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.
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. NemrutSunrise 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 ErzurumMountain 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.
I ran into a friend the other day who gave me crap for not posting anything for a while. I appreciated it.
This used to be my favorite time of the bird season. Not as many people to contend with. Peace and beauty of a remarkably different quality. The “certain slant of light.” Snow concentrated the birds into predictable places, and they seemed to hold better.
Now I just feel sorry for the birds and don’t have the heart to bother them. Big snow Januarys, along with very cold air and lots of wind make it hard to find bare ground and food. Their will to live far eclipses mine. I’m not sure if chukar do this, but I know ruffed grouse spend a lot of the winter in snow caves they make, which shield them from wind and much colder temps than if they were out walking around or roosting somewhere. My dogs smell them through the snow, and they’d point them and bust them, giving me another chance to miss (if it was before the end of the year; they still point and bother grouse in January). To me, that’s not fair chase.
Being back in galliforme country this year has been wonderful. Our two-year remote yearn, idiotic as it was, helped me appreciate the good days we can get in the field here. And we got plenty — not as many as we’d hoped, but they were almost all good days. And we’re older, which should equate to more patience somehow, although — for me — it’s debatable (especially if you ask Leslie; some things do never change). The worst thing about feeling our season is done is seeing how pent-up the dogs are. But they’ll get over it. I have more things to do than they, so it’s not as hard for me.
We aim to enter next season in better shape than we did this year. For some reason, we failed to get chukar fit by mid-September. Too much golf? Just lazy? Still, we hunted into chukar shape and were able to do some tough hikes. We haven’t practiced getting old, so feeling we are old is odd. Something else to figure out. Or just accept. I’ve been keeping busy trying to get my first real estate client (hasn’t happened yet), writing a bunch of stuff, including a short novel set in chukar country which I haven’t been able to get anyone interested in yet (not surprising, but I like it and think it’s good).
I’ll end with this because it’s been on my mind all season: I’ve noticed more boot-prints in places I never used to see them, on ridges far from anywhere a UTV can go, which means people are spreading over more chukar terrain. I think that’s great. Get out there.
“Maybe we fear that the work we depend on images to do for us — the work of immobilizing, and therefore making tolerable — will be undone if we throw the image back into the flow of time.” — T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death (8)
“I think we hide, necessarily, from an understanding of what is most to be avoided in the sight of death.” — T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death (227)
What is the “face of death”? We’re in a sport that makes us face death whenever we’re successful. And instead of shying away from it, discomforting as it might be, we photograph it, and most of us post the photos for others — friends and strangers alike — to see.
Why do we do this? Where does our current publicization of this taking of life fit on the continuum of monumentalized, frozen-in-time death? If T.J. Clark is right (and I’m inclined to agree with him, except maybe for the “necessarily” part), we take and share these photos of our kills both to acknowledge and avoid understanding what we’ve done. I have to think there’s something in our DNA that compels us not only to record the fact of our death-causing (and even death-gazing) but also to share it so we don’t have to think about it too much; McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” rings in my head. This compulsion might be limited to those of us outside the hunter-gatherer lines; even though we’re hunting, we don’t need to and neither have our ancestors for thousands of years. In fact, the compulsion might be because hunting isn’t necessary for our survival. It might be compensatory somehow.
I’ve written about Brightman’s Grateful Prey before, specifically how traditional Cree animal-human (prey-predator) relationships differ from those of Invader/Agricultural traditions (i.e., most of us who are not Native Americans or First Nations people). I’ve tried to fit the imagistic depiction of prey into the Cree system but can’t, nor does it fit in Hugh Brody’s account of Inuit hunting culture, which I’ve also recently mentioned. For hunter-gatherers, at best, static portrayals of a formerly alive thing are disrespectful. At worst, they’re like putting a curse on yourself. But that’s a different tradition, different culture than this. So let’s see.
Even without doing a thorough historical analysis, it’s fair to say that there are a couple major (let’s call them “Western,” as in Western European) traditions in how dead prey get represented. One, for lack of a better term, might be called the “Still Life Tradition,” and the other the “Hero Shot.” In super simple terms, “still life” images foreground the prey as objets d’art (removing, mostly, the hunter), and the “hero shot” foregrounds the hunter and/or his “achievement” (dead prey). I’m going to talk mostly about the Hero Shot, but I’ve included some fantastic “still life” paintings, too, mainly because they’re amazing (you’ll know why).
Classic Hero Shot: hunters posing with their alectoris prey, Spain, 2014An older version of the above shot, also in Spain, 1959Solo Hero Shot: 1937 photo of a young Australian bird hunter with his day’s take.A more creative Hero Shot, 1940s, Australia, by the same photographer as the above photo (looks like some sort of snipe)1912 Hero Shot, including dogs (no location indicated)1903 group Hero Shot, Nome, Alaska (ptarmigan)Still Life: Jan Fyt, “Dead Partridges with Hound,” 1647 Paul de Vos, “Hunter and Dogs by a Table with Dead Game and Fruit,” Flanders, 1640s or 1650s.Hendrik de Fromantiou, “A Still Life with Dead Partridge, Pheasant, and Hunting Gear,” Holland, 1670. View this full size for impressive feather detail on this perdix perdix specimen.Carstian Luyckx, “Gentleman hunter with his pack of dogs and hunting trophies,” ca. 1650-58, Belgium.John Constable, “Study of a Dead French Partridge,” circa 1830-1838. Constable was my favorite artist when I was young, mostly because of his romantic, highly detailed landscapes such as “The Hay Wain.” I was surprised to find this relative of alectoris chukar among his works.My favorite kind of Hero Shot, for the true hero of the affair, although he (the bird dog) has relied on me to do the killing, the middle part: he found it, I shot it, and he retrieved it.The Solo Bird and Hunter Hero Shot, on locationMy last “tailgate shot” (2017): to me, it’s appropriate that the drone I found sits alongside the chukar because I think it accentuates the undesirable “out-of-place-ness” of this type of image. I see a huge, distasteful imbalance between technology and nature here. Classic “tailgate” Hero Shot with dogs, hunters, and prey arranged with heads hanging off the edge of the tailgate. 2016. One of my favorite all-time dead-prey photos. Angus, who never stopped hunting is still hunting while Peat poses with a bird that came out of the conifers on an after-school hunt in a place I thought I’d only find grouse. Adding to the image’s dearness to me is the history of Peat’s initial reluctance to retrieve and radical, sudden change of course, becoming a flawless retriever to this day. It’s one of the purest gestures of reconciliation I’ve known, even though he’s “just” a dog and probably doesn’t think of it like that.4 years in the making: The Kid with his first chukar, after trying hard for most of 4 seasons with me, he finally got one (he actually got three that day). Doesn’t speak much for my guiding abilities, but a worthwhile Hero Shot.
Chukar hunting is hard, and bagged birds come at a price, whether it’s the calories you burned in the pursuit, the abrasions on your dogs’ pads, the pride you had to swallow when you couldn’t get up the hill to your dog’s stealthy point in time, or the axle you broke trying to get just a little farther up that nasty road. Lining birds up on a tailgate for a photo, with your amazing dog whose praises you’ve made a habit to sing and your best human buddy you’ve shared the challenge with, makes a certain amount of sense. This photo is not intended to say, “Screw these stupid birds, I’m glad they’re dead and I’m gladder I killed them.” It’s not meant to say, as the truly stupid saying about chukar hunting goes, “The first one’s for fun, and the rest are for revenge.” Rather, it’s meant to say, I think, “I respect these birds, love where they live, admire beyond description my dog’s singular flotation of the whole proposition, and am grateful for the opportunity to hunt them.” It says, “Chukar are beautiful, and a worthy pursuit, and I’ve hunted them fairly, ethically, and shot well enough to harvest some of them, who — I admit — gave their lives in exchange for all of the above.”
So, going back to T.J. Clark’s thoughts about these images of death, the faces we see probably daily (at least during bird season) of these multitudes of expired prey, I still can’t help wondering what we’re avoiding, “what is most to be avoided in the sight of death.” I do think something’s not being said here, whether it’s in the image or outside it, behind it, surrounding it. What, for example, really, is remorse? Pity? Sorrow? Projection? Reciprocity? Do those register? And, if so, since they’re all necessarily (aha!) irreconcilable (unless you commit suicide every time you kill a bird), where do they go, what do they do to us, what can we do with them? And how can we participate in a tradition (whether it’s a Hero Shot or a still life) saturated with adulation but based entirely on death that’s not our own, without avoiding something important? Is that possible? Does it matter?
On a very crass and basic level, what we’re doing is trying to connect (with others?) and using the death of birds to do so. Somehow, posting pictures of bird dogs pointing or of the sun rising beautifully over a ridge just doesn’t garner the same kind of response (or we think it won’t) from whomever we’re trying to connect with. The result rather than the experience. The bottom line. It used to bug me when I’d go back to work on Monday and the dudes who didn’t chukar hunt would ask, sincerely, “How many birds did you kill this weekend?” Once I answered, “None, but you should have heard the wind carry a slow sound in the hawthorn.” Connection aborted.
One of the loveliest poems I know is Robert Burns’ “Song Composed in August,” which situates bird hunting naturally in the middle of courtship:
Avaunt, away! the cruel sway, Tyrannic man’s dominion; The sportsman’s joy, the murd’ring cry, The flutt’ring, gory pinion!
Part of what I like about this is that it just puts it out there, this is what we do, they’re birds, they’re beautiful, and some of them, when we’re not trying to get laid, we kill. Chalk it up to “tyrannic man’s dominion” and the “joy” of sportsmen. We hear and see and might even be the cause of the murderous gore, and then get on with things. This, it seems, is exactly in the right cultural milieu. Harvest. Death isn’t really faced because it doesn’t have to be (as long as it’s not your own, and even then…). So, killing birds — and posting photos of them — isn’t the end of the world. Unless you’re the bird. I just think, aesthetically, that photos of dead birds look way better in natural settings (rocks, grass, dogs’ mouths) as opposed to tailgates or (the absolute worst) impaled on barbed wire. But that’s just me.
The two years we lived in Washington, as I’ve said here before, were not the easiest two years for us. We missed the chukar hills, empathized with our dogs’ longings for open hills of bunchgrass and sage, and just simply were unable to ignore the call to the hills. Local surrogates paled in comparison. When we returned to those hills last February, they were buried in snow. So we had to wait. Now that the snow’s here again, we’re recalling the patience required but it’s easier being here, no longer two days’ drive away. I’m busy trying to gainfully employ myself, and I’m liking the challenge and channeling some of that into the new blog/website. But the industry’s hurting, I’ve yet to land a client, and so am doing what I do (when I’m not hunting): reading and writing on topic. Here’s my latest:
I did get out with Peat into the chukar hills for a long hunt yesterday. December 5th. T-shirt weather in the midst of lots of precipitation. Gorgeous. Not as much action as we’ve typically seen in this above-average bird year, but enough. Bizarrely, even though I filled my 100-ounce Cambelbak bladder, I ran out of water (three miles from the truck). A first for December. Still, stellar day.
