Not just for the birds

Category: Hunting accounts

  • GSP Needs a Home

    UPDATE July 23: Jessie will be heading to a family in Colorado, and doing a lot of hunting. She’ll have two other GSP siblings (a pup and an old warrior). We wish her, and her soon-to-be former family, the best.

    I’m posting this as a favor to someone who finds himself in the unthinkable situation of having to find a new home for his beloved 8-year-old German Shorthair Pointer. He’d prefer she go to a chukar hunter, but is more concerned she can be with a loving family that will give her lots of exercise off-leash. If you’re interested, contact me through the blog and I’ll send you his email address. Here are his comments about the dog, Jessie:

    She’s slept on my bed with me since she was about 2.  She loves being in her kennel in the car. I take her almost everywhere with me.  If I made 300 trips in the car last year (local) she was on 270 of them.  I think she’s about 10 lbs overweight but she doesn’t look bad.  She wants to be wherever I am.  I think the best owners for her would be people who are retired or semi-retired.  She’s never spent an 8-hour day home alone.  I’ve been retired the whole time I’ve had her.  If she had to be left home all day I think it might suck the life out of her.  She’s energized by going and doing.  She’s not on my bed at night any more.  She’s locked out of the bedroom at night.  My heart hurts for her and what the future might look like with someone who wasn’t willing to let her be tied at the hip to her.  She’s the best dog I ever had and there have been probably 8 since I was growing up in the ’50s.  She gets along fine with other dogs but doesn’t seem to be very interested in them.  She’d rather be with people.  She has only chewed up one thing valuable in her entire life.  It was a Teva river sandal that I left out when she was about 8 months.  She’s very smart and very anxious to please and to be close to humans.  She’s a beautiful shorthair.  One night a vet at West Vet here in Boise told me she was the best looking shorthair he had ever seen. She has papers but I never registered her.  She was spayed at 7 months. I’ve found that there are dogs that hunt for themselves and dogs that hunt for their owners.  She is definitely the latter.  She never gets too far out (100-300 yards) and always comes back to check in.  I’ve seen her point a single Hungarian Partridge in one bush on a hillside 300 yards away.

  • Spring Chukar

    Angus and the flower

    Optimism has arrived with spring, in more ways than one. Chukar sounds have returned to the reservoirs in Hells Canyon, after last year’s spring silence along most of the shorelines we surveyed. The mild winter and easy spring conditions make finger-crossing less necessary than last year at this time.

    My mom follows a bird photographer’s blog and sends me links to some of his posts, and I recently decided to follow it because his photos are outstanding, and – surprise – he occasionally gets some great images of chukar. If you’re interested, check out his latest (click the photo)…

    http://www.featheredphotography.com/blog/2018/05/06/flower-eating-chukar/

  • Finding Things

    Finding Things

    Finding the radio (I’m on the ridge, a bit above the middle)

    Found my radio.
    Three days later after a
    Pretty good snowfall.

    “After I shot the cock and took him from Nora’s mouth, I looked at him a little longer than is probably usual, reached blindly and settled him down with the other quail in the game bag hanging from the back of my vest. But when that bird had broken cover and I had pulled the barrels of my double-gun along the path of his flight, just before I pulled the trigger, I was there in the midst of swinging my gun to the track of the bird. The sense of catching myself at hunting this bird was not quite the same as catching sight of myself; it was not as if I suddenly saw myself from afar. I had not been watching myself hunt. I had just happened upon myself. Intent on killing that bird and for no obvious reason, I had emerged from a kind of wholeness: the landscape and bird all bound up together in the act of hunting. The bird was the center of this feeling: a bird, not so much different from any other bird I had killed that afternoon. This encounter with myself was thick enough to hold the hunting of the cock in place. My awareness never broke. I squeezed the trigger, watched the cock fold up, hit the ground, flutter and die — all within a pervading sense of what was familiar and what was strange. Drenched in the real.”  — Peter Atkinson, Making Game: An Essay on Hunting, Familiar Things, and the Strangeness of Being Who One Is

    My friend Peter’s description of his encounter with himself while quail hunting is an experience many hunters might find familiar (despite its strangeness). I like his description a lot because it somehow holds “in place” the feeling of finding yourself after losing yourself (which I mentioned in my previous post) in the field. I think that finding is predicated on losing, even if you don’t realize you’ve lost something. It’s a reminder that’s there for you if you care to notice, which sometimes might be interrupted by another wave of chukar busting. And the thing that’s there to notice might or might not be remarkable. It’s just there. What do you do with this?

    For me, it’s probably the best explanation of why I hunt, and maybe the best reason I can come up with for why I continue to want to live. There are other activities which corral this type of losing-finding; playing music, for me, is one. I think there’s a kind of addictiveness to these things, an incentive. The off-season is hard on many hunters because there’s no substitute. We think we might be able to recapture it by reading, looking at photos, shopping for gear, working with our dogs, shooting clays, even hiking in the spring to see how many birds made it through the winter. It’s not there, and there’s a lurking sense of dissatisfaction that pervades these surrogate things. At this point in the season I find myself less and less able to fend off the regret of the impending “off-season.” I’m finding myself a bit off.

    But not entirely. On Christmas Day, we tried to hunt chukar but it was dumping snow and very windy, and we just didn’t feel like battling the weather, which didn’t look as if it was going to let up. So we drove home and joined our neighbors across the way who were breaking in their new electronic clay pigeon thrower (awesome gizmo!). Leslie, who’d been feeling less confident in the field because she’d missed some shots at birds and because we hadn’t practiced, absolutely crushed the targets. Confidence regained. I, on the other hand, could not hit anything. I didn’t know what my eyes were seeing, what to do with the barrel, which acted like the target had been granted a restraining order against it. I was lost (I was not hunting?). The next day, in the field, on some tough shots at fleeing chukar, I didn’t miss. I don’t know why, except to say that shooting targets and shooting chukar are two completely different things. Out there, I’d found what I’d lost on Christmas Day. I was on, I’d found my shot. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t thinking; I was doing hunting, which requires a certain kind of mindlessness. Or maybe it was just luck.

  • Losing Stuff

    Losing Stuff

    Winter

    So much of bird hunting is about loss.

    Take yesterday, for example. In the truck, on the icy road to our destination, I lost traction a couple of times. On the hunt, I lost track of Leslie periodically, as well as the friends we hunted with. Peat, whose pad has healed nicely thanks to the booties which I’m still making him wear because he looks so goofy in them, lost both booties who knows where. I lost my footing several times in the icy snow, including once when hustling to find Peat, who I could hear barking hysterically up a tree down in a brushy hole, presumably at a long-departed dusky grouse; I took a super-chalant header, involuntarily separated from my gun, which ended up facing me with the safety off (must have been caused by the ground), which made me ponder the potential loss of life or limb from such an escapade. A bit later on, Peat pointed way down a precipitous, icy slope, and I decided the only way to get to him within a half-hour was to use my butt as a sled, which worked quite effectively, an idea for whose brilliance I congratulated myself several times while in motion before planting the ol’ boots and springing into the ready position just as the covey busted. Moments later, Peat brought me the chukar which had lost its life, and I went for my radio to tell Leslie about it and discovered that I’d lost my radio somewhere in the snow during the slide.

    Winner with the loser

    There are other kinds of loss, too, of course, some good and some not so good. One of the good ones is maybe the main reason I hunt: to lose myself in the quest to find birds to shoot. Identity evaporates, and there’s no there there. We all need a break from ourselves once in a while, and projecting my self onto my dogs in breath-taking country is an all-expenses-paid vacation from man handing on misery to man (apologies to Philip Larkin). I’m sincere when I say it’s a shame this economy requires the killing of something truly innocent even though it sort of exists outside the equation; it’s incidental and it isn’t. I guess there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

    A certain slant

    And then there’s the loss of daylight as the season progresses, and the sense of loss that comes with declining temperatures and angles of light, which helps me better understand one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems:

    There’s a certain Slant of Light —
    Winter Afternoons —
    That oppresses, like the Heft —
    Of Cathedral Tunes —

    Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
    We can find no scar,
    But internal difference —
    Where the Meanings, are —

    None may teach it — Any —
    ‘Tis the seal Despair —
    An imperial affliction
    Sent us of the Air —

    When it comes, the Landscape listens —
    Shadows — hold their breath —
    When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
    On the look of Death —

    Dave and Aspen in a familiar place

    And then there’s the cycle of dogs. Although Aspen wasn’t a hunting dog, he hunted, and spent most of his days in the forest. And my brother-in-law lived through him. Sudden massive cancer, a few days left, maybe. Losing our dogs is an imperial affliction we knowingly set ourselves up for, a loss we know is coming from the day we take the pup from its litter-mates or rescue it from the shelter.

    As the bell curve of a dog’s vitality starts to line up with our own, the profit and loss intensifies, like the lowering light in the last month of chukar season. And we’re all aware, and it’s okay. Losing stuff is better than okay. It just is. It’s where the meanings are.

  • Pad Problem

    Pad Problem

    Not all it’s cracked up to be

    Peat’s right rear pad has been bugging him for a while now, and I thought I’d see if I could get a boot on it so we could look for birds today since hell hasn’t frozen over yet. Leslie decided to video the experience (see below).

    Obviously, the boot was a no-go. I’m not sure what to do. My friend Rob wraps his dog’s feet in vet wrap and duct tape, so I tried that. It was much less bulky and problematic to Peat, but still he hated it. Ideally, we’d let the pad recover, but I’m not sure that, (a) it would recover before the season ended, and (b) if we or he could sustain that much down time. He needs exercise, and we need him to have that exercise.

    The cracks appear to be pretty deep, but there’s no oozing and he really doesn’t squirm much when we prod and palpate it. But he was limping pretty badly last night, although putting weight on it, which made me think his hip might be bugging him since we’ve seen him hopping around on three feet quite a bit since all this started, keeping his right rear foot off the ground. He’s not limping today, thankfully. I also need to remind myself that here, halfway through the season, he’s run 373.8 miles so far.

    Any suggestions on a quick, miracle cure of a pretty split up pad?