Not just for the birds

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  • Where They Are

    Where They Are

    [I just found this in my “Drafts” folder. It’s from two years ago when we were still looking for a place back in chukar country to move to. I thought I’d posted it but for some reason didn’t, probably related to a family emergency that, along with the person it centered on, passed about a year ago.]

    We drove nearly a quarter of a million miles looking for birds this season. I don’t have the exact figure. We hiked 51.4, which was at least twice what we did the previous season (I didn’t even bother keeping records), but more than 160 fewer miles than our last big season (2020-21). Those are all the numbers I feel like sharing now. Maybe next year I’ll geek out a bit more on that score.

    At the beginning of one of those long, multi-state drives, in December I think, we left our house at the ultimate northwest point of the contiguous United States and drove nearly 30 miles going 25 mph along the undulant serpentine highway fronting the Strait of Juan de Fuca (also known as the Salish Sea) before realizing that I had forgotten my boots. So we went back and got them. The fog had burned off on the redux. “Worth waiting for, huh?” it seemed to say.

    For years I’d wanted to hunt chukar in Nevada. And never had. So this year, we went down there, armed with some beta from a cyber-friend we ended up meeting for dinner in Winnemucca. We’d reserved a room, on his advice, at Scott’s Shady Court, and when we crossed its threshold we time-traveled back about a half-century. Our suite was big and roomy, and cheap, and the dogs loved it, but there weren’t any grounded outlets so I couldn’t charge all our shit. Anachronism much? Anyway, before dinner at the fabulous (for real) Martin Hotel, we headed to Wally World to buy licenses to add to our Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Wyoming bird licenses this season. It was a typical Wal-Mart experience: walk around ’til you find someone who looks like they work there, ask for help, and have them ignore you but walk away and use their radio to ask someone to come to the _____ department and help a customer. The five minutes that elapsed before an associate arrived were spent by me thinking I should have just tried to get my license online. The young man entered the space behind the counter near all the guns and ammo (they lock that up now, too), and began logging into the computer. There was another guy with him, also with an associate’s blue vest and nametag with the smiley face on it. Together they appeared to will the keypuncher’s access to the system. Several minutes and dozens of keystrokes later, the keypuncher looked up for a brief moment, not at me but in my direction, and announced that he couldn’t remember his login information. I looked at him and asked if he could call a manager. “I am the manager,” he replied. The ensuing conversation made it clear that I would not be able to purchase a license at Wal-Mart that evening, but that I could come back at 8 a.m. the following morning when another manager who could probably remember his or her login would have taken over. On the way out I made a brief stop at the customer service desk for a second opinion, which verified the first one.

    At the Martin Hotel, sitting with strangers at the long family style dinner table, before our friend got there, while pretending to peruse the menu, we eavesdropped on our table-mates’ conversation about lining up immigrants, shooting them, and letting them fall into a mass grave. “Where would be a good spot for that?” one of the others asked earnestly. Then our friend arrived, and on hearing the account of the Wal-Mart license experience, was initially aghast but then said that unless we had a physical copy of a certificate showing we’d passed a hunter safety course we would not be able to buy a license in Nevada. It was my turn to be aghast, which I was; none of the other five states had such a requirement for people of our advanced age and inestimable experience. Chock this one up to an overabundance of faith and not doing adequate research: the next morning we drove north out of Nevada, our Silver State Chukar Virginity intact. As we crossed from Nevada into Oregon, Leslie said, “We should call it ‘No-vada.’” [NOTE: We’ve since figured out what we need to do on the license front, but have yet to make it there. Soon, I hope.]

    Like Moses, we wandered a lot in the desert looking both for birds and a new place to live. Wyoming was different for us, and revelatory in several ways. The red landscape around the Wind River range struck us positively, but the prickly-pear cactus stuck our dogs’ feet negatively. Still, after a wonderful morning in and around Lander, we did laundry in Pinedale and talked with an octogenarian man who’d raised ten kids in a log cabin nearby with no running water or electricity; each of his kids had long since graduated from a prestigious university and gone on to do big things. We camped at Ten Sleep Brewing Company, initially setting up in the wrong campground, to be kicked out by a rancher who owned what was the glitzy but empty level concrete pad expensive campground right next to the brewery campground but with no distinguishing signage. We found our sloped grassy/muddy tiny spot not long thereafter, which was okay. Better than okay was being awakened the next morning by chukar calling from a rocky outcropping above the brewery. The dogs were lit running through the network of red arroyos and over terrain that must have registered a lunar difference if they’d even paused for a second to contemplate. I’ve never hiked in anything more beautiful, but no birds were found by us despite a couple hard points by Bloom. On our way out of there, we (I) of course got lost, which I truly enjoy but Leslie does not. An unexpected joy, for us both, was that, while we sat pulled off to the side of the road, a FedEx truck passed us, braked, reversed, and the driver asked us if he could help direct us somewhere. His friendliness and easy-to-follow directions gave me a warmth for humanity. About thirty minutes later, we came to an intersection on the still-gravel road that we wanted to analyze, and — you guessed it — the same driver came past us, stopped, reversed, this time getting out of his truck and walking back to us in case, I don’t know, we might have something as novel as a map to look at (nope; just the “smart” phones). Anyway, he suggested the best route to Cody, and we were on our way, but not before my typical question to strangers in chukar country: “Do you by chance hunt chukar?” He said no, he didn’t have time, which I thought was a good answer, whether or not it was true.

    As it’s no doubt obvious by now, we’re both beerhounds, and the more cynical out there might view our house-seeking/chukar-hunting itinerary as a thinly-veiled excuse to visit brewpubs throughout the intermountain west and Pacific Northwest. Joints including but not limited to ones in Prineville (OR), The Dalles (OR), Walla Walla (WA), Lewiston (ID), Clarkston (WA), Ontario (OR), Mitchell (OR), Ten Sleep (WY), Sheridan (MT), Lewistown (MT), Ennis (MT), Victor (ID), Spokane (WA), Baker City (OR), Enterprise (OR), John Day (OR), Salmon (ID), Driggs (ID), Olympia (WA), and Troutdale (OR) sold us IPAs. And, in the ill-fated Winnemucca leg, we were gifted with some fine brews by Alectoris Aleworks! With Hells Canyon Beer about to embark on its third iteration, we realize we actually might be a Beer Club with a Chukar Problem.

    Enterprise, OR
    Mitchell, OR
    Prineville, OR
    Ten Sleep, WY
    Council, ID
    Olympia, WA
    Lewiston, ID
    The driveway of the house we tried to buy
    The view from the house we tried to buy
    The house we tried to buy (before it hard-failed the inspection)
    The house we ended up buying
  • But They Do

    But They Do

    “I didn’t know you were left-handed” my father said to me one day while we were having lunch. I sat there not knowing how to reply. I was never his favorite child, something that I’d learned to accept but was stunned at his new realization after being his daughter for over 50 years. 

    A few weeks later, I told my sister about it and she said it’s because he’s crazy, but this incident was a handful of years before his dementia took over his brain. I think he just didn’t understand how his words could make me feel so not very important. 

    I admit that after my mom died 13 years ago I didn’t call my dad as much as a daughter probably should. Instead, I would wait for him to call me first but he never did. Sometimes months would go by without any communication with him, and the phone call or birthday card in the mail that I was hoping to receive never came. My twin brother, who also was not my father’s favorite child, didn’t receive a birthday call or card either. I don’t know why we were both disappointed.

    Yesterday, I loaded up the dogs in their crates in the back of my car and left home for a solo hunt to clear my head from recent events. The morning sun was just peeking up from behind the snowy mountain range in the distance. I don’t like to drive at dawn when elk or deer sometimes cross the highway heading out of town but I wanted to get an early start. It was a long drive mostly on dirt and thick gravel for just over an hour. Rarely, in this place where both Bob and I only try to hunt once per season, we’d hardly ever see someone else parked there but I was worried anyway. I was relieved nobody else was there. 

    My hunt started with a short but very steep climb. As I weaved my way through the sage and tall ancient looking antelope bitterbrush, the air was dead silent and the only sound that I could hear was my own breathing until my Garmin beeped that one of the dogs was on point. Just as I reached the top of the climb Peat was just a few yards away. I walked towards his direction holding my breath and tried to walk as silently as humanly possible. I then heard the sound of wing beats as the covey busted and I got a glimpse of a group Hungarian partridges with their rust-colored tail feathers catching the light. They flew down towards the road.  I didn’t want to chase them back down the hill so we continued looking for other birds.

    A few minutes later, Peat and Bloom both went on point at the same time in opposite directions. Peat 75 yards to my right, Bloom 200 yards away at 10 o’clock. I headed to Peat first because it’s almost always a sure thing and just as I got to him, a different covey of Huns busted just out of firing range. Wild busts seem to be the common theme from my 16 hunts this season. I squinted down at my Garmin and Bloom was still on point, so I headed his direction and Peat quickly moved the same direction. I watched Peat put on the brakes and stop motionless after he saw Bloom pointing. Trying to guess which direction the birds might fly, I got into position. They busted and I was surprised and elated they were chukar.

    Everything seemed like slow motion as I mounted my gun and picked out one bird and hit it as it flew high from left to right. It cartwheeled to the ground and Peat retrieved it to me but it wasn’t completely dead. I held it in my hand and squeezed it hard until it stopped breathing and then stuffed it into my bird pouch. Immediately, an overwhelming sense of sadness swept over me for that chukar. The last time that I cried after killing a bird was seven years ago when I shot a ruffed grouse out of a tree. It was my first time hunting with a shotgun and it didn’t feel right to do what I did at the time but did it anyway. Since then I’ve never shot a bird out of a tree. 

    The dogs and I continued to hunt, finding more birds but I passed on a perfectly easy shot before realizing that I didn’t want to deal with more than two deaths in one week. The other death this week was my father, who died last Sunday at the age of 86.

    On the drive home I’d remembered the advice from a very insightful girlfriend this past summer who has three children of her own. I’d asked her if she had a favorite child. She said it depends on what’s is going on with them and said something like, “The reason your dad hasn’t given you much attention over the years is because he knows you are loved and you are okay. Your sister gets all the attention because she has never had that in her life.” My friend was right. My dad wasn’t a bad person, he just didn’t know how to treat each kid equally.

     When I arrived home, Bob was anxious to hear how my hunt went. I told him that I’d never seen so many coveys of huns and chukar in one day. He said, “You don’t seem very happy.”

    I came to the conclusion while out there hunting that it wasn’t killing that chukar that made me sad but instead I was thinking about my dad and the fact that I really never had a father. Two years ago when we moved back to chukar country it was partly to be closer to where he lived. We get busy with our daily lives, I regret we never got to know each other. 

    Bob said look up the poem “The Mower” by Philip Larkin. I did but found another poem by Larkin that seemed more fitting in my moment of angry grief called “This Be The Verse.” Look them up if you feel inclined. I think some of you might relate to them.

  • More Lies

    More Lies

    Like millions, I’ve loved fiction for a long time. Until recently, I’d never tried hard writing it. A while ago, though, when I was still teaching high school I was lucky enough to convince the principal to let me offer a creative writing course. I didn’t really know what I was doing (the theme of my entire career, and even life), but improvised. I gave an assignment to the class that asked them to write a short story. We’d read a few and talked about them, and I gave them a week. These were motivated high school students, and they ate it up. Instead of twiddling my thumbs while they worked, I decided I’d do the assignment, too. So we wrote alongside of each other for a week. Those were some of the quietest, most focused days I can remember.

    I’d been living in the little ranching town for a few years, and had grown even more obsessed with chukar hunting and trying to understand the complex attraction it had for me, particularly the paradox of killing something you thought you loved. So my story focused on a ranch kid, the son of a colleague, who’d asked us — in real life — to take him chukar hunting. Leslie and I wrote about him a lot back in the day. “The Kid.”

    But I had to lie to write the story, and — knowing I wasn’t the first — was okay with that. In the meantime, I’d found a book while wandering around Powell’s in Portland titled Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships. The title spoke loudly to me, almost as if it answered the paradox. I had to create a character that would bring that into the story. And so I started writing.

    But before I’d written much at all, I’d gotten into a spot in the story about a feral cat, and that consumed all of the pages and time alloted. That was maybe ten years ago. I’d never even worked in the stuff from Grateful Prey. Last winter, though, I took it up again and expanded it to a novella, adding four more characters. Once I’d finished it, I started the arduous process of trying both the get an agent interested in the book and to adapt parts of it to short stories that I sent out to literary journals.

    All of this was new territory. I knew that rejection was part of the game, and I got lots of that. In the first couple months of 2024 I sent out more than 60 pieces of various lengths and parts of the book, all “stand-alone” (so they would make sense on their own). I’ve had four stories from the book accepted by literary journals now. I’m still working on finding an agent. I’ve also nearly completed a sequel novel.

    Anyway, I’ll share the first story, published in The Vassar Review last spring. If you click the thumbnail below, it’ll open the whole issue (it’s kind of a big file so it might take awhile). My piece, “Facing Death,” starts on page 48. Some of the stuff from Grateful Prey is there, and lots of hunting-related things. Let me know what you think.

  • Shadows

    Shadows

    When it comes, the Landscape listens —
    Shadows — hold their breath —
    –Emily Dickinson

    Like Men and Women Shadows walk —
    Upon the Hills Today —
    –Emily Dickinson

    Every picture has its shadows
    And it has some source of light
    Blindness, blindness and sight
    –Joni Mitchell

    Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale,
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.
    –William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

    Hunting chukar is a privilege, a hobby. Nobody hunts chukar because they must. If your life depended on it, even if you shot 100%, you’d die of malnutrition. Calorically, it’s way less than a zero sum game. On this 95th anniversary of Black Tuesday, that’s food for thought.

    I started this blog about 15 years ago, after I’d lost my job and had more time on my hands. My first chukar hunt happened ten years earlier, in the fall of 2000, thanks to the generous father of a co-worker. He and his Lab had picked me up in the dark in his Bronco, never having met me or my puppy Glenna, and drove about an hour outside of Boise. He’d told me to bring waders. We linked arms, started across the swift river, hoped the dogs would figure it out, ditched the waders on the opposite bank, changed into our boots, and headed uphill. My youthful enthusiasm and Glenna’s natural ability impressed him, but we never went with Rich again. I’m not sure why. I think I got one bird that day. But, as I’ve written about before, Glenna — for whatever reason, probably my fault — began hunting too much for herself and diminished my desire to chase birds.

    I started really becoming obsessed with this privilege when I moved to Cambridge in the summer of 2012. It served to stabilize me through the first several years of my new teaching career there, and soon became my favorite thing in the world. Even though my first glimpse of Cambridge was colored by the pawn shop’s astonishing storefront, lowlighting the deplorable ‘Murica mentality of its owner (who’d been the high school art teacher before the district cut the art classes because of Idaho’s deliberate underfunding of public education), being able to go hunting after school and on the long weekends (ours was a four-day school) really helped me to develop a stability and contentment there. And as teaching became easier and more fulfilling, so did chukar hunting. Funny how that works.

    The former high school art teacher sitting on the bench in front of his pawn shop in Cambridge, July 2012. (Enlarge the photo to read the signs.)

    So my first four seasons there became more and more joyous. My youngest group of students had become seniors, and in the spring of 2016 they asked me to give the Commencement address, an honor which moved me tremendously. But in November 2016 the shadows started becoming more of a factor, darkening the landscape. It took awhile to notice. Incredulousness played a big part. Teaching critical thinking skills seemed increasingly important, but began taking a toll on my demeanor. When I refused to answer a question about the recent election, one of my best students said, “I’ve been waiting since kindergarten for a new president but I didn’t want this one!” Not by nature a tongue-holder, saying nothing about any of this at school took more out of me than I’ll ever know. By 2018 I realized I’d transitioned from a merely negative person to a constantly angry person. It’s been a while now. Nearly ten years of watching the normalization of hatred and division, the disrespect for the rule of law, and now the threat of a complete dismantling and destruction of this country’s admittedly flawed but hopeful foundation looms so large for me and tens of millions of others that every day every thing is laced or suffused with dread. Including this privilege of walking around public land (who knows how long that’ll last) searching for game birds with my dogs and wife.

    So it would feel ignorantly irresponsible of me not to say that I’m voting for Kamala Harris and to encourage everyone I know to do the same. Actually, I voted early. It was easy for me. I know it’s not for many. As I’ve written here and elsewhere, strong women have been a formative part of my life from its beginning. This shouldn’t strike anyone as irrelevant to this blog: it’s been a satisfying impossibility for me to separate chukar hunting from everything else and vice versa. Worry, dread, shadows all play their part at some point in every outing; the ups and downs of any hunt reflect life in reassuring ways. But when those dark things spread so opaquely over everything they demand all of my attention, paralyzingly so. The thing that saved this country in the fallout from Black Tuesday, after so many people died and suffered needlessly for years because of the un-democratic power and greed of a few, was FDR’s New Deal, which is the model for what Biden’s done to rescue the economy from his predecessor’s grift and graft. Harris, obviously, will build on that success if she wins. But there’s more to this than just “the economy, stupid.” Obviously. There’s the abyss, which is always all shadow.

    Stupidity is one thing. Ignorance is another, and it is truly deplorable. Our dogs and the birds we chase, god love them, are stupid, but their instincts — at least on this playing field — are smarter by far than ours. Their lacking of the anatomy that makes us intelligent is the basis for our love of them: dogs, for one, can only do what’s right and good. Ignorance, on the other hand, is having the ability to know the difference between right and wrong and choosing not to give a shit, choosing not to pay attention. There is only one right choice out of the two we have for who leads this country. The wrong choice is simply, obviously, wilfully ignorant. I know there are many who think, like Macbeth, that it doesn’t matter. Even a smarter writer like Emily Dickinson thought that

    Diadems – drop –
    And Doges surrender –
    Soundless as Dots, 
    On a Disk of Snow

    but I like to think she wasn’t as serious about that as she was about shadows holding their breath. I’m holding mine. Don’t be ignorant. Do the right thing.

  • Younger

    Younger

    Just got home from a great week hunting chukar in Oregon. We were blessed with mostly good weather, and my shooting actually seemed to get better. Imagine that. To be honest, I’d switched from the #7 steel Rio shells (1-1/8 ounce, 1350 fps) that were sent to me in error last season (I’d ordered #6, but they wouldn’t take them back) to some lighter target #6 steel loads (1 ounce, 1365 fps) I’d brought as backups. Who knows? Biorhythms? Planetary alignment? Jerky? Payday bars? A penchant for Joni Mitchell?

    The revelation of the week, for me, came accidentally. Peat, who’s now nearing 10, is wearing out and it breaks my heart. He was limping badly from some abrasions on his pads and also the arthritis or tendonitis that has crept up on him the past few seasons after tough hunts. To call this an accident is dishonest, but I’m still gonna call it that. I was hoping to take Peat for a fourth straight hunt, seeing as it would have been our last day on this trip. But he wasn’t up for it. He didn’t even get off the bed in the camper when I walked out the door with Bloom. Leslie had very kindly encouraged me to go alone with the younger dog. Her dog.

    I didn’t have high hopes for the hunt. I’d never hunted alone with Bloom, who’ll be 4 next March. His nose has always seemed to be almost too sensitive, leading — we’ve theorized — to lots of false pointing. But he’s also found us a ton of birds. Peat, whose favorite thing in the world has always been backing another pointing dog, and, as Angus did with Peat in his early days, seems to have gotten comfortable letting the younger dog do the most work. My log shows Peat barely outrunning Bloom their first season together, then Bloom besting Peat by about a mile or two per hunt, and this season so far (after 17 hunts) Bloom is outrunning Peat by 3 or 4 miles. Bloom is an athlete, a freight train of uncut and solid muscle, and runs 4 to 5 times what we hike. Peat’s a finesse hunter, and has always “only” averaged about 3 times our mileage. The upshot of the discrepancy in the ground each dog covers is that I’d never really paid careful attention to how Bloom hunted, only noticing that he covered much more ground than Peat did. Still, when Peat points it’s a sure thing. I’d gotten used to 50-50-ing Bloom’s points, and focusing mostly on Peat.

    But hunting alone with Bloom the other day let me see him work more clearly. Before too long, it had become obvious how utterly methodical he was. He’d almost intuit the path I moved along, and would run ovals apexing at almost exactly 200 yards in front of me, then circle around just behind me and start another oval. He did this for 3 straight hours, deviating only when chukar scent pulled him “off” course. Which happened five times, resulting in four shots and three bagged birds. My “best” hunt (as far as numbers go) this season.

    Bloom seemed to appreciate the simplicity of our hunt, too. He didn’t have two hunters and another more experienced dog to contend with. It was reassuring, in a bittersweet way. It was almost as if we both responded to being able to focus better on the task at hand, where the sum of the affair was greater than its parts. How sweet. But the bitter part remains. Anyone who’s had multiple dogs knows this game: you favor a certain dog and then he or she starts showing the inevitable decline that comes with age. The cloud moves in. I’m at the point where I can, finally, hunt more consecutive days than Peat can, but I know it won’t last long, both because of my age (And if no other misery yet age?) and because of his. We look for things that might mitigate this sadness, and a younger dog improving, or just being able to appreciate him without comparing him to an older, more beloved beast, certainly doesn’t hurt.

    I’m glad Leslie encouraged me to take her pup out, and that she sacrificed a gorgeous late October day (the day before her birthday no less!) to stay at camp with Peat.

    Bloom pointing stylishly (note his tongue). He seems to like it this way.
    Just checking to make sure I’m still there
    Bringing home the bacon
    Bloom’s most similar behavior to his great-uncle Angus: retrieving a bird to the closest sagebrush shade to me. He runs hot.