It’s this. I spent most of today’s hike weaving together phrases of future, present, and past memory fragments: stressing to keep up with the dogs through backlit bunchgrass on 45-degree slopes toward the water punctuated by dried cattle hoove divots; no concept of my identity but just a pursuit; no concept of the fact that I’m in an environment that’s not “usual”; the occasional, hysterical interruption of the sudden realization I don’t know where my wife is, or where I am, or where the dogs are, or — oh, yeah — eruptions of birds, unannounced, interwoven with the sky, lenticular wisps of clouds, glint of the barrel swinging, sun stinging my eyes on the miss, the diminishing blur of reddish tailfeathers, shadow patterns careening off puckering water, basalt outcrops, redlined heart-rate, heaving chest, butt on dirt and parched cheatgrass, a smiling dog with a matted feather stuck to his gluey gum wondering, “what now?”
Ten minutes in on this second day of the season, after a gorgeous mistake yesterday, Peat bee-lined from the shore up a wee crotch of a draw and froze. Angus soon joined him and validated the point. Both held solid until I hoisted myself the hundred or so yards, and then they burst. It’s on the video, in slo-mo, even. I hit the first three, not even sure how many birds took off, then watched more waves of ones and twos going every direction, in the air, on the ground, in my memory. Fantasy start. We worked hard chasing them, finding new coveys, dogs going nuts, and Leslie made the shot of the day, a crosser across a ravine. She saw it land but couldn’t find it. Then Peat pointed it (it’s on the video, too). What a day.
There’s a gorgeous but reviled magpie out the window scarfing up birdseed. A Eurasian dove just landed 5 yards away. Peat and Angus are snoozing after today’s opener, dreaming of getting skunked because their idiotic “master” took them to a parched desert landscape to look, duh, in vain, for the first chukar of the season. Crucified arrowleaf balsamroot made me wish I’d installed earplugs before heading out. It doesn’t matter. Robins, blackbirds, more doves, some house finches, a Say’s Phoebe. Leslie has the tummy flu, my Camelback bladder leaked all over the back of the rig, I threw a tantrum, spoiling the excitement and the anticipation. Everything’s relative. Maybe not as bad as a few years ago when we thought we’d “show ’em” by camping in the boat and getting a jump on everyone, only to discover they drop the reservoir level at night, causing us to unload the whole vessel at 3 a.m. so we could get it back on water (this after relocating to a spot that wasn’t occupied by a sow black bear and her two cubs); we woke to the realization I’d forgotten to pack the stove so we could make coffee. Cold water coffee doesn’t begin to approach the “cowboy” style. We love sleeping with our dogs. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It takes a toll on them and us, but it’s worth it, I think.
It started out niceThe source taking a breakDry as a bone
Peat met his dad the other day. Angus met his birth facilitators. We’d finally found time to visit Gabe and Katie Mouritsen of Sunburst Brittanys with our two dogs they produced.
It’s weird to think about the process. You can’t conceive of it in human terms without thinking of kidnapping, or the slave trade, or child trafficking, or maybe prostitution. Thank goodness we’re talking about dogs, though, and the process of purchasing a dog from a breeder is older than dirt so I’d guess it’s not something those involved question much. It works. It’s worked for us rather well. Some things might be better left unthunk.
Despite the process and its required interactions with Sunburst in obtaining our two treasures, we’d never taken the time to get to know Gabe and Katie. We swung by their new setup in New Plymouth, and they introduced us to their stock. Peat’s mom (Candy) passed in January, but his father, Sioux, was there, and so were lots of new Brittanys they’ve acquired from several places around the country. Despite working full-time, Gabe and Katie have built their program into an impressive operation with new options on pairs coming down the pike. We’re in for another some time but that brings up a painful thought of life without Angus. After all, all this is because of him. He’s the source. He’s why I’m here, we’re here. What can you do with that?
Preparing for tomorrow’s season opener… Besides making sure we have the shells we need, everything is charged, deciding where we’ll go, I’ve also been going through photos from last season and reminiscing more about it. Tomorrow, it will be out with the old and in with the new season. Here are some of my favorite moments plus some short video clips from the 2017/2018 chukar season.
We hope everyone out there has a wonderful season. Good luck!
The big yellow school bus recently started up its route again driving back and forth on our gravel road twice a day, spewing a cloud of dust behind it. We knew that would happen, just as we knew Bob would be returning to the classroom to teach literature and poetry to rural Idaho High School kids. Days around here are noticeably getting shorter, the air is getting cooler at night, and chukar season starts in a few short days. September 15th to be exact. I always think I’ll have plenty of time to get my body ready, the dogs ready, and to practice shooting, but before you know it it’s time. This approaching season will be my 12th year of chukar hunting. The first ten of those I wasn’t actually carrying a shotgun but instead following Bob and the dogs up and down the mountains and rock outcroppings with my camera in hand, documenting chukar hunting.
My anticipation for the upcoming season always brings excitement and a tangle of emotions. Thinking about being in the thick of things again to witness first hand and intimately the magic of the dogs working up and down the terrain instinctively and methodically and in perfect harmony thrills me. With that it brings the hope that I’ll anticipate the moment right before the birds bust after a long steady point and be ready for it. I also look forward to the elation often followed by sorrow when my dogs carry in their soft mouths a downed chukar or Hungarian partridge directly to my hand. I have deep respect for these birds that live in these brutally dry western desert environments, and I don’t think of killing one as revenge for the hard work and determination it took me to put myself into the position to possess one. Often, I have to remind myself that these non-native game birds were originally introduced for the sole purpose of being hunted. It doesn’t always convince me to feel better about killing one, but I owe it to the dogs every once in a while to allow them the pleasure and reward of retrieving a bird they worked so hard to find for me. I want to think they understand the praise that soon follows.
We know our two Brittanys aren’t perfect text book bird dogs and we also aren’t the best trainers. They’ve adapted to our style of hunting and we rely on their pure natural instinct, prey drive, and good breeding to guide them and pray for the cohesion of dog work and gun handling to happen at just the right time. It’s a beautiful thing to see elegant and well-seasoned Angus being backed by young and quick-footed Peat.
Tangible gift
Perfect harmony
I’m probably an anomaly in the world of chukar hunting: female for starters, and I’m 55 years old and I didn’t handle a firearm for the first time until last year. I have no doubt this tough and mean country with its steep talus slopes will remind me again that I’m another year older. I’m prepared to have to dig deep and push my body to some uncomfortable extremes. I’m up for the challenge. I love the challenge and I’m not afraid to go out alone by myself again which I did a few times last season.
The past couple of years, besides thinking about my age creeping up, I’ve dreaded that quite possibly it might be 11-year-old Angus’s last season, not because he can’t physically do it; we know he can. This past couple of weeks while out grouse hunting he’s been covering more ground and ranging farther than Peat, but he’s slowly going deaf and his eyes are starting to look cloudy gray. I worry that one of these days we might lose him on the mountain. The GPS tracker collar that I was dead set against purchasing and using in the first place because I dislike fussing with too many things has now become a reassurance to find a confused and wandering lost dog.
The old warrior, Angus
Heading up to the clouds
Downhill traverse
Mouth to hand
Rushing to the point
Fruits of labor
Lastly, anticipation for the upcoming season also becomes a moment of reflection from past seasons. It’s those great memories that make us hungry for more. The culture of chukar hunting for us is about the beauty of the unhindered landscapes, the hard ascents up into the clouds, the smells of damp sage, the cold harsh mountain winds that remind us we’re alive, the sound of a covey busting, and for that intimate connection and trust we have with our dogs.
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.
