Not just for the birds

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  • Will

    Will

    “Will you go to lunch.” — Kevin Spacey as Williamson, Glengarry Glen Ross

    “If others have their will Ann hath a way.” — James Joyce, Ulysses

    “Jem and I were accustomed to our father’s last-will-and-testament diction…” Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

    “The will to live, which forms the inmost core of every living being, exhibits itself most conspicuously in the higher order of animals, that is, the cleverer ones…” — Arthur Schopenhauer, “Psychological Observations” (1817)

    I had this thought last night: “There are four dead birds _________ in my refrigerator.” I couldn’t think of any present participles. Actually, I could, but they didn’t make any sense, their cognitive dissonance was too great. The idea doesn’t really need a participle but, you know. Habits of language. Then I wondered why I was having this trouble. And it occurred to me that death can not be a state of existence that warrants any present anything, participles, verbs, presence. It’s the absence of being.

    I would say that chukar are among the “cleverer” animals, so when their will to live is extinguished by a mortal wound caused by some number 6 steel shot fired from my gun, that bird is from that point forward verbless, regardless of whether it’s in my fridge or freezer, or even taxidermied on a beautiful mount that hangs on the wall. Its being no longer is, which includes its will to live. Or, as John Cleese described his dead parrot to the falsely incredulous pet shop owner, “This is an ex-parrot.” And I did that.

    This all might seem pretty basic. But it wasn’t to me, and still isn’t. The problem intensifies, of course, when it’s turned onto me and my mortality. What’s the connection between all of our individual mortalnesses and this hobby of ours, trying to bag birds, trying to create ex-chukar?

    The phrase in the regulations sheds some light on this: “reduced to possession.” When we will it and execute it properly, the chukar’s will to live (our idea) is not actually reduced, is it? Instead, it’s eliminated. But what the regs mean is that — like the word they also seem to love, “harvest,” as if we’re talking about corn here — we’ve merely diminished the animal’s state of existence. One could also argue that the regulations’ language here simply marks the difference between a daily bag limit and how many previous days’ harvest one has in possession. Regardless, it’s dishonest language. The discrepancy in meaning between “reduced” and “eliminated” is our (as the putatively cleverest of the animals) inclination (or will) to minimize or obfuscate the fact that we’ve asserted our will over another creature’s and rendered it a former being. Further, it’s generally assumed that asserting our will over another creature’s — as long as they’re “lower” than us — is normal, okay, unproblematic. Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting, probably the most-cited writing on this subject, normalizes this hierarchy in a specist and specious argument (which is why I have no use for it).

    Another aspect of the phrase strikes me, too: “possession.” When we possess the chukar, it’s not only dead but no longer free. We own it. But can something dead be owned, possessed? Grammar says no. Still, our will prevails. (I’m aware of my cultural bias here, as a non-Native Western European: Native American cosmology and ontology have much different takes on all this.)

    But, despite the linguistic obstacle, who can do this to us? How are we reducible to possession? That’s not a real question. We all know the myriad answers to it. Some eliminations are accidental, some intentional, and some just are as a matter of course (dying of old age, for example). Or, for some, it just comes down to God’s will. Not sure what to do with that, aside from saying that we’re assuming the status of God when we “harvest” game (Gasset would have no problem with this). But it’s ironic to me that we cleverest animals have mucked up our wills to live far beyond the less clever but still clever enough to will a life. Maybe in Schopenhauer’s time humans’ will to live was pretty uniformly “conspicuous.” Existence was harder then, and humans, regardless of economic or social status, spent enormously more time than we do on subsistence-related endeavors. Food, shelter, clothing. Now, we have Amazon and Blue Apron. So our wills to live have been diminished somewhat, at least for those privileged enough to have a relatively easy life. I’d say that anyone who hunts for sport (as opposed to necessity) falls into that category.

    If you’ve read this far you’re probably going, “Where the hell is he going with this?” For me, all this comes down to the question, Whose will to live shall prevail, and why? Clearly, we humans think our wills are superior to animals’ and therefore, duh, shall prevail. But I don’t actually buy that, although — hypocrite Me — I act on it at least fifty times a season. First, the concept of superiority, or hierarchy, is entirely ours, which is self-proving. “Fair chase” is probably the best known and most relied on ethical justification of this hierarchy, but in truth there’s nothing even remotely fair about it. It’s not a level playing field. Animals have no conception of the food chain, despite being programmed to fit in the various slots human analysis has constructed through observation over the millenia. This reminds me of the trouble Noah Lyles got in during the Olympics for criticizing the “World Champion” concept in American professional sport for assuming the U.S. equals “the world.” So yeah, bias is a bitch, and hackles will be raised when it’s called out. So I expect something.

    A lot of this has to do with my metastasizing distaste for tailgate shots, which I wrote about not too long ago. “Look what I did!” Poses with dead game and their killers litter social media. Despite what Gasset says, there is nothing noble about “tradition,” which has been used for nefarious purposes forever. Why the need or desire to associate oneself with an ex-chukar and share it with the world. Penance? Pride? A cry for absolution? Atonement? Adulation?

    When I kill a bird I feel guilty as hell. I think of the family I took it from. I think of the life it was endeavoring to live, the succulent blades of grass I found in its crop as I cleaned it (the vocabulary of all this rocks me). I think of the covey bust and its communal expression of the will of each of its members to live, and live together, going forward, fearing the demise of their lives, of being eliminated, of not wanting to be eliminated. I think of fear as a killer and a saver of life, and the crap shoot as to which it is in any given situation, and how my participation in this particular situation radically influences that outcome. I think of the things I share in the chukar’s fear, of my own fears about mortality, whether caused by an external force or not. I think of the dogs, and then I can barely take it, in good ways and bad.

    And I will do this. Until I won’t.

    Peat looking outside in Cambridge

    Angus, about ten years before we laid his ashes in exactly this spot, on Schoolhouse Ridge, overlooking Henry’s Lake, on the Continental Divide.

  • Praising Canines

    Praising Canines

    Our little burg has a “town square” group on Facebook. Notices of dogs running loose, accompanied by blurry photos, is probably its most common theme. Often, follow-up posts report that the mystery dog’s owner has been found and that the dog has returned safely to its home. Very occasionally, as happened yesterday, someone reports a dead dog. A close-up of creamy and mocha short-haired fur, a Christmassy collar with little bells on it, and lots of small black and white-tipped porcupine barbs. No face or even an indication of breed. Not necessary. Someone’s beloved pet, judging by the remarkable collar. Most people who respond do so empathetically, posting a “sad” or “caring” emoji. Sometimes the keyboard commandos come out, though, as one did in this case, chiding the author of the post for not including a “better” photo of the whole dog. But when it comes to dogs, the better angels win and these j-holes get put in their place publicly. Which is gratifying in a way because people seem compelled to affirm that these creatures really are our best friends. You get it.

    I was a cat-person, childless, until age 36. My first dog was Glenna, a backyard breeder’s last Brittany puppy out of a litter of ten. I think she cost me $300. After she passed at the early age of 10 from megaesophagus I tracked her life’s vet bills (I’m one of those organized OCD types): it was more than $10,000. If I’d never gotten another dog after her — the thought had settled in me for a while there — I wouldn’t be writing this. My time with her would have been written off as a failed experiment. Glenna was a good test for a first dog: headstrong, increasingly irritable as she aged and was overtaken by her discomfort from having an esophagus that went on strike: her food just piled up in her throat, created a lot of foam, and the bolus (a word I’d never heard of before this) would get coughed up spectacularly in stages, piles of sticky white foam surrounding still-dry kibble. Gruesome, and emotionally wretched. The pounds slid off her and I finally had to end her life.

    Fortunately, we’d gotten Angus when Glenna was 7. If you’ve followed this blog, I don’t need to say anything else, but you might want to see Leslie’s post from 2019, “Saved by a Dog.” Then, later than we should have, we got Peat when Angus was 8. But if we hadn’t gotten him then, we wouldn’t have, and we might now be dogless. I was convinced Peat was the Devil. Initially. Well, for about three years. Now that we’ve had almost ten years to adjust to him (he hasn’t changed at all), he’s just adorable. At least we think so. Maybe our lack of friends has something to do with that. Peat. My nephew put it well when introducing Peat to a friend of his when we were all about to float the Missouri this summer: “He’s a 10-year-old that acts like a 2-year-old.”

    Now we have Bloom, who’s 3. Bloom, Peat, and Angus all came from the same breeder. They each couldn’t be more different from the rest. Each has been the world. Bloom, by design, is more Leslie’s dog. I’ll let her write something much better than this about him. She has the knack, and he’s worth some buckets of words.

    Peat and Bloom hunted with, for, us yesterday. It was hot. Early season, where there’s no water anywhere and we might as well have been in the Australian Outback. Within the first five minutes, Peat pointed a covey of Huns. Bloom pointed something else, closer to me, about 50 yards away. Peat’s covey went up and Leslie took one shot, killing two birds. Bloom’s birds didn’t materialize. Halfway through the hunt, both dogs started slowing down, hop-scotching from bitterbrush to sage in search of shade. We took a break, gave the dogs some treats to go with the mass quantities of water they’d been drinking, hoping they didn’t get hyponatremia. I ate a Payday. We did a 180, and the sun was, finally, at our back. Peat got a second wind and hunted hard all the way back to the truck. But we encountered no more birds.

    I probably have a few more seasons with Peat, and each will be diminished somehow. If I’m lucky. I can’t really face it. Don’t want to. Yesterday tried to get me to glimpse the future. When Angus was a puppy, even before I started really hunting with him (I had to wait for Glenna to die, when he was 3), I’d begun grieving his death. It was stupid, but that’s what I was called to do with him. Peat guaranteed I wouldn’t do that, and before I knew it (he was a little more than 3) I was hopelessly in love with him. I’ve never experienced anything like it. He’s a cartoon. There’s nothing remotely noble about him, and he doesn’t give a shit. I suppose, then, he’s like me.

    But I do give a shit. That’s what makes him better than me. I shouldn’t. Dogs do that: no matter what they’re like they make you wish you were better, wish you were more like you think they see you. If you give a shit, that means there’s something not quite right with you. Dogs don’t have that burden. They just want to connect. That’s all that matters. Thank god. Dog.

    Glenna teaching the puppy Angus about sticks
    One of my favorite shots of Angus
    Leslie taking a break with Bloom (wearing Angus’s collar)
    Peat looking at the future (Bloom)
    Peat. MENSA Dog.
    Leslie and Angus in a happy place
    Peat, pointing with a tibia, and style
    Spring in Cambridge with Angus and Peat
    Peat, in my classroom, showing Angus where chukar originate

  • Youth Hunt

    Youth Hunt

    Idaho’s chukar season began on September 21. We were still fishing in Montana. On my first encounter with Idaho chukar this season, on October 1, I was hunting in a spot I hadn’t hunted before. I’d tried one other place for the first time about a week prior, but saw no birds or even turds there.

    When I finally joined the dogs after a rather epic brush-busting ascent up a steep incline, Bloom, who last season had been in the annoying habit of false-pointing several times at the beginning of hunts, went straight to what turned out to be a widespread, big covey of chukar in a roomy, shady bowl just below a ridge topped with large Ponderosa. Peat, as Angus used to do to him, initially honored and then crept past Bloom to dial in the birds’ location. As I crept close to the nearly supine, pointing Peat, the thirty or forty chukar busted in waves, from an area at least fifty yards wide, so shocking to me that I was able to manage only one prayer of a shot. Which I missed.

    A while later, Bloom relocated a small group and pointed them staunchly. I got one shot off and killed a bird, which Peat retrieved to me. It was a juvenile, with just a scant hint of the adult chukar trademark barred flank feathers. A few minutes later, Peat pointed another small group, and I shot one of them, which I saw Bloom retrieving toward me. I regarded with great pleasure and gratitude the balance of my dogs and today’s experience as Bloom brought the bird to me, dropping it at my feet. It was smaller than the first, not much larger than an adult quail. A few downy feathers had yet to be jettisoned. Not even a faint hint of the bandit mask or red beak.

    I’m a hypocrite in many ways, but have a long track record of hypocrisy regarding Idaho’s too-early commencement of chukar season: despite always feeling Idaho should match Oregon’s mid-October start, I invariably find myself unable to resist hunting for chukar on or near the opening of the season in Idaho.

    This day’s bag of two diminutive, juvenile chukar is just another confirmation of my longstanding belief that Idaho starts too early. There are many who will argue until they’re blue in the face against my assertion about Idaho’s too-early start to the season. Some have even thrown pop-science at me to counter-argue. I don’t even have pop-science on my side, just the evidence of my own early-season bags, which almost always contain numerous drab juvenile birds.

    In talking about this with a more knowledgeable friend, who happens (I was amazed to find) to agree with me, she made the point that the big outfitters on the Salmon and Snake that offer cast-and-blast trips in September are an effective lobbying force in Idaho’s legislature, which in turn — even more so now with the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron — basically runs Idaho Fish & Game (instead of science). Remembering that Idaho, not too long ago, delayed the start of chukar season and reduced the daily bag limit from 8 to 6, makes me think there’s hope it might revert to what I believe is a more reasonable approach — especially with climate change seeming to delay lots of natural development — but I won’t hold my breath on this.

    I thought about calling one of the bird biologists on the Fish & Game payroll to see what they think (I’ve done this before), and maybe they’d say it doesn’t really matter when the season starts because mortality is mortality and these birds don’t live longer than two or three years anyway, and hunters don’t really impact bird numbers over the long run. Weather, habitat, predators: those variables are much more significant than hunters. I’ve heard this before and it makes a certain amount of sense. Maybe I’d feel better about this if I had a better hand on the relevant science and it in fact showed that start dates and bag limits don’t matter. Even if that were true (which I’m too lazy right now to investigate), I’d probably still feel the same way.

    So what it comes down to is opinion, or, even less importantly, taste. Like preferring Coke to Pepsi, or Fords to Chevys. Brittanys to GSPs. I’m fine with that. But personally, I’m not fine with shooting chukar youth. It leaves a stain. But I’ll still go out, hoping my chances intercept adult birds. Hope, and hypocrisy, springs eternal and infernal.

  • Grousing

    Grousing

    I should have known better.

    As usual, I didn’t.

    Grouse in Idaho opened two days ago, so we decided on our initial attack today. Today’s high is supposed to be 96. It’s been hot, and smoke from a new fire near Cascade has choked our valley thickly after a brief teaser of a few clear days. The hills are parched and the trails talcum. Visibility is solely conceptual. But we left early, undeterred and — speaking only for myself — brain dead.

    This is the time of year I never seem to remember much. My excitement to get out with the dogs and the gun always seems to occlude the simple memory of years of early September disappointment of getting out with the dogs and the gun.

    We walked for a while on an old road that was supposed to be closed, but which vehicles had simply gone around the locked gate; onX and the USFS map show these places as non-motorized but in reality it’s a crap shoot if people comply. ‘Merica.

    After a bit, the dogs reached Pole Creek and we heard the first grouse bust of the day. My heart quickened. When we reached the tiny creek, we saw the typical nuclear winter of cattle. See the video. Or don’t. You’ve seen it before, I’m sure.

    The dogs busted a few more grouse but my heart had left the station.

    Remind me next year to read this post before I go grouse hunting again.

  • Erika

    Erika

    Thirty years ago I spent a month in Turkey. Erika had invited me to join her, and initially I thought it was a bad idea. I’d been chronically depressed and my therapist worried something bad might happen and trigger a personal catastrophe way over there. But I decided to go, and the thought of being in a different place began feeling more and more exciting.

    Erika and I shared the same birthday, hers being a year after mine. My oldest friend introduced us, thinking we might like one another. We dated for a while, but by the time she invited me to join her in Turkey things had cooled into a state I thought was undefined. Plus, she’d been gone a while.

    Hardly a day has passed since then that I haven’t thought of that trip. Talk about formative. Talk about memorable. I’ve been blessed with more than my share of stellar travels, and I think about many of those a lot still, too. But the trip in Turkey with Erika has stuck with me more than any other, and I’m not sure why.

    I’ve been thinking about it lately in terms of chukar, probably because the season’s almost here. Erika and I traveled to the eastern part of Turkey, at one point taking a fairly large risk traveling in an unmarked Turkish Army van into Kurdish territory near Armenia. Traveling through landscapes that — later — Hells Canyon would remind me of, I had never heard of chukar but am sure — now — that I had to have been looking at their native habitat.

    That van ride sticks with me. Over-filled with soldiers, who chatted nervously the entire several-hour trip, I understood nothing of what they said and was almost glad about that. Kurds had bombed a number of Turkish military vehicles on that road in the previous couple of weeks. Erika, the only female on board, was nearly fluent in Turkish and talked with some of the men. Straight-faced. I sat on someone’s lap and watched.

    But we got to our destination safely and spent a couple of nights with a group of Kurds near Mt. Nemrut. Music and dancing at sunrise on a mountain top built by a vainglorious king in 62 BC.

    Erika with Kurdish friend on Mt. Nemrut
    Sunrise on Mt. Nemrut

    Nearly everything we experienced on that trip was suffused with intensity for me. A hair-raising “cab” ride to a medieval ghost town on roller-coaster roads littered with sheep, one of which our frustrated Indy driver plowed into at high speed. A complicated, multi-person negotiation by Erika in a little town over what we needed to do to get to our hostel a few miles away. Having tea brought in a samovar to us on a silver tray by shepherds at a high mountain lake after they set up our tent for us, realizing we were beyond exhaustion. Getting lost in dense fog on a mountain peak the next day, afraid we’d perish there until we ran into a French mountaineer on a mission. Listening to Arif Sağ for hours and hours over the PA on a cross-country bus trip, not believing my ears. Somehow I got Erika to find out whose music that was. Some of my chukar videos on YouTube use Sağ’s music. Erzurum.

    The chukar hills of Erzurum
    Mountain shepherds with Erika and me in the Little Caucuses (before we got lost in the fog)

    Language has a lot to do with this intensity, with the adhesive quality of this trip’s memory. Communication. Until that trip I’d never been — and haven’t since — in a situation where I couldn’t communicate easily most of the time. English wasn’t common in Turkey, especially in the east, and Erika spoke five languages. I relied on her for everything. Movement. Nutrition. Lodging. Fun. Analysis.

    Which suggests something that looks like a trend, a fortunate one, in my life: trust in women more capable in important ways than me. I was raised from age five by a single mother who’d become a schoolteacher after her first marriage so that she could provide for her two boys. She wasn’t affectionate or textbook nurturing, but she was solid and I relied on that (she’s grown to be more affectionate with age, which I feel lucky to witness). In graduate school, I chose the one woman among my four advisers to direct my dissertation because I trusted her the most in terms of communication. The best boss I’ve ever had — my principal for the first three years I taught high school in Cambridge — was a woman, by far the most competent, fair, and reliable professional I’ve ever had the luck to work with.

    And so Erika. Soon after we met she revealed to me that a few years earlier she’d been hit by a car during a century ride on her bike, and that the majority of major bones in her body had been shattered. She’d spent a long time in the hospital. She said this matter-of-factly as she showed me some scars and her gnarled collar bones. After our trip to Turkey, we became better friends than lovers, and she continued developing her career as an agricultural economist, traveling all over the globe but also coming home frequently, often from the other side of the world, to do her share of care-taking for her cancer-stricken mother. I visited her in Mexico City, where she’d moved for a while and had a comfortable apartment. She spent a week or two with me and another friend at our cabin in eastern Idaho, fly fishing, hiking, and mountain biking.

    For years afterward, every August 26th she’d call me to wish us both a happy birthday. She did most of that kind of friendship tending, I’m ashamed to say. Once, for my birthday, she sent me a “Fly Fish Mongolia” hat from Ulaanbaatar where she was studying wheat farming. And she’d call me on that day no matter where she was, her voice joyous and always winningly sly, a soft laugh ready to pounce. Then, a year or two went by and I realized I hadn’t heard from her in a while. I did an Internet search sometime around 2010 and learned she’d passed away in 2008 from a long battle with ovarian and breast cancer. In all those phone calls she’d never once mentioned she was sick. Aside from the shock, reading her obituary was strange for a lot of reasons but one was how little I’d known about her. She was much more accomplished than I’d ever realized, which is saying a lot because — despite her definitive modesty — I always felt lazy and unremarkable around her, not from anything she did or said but simply from comparing our calendars. She was always heading somewhere far away to do something important. I was just hanging out, trying to pull my head out of my ass and finish my Ph.D.

    44 is too young. I can’t help but feel Erika was cheated. I’m still alive and have the tremendous luck to feel grateful our paths crossed. We all take too much for granted, but it seems that at least one measure of greatness in someone might come from an ability not to take much for granted. It exhausts me to imagine how that’s possible, how such people not only exist but prosper.