The ugly under-belly of chukar hunting has once again exposed itself here, hoping, maybe, for some kind of swan song celebration of self-hatred. I don’t really want to give the person the pleasure of a reaction, which — not unlike the mentality of mass murderers, who failed in life to get the attention they crave and thus create the conditions for a guaranteed but pathological kind of attention from strangers — is what he (or, more likely in this case, she) wants. But since this, sadly, has become a part of even the most off-the-radar culture of chukar hunting, I’ll offer it up now with the promise of ignoring it from here on out.
Since you seem like one of those guys that suffers from separation anxiety with your dogs (you not seeming to want them more than 10′ away from you at all times), why even bother with pointing breeds that are genetically designed to “hunt” and sometimes get out of your sight? Get yourself, hmm, maybe a king charles spaniel and leave the real chukar hunting to the big boys, This way, you won’t have to shit your pants every time a dog goes over a hill…..and you won’t have to “run” every time one your dogs goes on “point”. Boy, that’s a sight – you runnin’ and shittin’ at the same time
Two things come to mind. First, it’s only been in the last 18 months or so that we’ve gotten comments like this; I have my own thoughts about why this might be, but I’ll let you make your own connections. Second, it saddens me to contemplate what someone like this might think is appropriate or ethical behavior in the field. I’ve never claimed to be the best-behaved person in the world, or that I have the best manners, or that I’m the most ethical hunter on earth, but I can’t even (and don’t want to) imagine the type of self-hatred that would make talking to a stranger in this way even possible. I feel sorry for him or her. Real life is better. Check it out.
UPDATE 10/21/19: I’m participating in Boise’s storytelling institution “Story Story Night” on Tuesday, October 29th, for its “Starry Story Night” event, which weaves together six storytellers’ narratives on a theme related to hunting. My part is largely from the piece I published in Gray’s about Angus and other things. We’ve rehearsed several times now, and I have to say it’s one of the most interesting, thought-provoking, connection-inspiring literary events I’ve been a part of, and it features a live brass quintet. If you’re in town, please come check it out.
If you can’t find a copy of Gray’s from August 2015 and want to see my piece on Angus, here it is:
The current issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal (Bird Hunting Edition, August 2015, available at Barnes & Noble) features a piece I wrote about Angus a couple years ago. The best thing about the piece is Rachel Teannalach‘s painting, which I wrote about in an earlier post. Still, the piece is heartfelt and makes a nice tribute to one of the most compelling souls I’ve had the pleasure of being with in this short life.
We haven’t made many videos since Leslie traded the camcorder for a Benelli. I was looking through my Youtube channel the other day, and noticed that one of the first videos we made (and one of my favorites) had been permanently blocked because I used copyrighted music as a soundtrack. I have no problem with that, but wondered if there was a way I could restore it somehow. Youtube offered to remove the music so I could restore the video, and it actually worked!
So here it is, in case you missed it: one of the early Angus hunts back when we lived in Boise. Enjoy!
It was warm outside, t-shirt weather, and I was hoping for a crisp, cool morning on grouse opener but the air felt thick and muggy. You could hear a pin drop in all of its calmness. I worked my way up through the deep draw that was nestled between stands of tall sage, weaving my way through the thick brush, tucking and carefully maneuvering my shotgun, always aware of where it was pointed while crawling over and under branches. Some branches catching the back of my upland hunting pack, I fought my way loose. I could hear Angus intrepidly and noisily moving below me, sticks breaking and dried arrowleaf balsamroot leaves being crushed like potato chips. I caught a glimpse of him as he ran uphill past me. Angus was birdy, his docked tail moving back and forth quickly like a hummingbird. I was hoping to hear the sudden fluttering of a grouse busting for freedom but I heard a different sound instead.
A quiet staccato cak-cak-cak noise came from overhead in the tall pine trees at the top of the draw. I stopped, picked out a tree and squinted into the sun looking for an outline of a bird overhead somewhere. Balancing from a skinny branch like a tightrope walker, I caught the glimpse of the big dusky grouse staring down at me. Bob and Peat were coming up the other side of the draw and heard the grouse calling. I motioned him over and singled out the grouse in the tree. He pointed at my forearm covered in fresh blood and asked “What happened?” I answered back “Hawthorn spike, I guess?”
My preferred style of hunting is not seeing or thinking about killing a bird too much beforehand. The killing part of bird hunting is the part that I hate the most. “I’m not going to shoot that grouse out of a tree!” I shouted to Bob. In my mind after I made eye contact with that bird, we now had a relationship. Bob said “It’s just meat, I’ll do it.” The grouse impatient from our conversation about who was going to shoot it flew from the branch. Bob shot and missed and then he continued up the draw where he found a large mule deer shed laying on the ground. Bending over to pick it up, another grouse busted from the ground nearby. He proceeded to mount his gun, spin around, and hit the bird as it flew past. It was an amazing shot. Falling from the sky and into the ticket, Angus was first to the retrieve and took the bird directly to Bob. I was proud that he beat Peat to the grouse.
The old warrior, or aged warrior, as we call him, Angus seemed perfectly normal and fine during the hunt but after we got home we noticed some tiny drops of bloody urine on the kitchen floor. We had noticed some drops of blood before, about a week prior, but didn’t know where it came from. Examining Angus, we realized it was coming from him. I called our regular vet who’s taken care of Angus for seven years. His answering machine said that he was still on medical leave, which he’d been on all summer, but that he might start taking appointments on the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend. Anxious to get Angus treated right away, we called another vet clinic in another town and they said they could see Angus that afternoon.
The veterinarian, one we’d only met for the first time that day, walked out of the back examination room and into the waiting room where Bob and I were anxiously awaiting the results of Angus’s urine test. Expressionless, he made eye contact with me and looked away. He began by saying “I have some bad news…….[pause]………the good news is that his lab work looks good……..[pause]……..the bad news is that we went ahead and did a quick ultrasound and he has a urinary tumor and most likely has one to three months to live.”
Devastated.
I stared down at the concrete floor and looked up as someone walked past close by, and another person with their dog was heading out the door. Without saying any words to me and just from his expression I could tell the vet was saying, “I’m sorry.”
Instead of being handed a bottle of antibiotics to fix what we thought might be just a simple urinary infection we were being handed a business card for a vet clinic in Boise that we could call the following week to make an appointment so they could discuss starting chemotherapy which might buy him another six months at the most.
The long Labor Day weekend was ahead of us, and anxious to get a second opinion right away, Bob called a good friend of ours who’s a vet in Washington state to ask him for some advice. Ethan suggested getting Angus on Piroxicam because it’s been shown to sometimes give good results to dogs with transitional cell carcinoma (TCC) and that surgery was too risky to remove the tumor.
Tuesday, Sept 3rd.
After the long weekend, doing our own research and giving it plenty of thought, we decided against pursuing chemo because Angus is 12-1/2 years old. Bob called the vet to see if he could get us some Piroxicam, but he’d never heard of using it for TCC. What!? That same Tuesday Bob called our normal vet , Dr. Gardner, who we liked and trusted, and who’d miraculously made a complete recovery from his illness and was back to business full time. Dr. Gardner called into our pharmacy the prescription for the Piroxicam. We started Angus on the drug on Sept 5th.
Chukar opener was Sept 21st, and I’ve hunted with him eleven times now since they found a tumor in his bladder. He’s been hunting hard and pointing chukar and Huns just like he’s always done, and I’ve had the pleasure of shooting over him and have him retrieve birds for me. Looking at him you wouldn’t know anything was wrong with him, but now knowing that this is his last season makes me appreciate things more than ever. Bob and I take turns following him around outside to watch him pee, but the moment he can’t urinate anymore because the tumor is blocking his urinary tract it will be time. Just like in that moment you choose to shoot and kill a wild game bird, it’s a choice we make or are forced to make, and it’s never easy ending a life.
Miracle dog?
I’ve been crying a lot lately but don’t want Angus to see me doing it. Dogs are perceptive, they key into your emotions. He doesn’t know that he’s dying. We took him for his two month check up a couple of days ago, and Dr. Gardner said that the tumor was shrinking.
Sometimes, the best way to define something is to begin with what it is not.
I think this is because the more stuff we get exposed to, the harder it is to distinguish between things that appear similar but really aren’t. The Internet Age has amplified this, as we all know. Social media in particular has grown into what a lot of people might call a necessary evil (although I personally think it’s very unnecessary, despite the fact that I use it). Each day more of us are seduced by it for one reason or another. And as that happens, the general discourse gets — in my opinion — degraded. This blog’s been around for about a decade, and until very recently it’s been immune to some of the ills I see in the discourse between otherwise anonymous people. “Civil discourse” seems to get rarer each day as keyboard commandos, trolls, and just straight-up assholes feel entitled to ruffle feathers just for the hell of it or, more likely, because they hate themselves and can’t think of anything better to do but project that self-hatred onto strangers.
So, to put it plainly, as far as what this blog is not:
— It is not yours — It is not a petri dish for trolls — It is not Instagram — It is not a forum for “free speech” or spam — It is not an outlet for unsolicited, uncivil discourse
What it is (as if that weren’t obvious):
— A place for my wife and me to share our thoughts, experiences, photos, and videos about chukar hunting and the culture surrounding it — A place for civil discussions in response to our posts
As I said, until very recently, the impetus for wasting bandwidth on this issue never existed here, but I feel compelled (and really saddened) now to do so because I want to make it clear that if you feel like being a jerk on this blog, I won’t give you the perverse satisfaction of publicizing your self-hatred. Sorry.
If you don’t like what I write, or what my wife writes, and want to say so, we want to hear it if you can be a person about it. I like disagreement; I learn a lot from it. But if you can’t be a person, please don’t read this blog and please don’t comment. Unsubscribe. Go spread your self-hatred somewhere else, or better yet look in the mirror and face yourself and get some help. We’d all be better off.
