Ruffed grouse are survivalists, like anything wild. Keen masters of escape, Houdini had nothing on them. I’ve had them use the back door too many times to think it’s chance. And when that door is covered, they fly out the side window.
I am convinced they thumb their noses at us. In fact, I know it. If every route is covered, if there are no blinding branches, no thorn hanging us up; if the dog’s point is hard, the shooting lanes clear and we know that we’ll mount and swing with aplomb, still there are no guarantees.
I have had those stars align. I’ve had birds that were as good as in the freezer, only to have them rise in a flourish, flip me off and fly directly at my dog. The only route of escape, there is no other. I don’t even get to mount the gun. Perhaps if my dogs had been trained to snatch zipping birds from the air in their mouths, I think, instead of pointing them. I give the merits of such training too much attention, often when I am trudging back to the truck, my game vest lighter then when I started. Such is the bird’s specter.
What is it about the grouse that agitates the shooter? The rise? The flight? Is it the miles walked to find and then miss the fleeting shadows? Perhaps it’s all of it. No bird is like it. Not woodcock, not pheasant. The quail is too well behaved. The duck, over decoys, too diffident.
“They get you every time.”
In another few years, this orchard will be overrun. Moribund now, bramble will have throttled the last of it. The grouse will have moved on. The apple trees, starting into rigor mortis, their blackened, spidery limbs will scratch feebly at the sky. No food, no grouse, Peter tells me each year, when another covert fallows. Some years, it’s our mantra, sadly repeated as we hunt one after another.
We look for new ground. Most of it is posted now, newcomers from down-state unfamiliar with rural notions of sharing and using the land can’t abide us hunters. Some of it falls to the plow, or worse, the bulldozer. Still we look, hopeful always for that sleeve of cover along a creek bed, that fir-bordered swale, that something holding birds.
Tonight calls for a full moon, tomorrow a frost. The woodcock will be in again. Steady, consistent work for the dogs, they provide both of us a chance to prove we can still shoot. But we aren’t thinking about that.
Fruits of Your Labor by Persis C. Weirs. Courtesy Wild Wings.
There on the hill, the country opening beneath us, we curse the barbed wire biting at our boots—it’s torn my chaps already today. There is the pungent odor of rotting apples, of pine. I’m watching the dog on eager point again. Her coat is knotted with burrs, her belly cut by thorns. Overhead, a raven watches with some amusement, his croak as dispiriting as the missed flushes echoing in our heads. I remind Peter that he needs to make this shot. Redemption, I say.
Some of us like the pined cathedrals of the South and breaking up quail coveys, others the unending cornrows of the Dakotas and their hard-charging roosters. There is, too, waterfowling. Decoys and sneak boats. Chest waders and hand-warmers. Biting sleet, off-shore winds. It lacks the glamor.
For Peter and me, it’s New England and its grouse, chasing him in the hills. He’s called the King, not for idle reason. To watch one hop onto a log is to see one set upon his throne. Yes, that is a crown he wears. The pine barren, the pasture’s edge, the orchard, this is his court. We are honored to be there.
