Two of my favorite creatures in one of my favorite places
Thanksgiving is coming, and since I’ve been complaining about the scarcity of birds I thought I might refocus a little here.
I think one of the reasons I love chukar hunting so much is that the landscapes I get to inhabit are particularly compelling to me. I remember driving through dense alpine forests on some forlorn road trip, anxious to get to my destination, and wishing I could stop the car and crawl into the deep, dark woods. That was before I got a dog and discovered the arid high desert habitat laced and punctuated with bromus tectorum, bunch grass, and bitterbrush. Basalt steeps. Lichen walls. Vistas unlike any I’d seen except in eastern Turkey long ago. It’s almost as if the birds don’t even matter (while they’re precisely why I’m there).
Anyway, I have lots to be thankful for, including my wife Leslie for being so good with the cameras and such a wonderful companion. And my new friends, young and old, who’ve decided I might be worth putting up with out there. And, of course, Angus (who redeemed himself in tremendous fashion last night, just as it was getting dark, by retrieving a sure-to-be-lost winged quail from the densest of slough-thickets).
Enjoy a few of the sights I’ve been blessed to experience this season:
Instead of searching google images for pictures of bubbles bursting, my penance for what I’m about to share should be that I’ll write ten thousand words about how my beloved avian-pursuing canine embarrassed the hell out of me this afternoon. But that wouldn’t be fair to share because it would be cruel and unusual punishment to anyone who happened upon this cyber-rag, not that they wouldn’t be deft enough to click their “back” button immediately upon seeing this cascade of garba-verbage. So I guess I’ll continue.
To wit: Angus blasted through another dog’s point and busted the covey before either one of us could get a shot off.
OMG. OMG. OMG. I’m still sick about it. But cleanse I must, so prepare for the confession. (Cue Dante’s warning at the gates of Hell.) Run while you still can. Go to youtube and find the latest FAIL compilation. You’ll be better off, I swear. What does the Brittany say? Bust, bust bust bust bust bust bust…
Here’s the story: first time hunting with our new friend from the ‘hood who’s been at the upland bird game since I was barfing up yogurt all over my mom’s handmade kitchen aprons with multi-colored carrots and palm trees. We hiked a long ways. Sam’s 8-year-old Drahthaar, Hannah, had earlier found a small covey of Huns that Angus totally missed (an infraction for which I forgave him in the moment, largely because I managed to drop one of the birds on a prayer of a second shot). We walked a long way. We walked farther. Stuff was beginning to hurt in my body, which is a quarter of a century younger than my companion’s. Jesus H.
Anyway, we’re walking, we’re walking. Sam stops, looks at his Astro and says, kinda like Christopher Walken might announce that his cousin had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, “Hannah’s pointing 211 yards that way,” which was the opposite direction I thought Angus was. A sucker for technology, I followed Sam, wondering where the hell Angus was.
Angus has a talent (for lack of a better word) for being places you never imagined he could be, and then appearing, seemingly out of nowhere, in a blur, on his way to seemingly the next nowhere. But he didn’t appear within the normal time period. So, soon I began fantasizing about coming over the next undulation and seeing Angus locked in point right next to Hannah, like he used to do with his older sister back in the day (on garden snails, grapes, and grasshoppers). Tripping over the basalt scraps and baby-head lava rocks and medusahead noxiousness I dreamed my darling baby boy would do me proud and redeem himself of his earlier non-find of birds by co-nailing what was to be our final covey of the day. I thought of Drahthaar and Brittany flanks touching in a pregnant moment of pointing paralysis, the ellipses preceding the climactic rise and fall of a rare group of game birds beaten at their own game by a collaborative quartet of canine-human predators totaling 140 years (224 if you do the dog-year conversion).
And then Angus came bounding up from the other direction. Uninvolved. Oblivious. Enthusiastic. That was bad enough. He’d been shown up again. By a Drahthaar, no less. OMG. I buzzed him to make sure he’d stay close and not bust the covey Hannah was holding. We still had 40 yards to go. Angus kept straining beyond the reach of the buzzer, and I kept pulling him back. To his credit, he obliged, mostly. But in the final approach, in the excitement of knowing Hannah had been locked on birds for the time it took our bodies to traverse the 211 yards and that we were about to capitalize on her expertise and our luck in finding what was sure to be another undersized group of birds in this bizarrely scant season, I momentarily lost track of Angus.
Exploiting the gap, and still in “find” mode, Angus – not aware of the concept of “honoring” or “backing” another dog’s point – blasted past Hannah just before we were able to get in position. Bitterbrush, Basin Big Sagebrush, undulating terrain, rocks, and birds – maybe 8 of them – flew every which way. I fired a prayer of a long shot, which has still not been answered.
Have you ever experienced this humiliation? Have you ever been forced to ponder how on earth your otherwise miraculously olfactoral buddy could not have scented birds which another dog was locked onto for a long, long time? OMG. OMG. OMG.
I must admit I feel horrible talking about Angus this way behind his back. He is, after all, a sensitive and intensely cherished little fellow. He does his best every time. I just don’t understand what happened today. But I am not complaining (very much). I did come home with one bird (which he had nothing to do with). But I still love him. 🙂
Guest blogger, Bob’s other half here. The other day, one of his followers commented how cool it was for Bob to be out there hiking around with Angus and sometimes the kid. Whoa…what about me!? Being behind the scenes with video camera in one hand, and regular camera in the other, I’ve experienced 99.9% of the action. Sometimes, after stopping to take still footage, I’ve had to run full speed up hill to catch up to Bob and Angus. Yes, that’s me doing all that huffing and puffing in the video clips trying to get a shot of the shot. It’s easy to forget that someone else is also experiencing all those steep hills, beautiful scenery, and wonderful moments. These are some of my favorite photos. Enjoy.
We all have things in life that mess us up. Some result in really bad stuff happening. Others are less severe. I like to think my problem with birds lies in the latter category. But I guess that’s actually relative. Nevertheless, I regretfully and proudly would like to make the formal announcement of my (with any luck) terminal alectorisosis.
This is a bad disease. Dis-ease. It sounds so benign, yet it’s poetically perfect in its efficient description of negating ease. There’s nothing easy about hunting chukar. Hunting chukar comprehensively disses ease: there’s no easy route, no easy approach, no easy way to locate the bastards, no easy terrain to gain footholds on, no easy stance when your dog is locked on point but still not exactly sure where the bastards are laughing at you non-avian life-forms from, no easy way to predict their launch (their flight schedules are far less reliable than any of the major airlines’, regardless of their putative on-time departure records), no easy shots, and – mos’ def’ – no easy retrieve if you’re lucky enough to hit one.
In the midst of an alectorisosis episode
Worse, there’s no easy explanation for why this pursuit is so addictive. And all-encompassing. I’d be much better at what I “do” if I didn’t suffer the heartbreak of alectorisosis. I wouldn’t fabricate an excuse to spend all day with 500+ 16-year-olds just to ride on the Chukar Bus instead of teaching my classes (while wishing I were actually looking for chukar).
I don’t even know where to begin with this…
I wouldn’t find it so supremely funny and oh-so-ironic to see well-intentioned mascot-derived signs and – far worse – take pictures of them with my stupid phone and post them on facebook. I wouldn’t consider breaking the glass on the chukar diorama which explains in true death just what in the hell the mascot of this community college is (although most attendees aren’t sure how to pronounce the word, not to mention from whence their mascot originates; I can imagine the horrified facial expressions were they to learn that Al Qaeda and chukar aren’t super strange bedfellows).
But I hope there’s no cure. I hope there’s no hope for me. The dearth of real chukar, for me so far this season, threatens an unwanted remission of terminal alectorisosis. Friends keep telling me not to lose faith, that the disease will re-intensify, or at least its symptoms will. I want to believe them. I want to believe. I want to keep this disease alive.
It’s six weeks into the season now and the sinking feeling is growing. Each time I’ve gone out I’ve thought, “Next week I’ll find them.” Then I wouldn’t.
This weekend I made it out twice and both times were dismal in terms of birds. We busted one covey of Huns yesterday, and today I saw two chukars – isolated incidents. I knocked both down. We only recovered one, which doesn’t happen often, but is really hard to take when it does, especially when birds are at such a premium.
Angus worked heroically and stoically and I’m starting to worry he’s wondering what the heck is going on. He’s never seen pickings this slim (nor have I). But the terrain and habitat are as good as I’ve seen them, and I’m not giving up even though it’s looking more and more as though the bird numbers are truly way down here.
