I think I came to naturally from watching dogs and trying to find birds, paying attention; the similarity to the shape of the world in the eyes of hunter-gatherers strikes me as a rich coincidence, one I came to but one they’re born into. Land: there’s a rich relationship, richer in reciprocity: we want to pay attention to one another. I remember, as a teenager, looking at the boardwalk in my hometown destroyed by massive waves one winter and thinking joyous thoughts not because of the destruction but because nature still had a fighting chance, some kind of power. Without anthropomorphizing too much (a naughty word for those of us from the farmer culture while a central feature of the language systems for hunter-gatherers), it seemed like the waves were sending us a message about abuse. I think this is why it bothers me so much to see medusahead and cattle damage of many other kinds all across the range; it seems felonious and matricidal, especially coming from agriculturalists.

Oh well. We carry on. Next year there will be more medusahead, more star thistle, more over-grazed, abused public land. But we’ll be out walking on it with dogs looking for birds, never giving up hope, learning from dogs in this, and paying attention, listening to things the land might want to tell us. And none of it can be captured in our words. But that doesn’t mean we won’t try.

Do you believe in miracles? –Al Michaels, 1980

And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy
–Philip Larkin, from “Coming”

The animals are endlessly regenerated, and yet they are finite. I am more powerful than the animal because I kill and eat it. The animal is more powerful than I because it can elude me and cause me to starve. The animal is my benefactor and friend. The animal is my victim and adversary. The animal is different from me, and yet it is like me, as much like me as its ancestors were in the earliest time of the world.
–from Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships, by Robert Brightman

Hunting can be confusing. Not hunting for two seasons, really, gives you even more time to get even more confused. Yesterday, that confusion shifted planes, and I’ve been trying to make sense of it. Leslie and I have talked a lot about it, and we came to the same conclusion: it was a miracle, and Angus had a lot to do with it.

We’ve been camped at one of our favorite spots in Hells Canyon for three days. It’s where we scattered Angus’s ashes on our last day as Idahoans. It’s warm, it’s too early for the birds to be here; they’re down near water. But we wanted to “hunt” here anyway, just because. The dirt is talcum. There’s nothing green anywhere, and the two creeks in the area are scant trickles with numerous undulating ridges between them. The first day we hunted nearby, and the only sounds to accompany the hike were our boots crunching old arrowleaf balsam root and other dried-to-hell ground cover. The second day we went to another favorite spot from our past, partly out of curiosity to see what it looked like after a massive fire that had torched the area two years ago. While the burn was hard to see, the landscape had changed entirely: instead of the sagebrush and bitterbrush hillsides and flats — perfect habitat for chukar and Huns — the entire drainage was now a vast sea of dense dried western wheatgrass 4- to 5-feet tall and next to impossible to walk through. Scarce of partridge. Still, we were out with the dogs.

The third day, yesterday, we went early because of the heat. Another favorite spot, a ridge we call “The Ridge.” We had low expectations but wanted to do more reminiscing, I guess. Leslie, who’s not fond of grouse hunting, said, “Well at least we should get into some grouse on the north-facing timbered slopes.” We saw one. The dogs, as usual, worked their butts off, but Peat was feeling the heat and had his range thirst-shortened. At one point, when we both realized we’d forgotten to bring any food and it was really heating up, we nearly turned around. We decided to circle one more knob before heading back. As we came near a flat at the apex of the last circle, our Garmins told us Peat was pointing about 150 yards away. I said, “He’s probably lying down in the sage shade.” But then I added, “Never doubt your dog.” As we inched closer to Peat, still unable to see him, he remained on point, while Bloom was still cruising somewhere. As I got to about 30 yards from Peat, still hidden in the sage, Bloom suddenly stopped and pointed. Just then I saw two creatures on the ground in the open near the sage. They were big, and for a moment my brain didn’t know what to do with them. A second later my brain told me they were the first chukar I’d seen in nearly two years. And in that same moment they flew. I traced one of the two birds with my barrel as it ascended and I fired and watched it drop. Then I heard Leslie yell, “I got one!” Waves of chukar kept launching and I just watched. There must have been at least 60 birds. I understood nothing but the ballet of dogs and birds and started to be happy. For me, this is the best moment of hunting and why I like it. Jouissance.

None of those birds should have been there. They shouldn’t have been anywhere near. Leslie fired one shell I had hand-loaded two years ago with steel #6 shot buffered with Angus’s ashes. His soul knew we were here, and he put those birds there for us, even though every member of the super-covey probably thought, “What the hell are we doing here?” And, consistent with Angus’s deadpan humor, he knew we’d need at least 50 birds for a chance at two. Dogs are sanguine like that.