Avaunt, away! the cruel sway, / Tyrannic man’s dominion; / The sportsman’s joy, the murd’ring cry / the flutt’ring, gory pinion! –Robert Burns, “Song Composed in August” (1786)
If you love birds but love to shoot them, and love the world and some of its people, too, and not much of anything makes sense to you, then read this poem. The Scottish singer/songwriter Dick Gaughan recorded a beautiful version of this in the 1980s.
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.
–Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” (1862)
An extreme but considerable statement from someone whose thoughts bear considerable attention. For me, walking (and climbing and descending) in pursuit of chukar — when I’m in the middle of it — achieves Thoreau’s preconditions for a walk. Even if I’m fortunate enough to be accompanied by my wife or friends on these “walks,” I’m as free as I’ve ever felt, with no worries about bills, politics, or any other “affairs.” It’s much the same feeling I get from playing the bagpipes. Although I very much enjoy the company of my wife and friends on these walks, maybe I prefer hunting alone because — when I’m not hunting but thinking about hunting — I feel less guilty about my selfishness achieved while hunting.
I wonder what Thoreau would say about my going at this all backwards, if it’s possible to become ready for a walk by starting the walk, a kind of arriving by commencing. When I set out for what I have come to expect will be a very enriching, liberating experience, I am certainly not “ready” to leave my loved ones and never see them again. And I know I’ll never start a walk debt-free.
But in the process of hunting, walking on hillsides — and, this is important, reading Angus’s walking — everything but my body moving and my eyes and ears doing their best is eliminated. In those moments, were I to die I could say, easily, I am ready for a Thoreau-esque walk.
I moved to Cambridge, Idaho in August to start a new career as a high school English teacher. For me, one of the draws to this place was its proximity to Brownlee Reservoir, the hills near which are famous for chukar. I pictured endless days of nothing but hiking up and down the cheatgrass and basalt slopes searching for alectoris chukar. School started August 20, reality set in, and weeks screamed by with very little time in boots.
Things settled down a wee bit in late September, at least enough to feel I could afford a half-day on the weekend to explore the area with Angus and, if she was able to come up from Boise, my wife. Leslie is the skill behind the video and still cameras, girded by impressive fitness and even more by a remarkable interest in this activity, despite having once been a member of PETA. Still, the only shooting she does is with a camera.
Anyway, I went one place when it was hot and very dry and found one very small covey despite some serious elevation and extended trekking. We took one bird off that hill, thanks to a marvelous but treacherous retrieve by Angus down, and then back up, a few clifflets. Like most reports of the early season’s drought-induced, parched habitat, mine was fairly bleak. Rain and “green-up” badly needed.
Then it rained and snowed a little and, suddenly, got really cold. Any green-up got frozen and stayed below the surface. A new system with warmer temperatures and plenty of precipitation descended on us in late October, though, and today I saw the first little bits of green popping through the soil. Hopefully it will stay warm long enough for the birds to get full, happy, and healthy for the winter ahead.
Yesterday we found our first good spot and now I’m really excited. We hadn’t intended even to get out of the truck since it was cold, very windy, and raining. But Angus needed some exercise so we took a little stroll up a trail along a creek and suddenly heard what sounded like an ATV on the hill above us. It was a huge covey of chukar leaving the creek. The fun began, and soon we were into chukar and Huns. Less than an hour, two birds in the bag, and I can’t wait for more. To riff on the motto of our principal’s email signature, “The worst day chukar hunting is better than the best day at work.” Yeah.
Below is a video compilation of the stuff we’ve done so far this season. Look for more soon (I hope).
I was on the treadmill at the YMCA today and this song came on my Shuffle. For some reason it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Why? I’d heard Cassandra Wilson’s cover before, but never in inescapable circumstances like this. Earphones. Long stretch of time ahead. Getting nailed by music has always been a perk of life for me, but it has been a while. Today was as good a surprise as any. But still, why this song?
As so often happens with this the kind of surprise attack, today I was able to get sucked deep inside the sound. With each beat, I felt the syncopated brushes and distorted guitar washes and Wilson’s scattish vamping crossing the bridge of my nose from the center of my skull and out both ears with the same pulses going down the solar plexus. Yeah, feedback, reflection, penetration, fulfillment, joy. I caught myself smiling from ear to ear, and soon I was laughing as I pounded the belt on the treadmill and staring at the mothers floating their babies in the swimming pool. I love getting taken this way. Hit and run.
The Monkees’ debut single and number one hit in August 1966, the tune resonated with soldiers heading to Vietnam. They wanted to spend their last possible hours with their loved ones, unsure if they’d survive the war. As a child, hearing and watching the Monkees do this on their Saturday morning show, I had no idea. Today I didn’t, either, until I got home and looked it up. But something in me must have known. Collective memory?
I used to write about music a lot. I haven’t for over a decade. This song is too good. It brings some stuff back that got too hard for me to deal with. Most difficult is the discovery that emotionally provocative songs (we all have our own) paint visceral images of an ideal world. I could speculate on why this song got me today (the day after the mid-term elections went sour for the Democrats), but it doesn’t matter. The toughness of this – which partly led me to stop writing about music – is that the ideal world you get in the ecstasy of music is only that, and usually it’s painted in stark opposition to reality. The irony of the joy I heard in the Clarksville song today is obvious, and what have we learned since Vietnam?
So what? Keep listening and be nice to people.
