The morning air felt crisp and fine as the hunter followed the aging pointer through old, familiar coverts. The remaining aspen leaves twirled gently in the breeze as he listened to the tinkling of the bell. Suddenly the sound stopped. The hunter's pulse quickened. He walked in on the point, and the roar of one bird, and then another, found him with a shouldered gun. The double barrel spoke twice. After a brief search, the dog brought the birds to the hunter's feet. Later, as he cleaned his partridge by a woodland stream with gun broken over his knee, the hunter thought what a fine morning it had been.
Has this ever happened to you?
Me either.
Well, the sentiment has, but the reality? Never. It hasn't because Bonasa umbellus isn't actually a bird.
It's a myth.
A squirrel is just a squirrel, and no one waxes nostalgic about the cotton-tailed rabbit or snowshoe hare. The white-tailed deer used to be more romantic, but years of 1 million-plus herds, bonus permits and car kills have made the deer seem, well, more common. But say "grouse," and the classic New England images of stone fences, apple orchards, small-bore doubles and braces of liver-and-white Brittanies come to mind. Never before has a beady-eyed, dim-witted, 1-pound bird received such a massive onslaught of public relations.
I suspect I'm like most hunters in that I'm democratic-- I hunt what I can when I can. But I love grouse hunting, and get to do some of it each fall. My problem is that the classic images in my head never match my results afield.
I remember well my first grouse. I walked along a trail near the Wisconsin River south of Stevens Point. With my gun at port arms, I looked ahead to see a block of woods consisting mostly of oaks but with some declining aspens. It was fronted by a thick wall of berry bushes and looked birdy. I had a sixth sense about what was about to happen.
A grouse flushed and roared away with the sound of a bike with playing cards clothes-pinned to the spokes. I pointed the gun toward the bird and pulled the trigger. As the report faded, there was a dying flutter of wings on the forest floor.
I was elated.
While cleaning the bird, I discovered no pellets-- not even in the head or neck. It stood to reason. I killed the only couch-potato partridge in Wisconsin-- the bird had died of a heart attack. Shortly before I arrived, it had munched lazily on catkins while its mate nagged about the unused Stairmaster in a corner.
Nowadays, I have a side-by-side double-barrel-- just like those in the fancy magazines-- which I sometimes use for grouse hunting. But it is a .410, and it only looks expensive when the sun hits it right. In almost every how-to grouse piece I've read, the .410 has been deemed inadequate for grouse hunting or has been damned with faint praise as an expert's gun. I'm no expert, but I routinely dismiss their assertions that the .410's pattern is too sparse and likely to wound a bird. I don't worry about that. When I shoot at a grouse, it's in the next time zone when my shot arrives where it was. Inadequate or not, I enjoy carrying the gun, mostly in my own nod to sentiment. It was my grandfather's. When I hunt with it, I think of him carrying the gun behind beagles, and recall what he used to say to me during games of cribbage: "Miss 'em with one barrel, get 'em with the other."
I do him one better, and miss 'em with both.
My regular grouse gun, though, is the same gun I use for everything else: a nearly 9-pound 12-gauge pump. The wood is plain, and the checkering is pressed, not cut. At the end of a day with it, I feel like I've been lugging a small child. However, it does the job when I do my part, and I like to think it hearkens back to the days when guns were tools, not status symbols.
Occasionally, I encounter some waxed-cotton swell with a silver-plated, hand-embossed dog whistle and a gun that cost more than my car. I know there's a brand-new Range Rover or the like packed with the entire contents of two sporting-goods catalogs back at the logging road.
"Road-hunter. He's only in it for the meat," I can almost hear him think as he issues a condescending farewell after a last glance at my gun. I get some perverse satisfaction out of that, and I think it's because of the chance to thwart one of the main elements of the old, classic, "gentlemanly" idea of partridge hunting: snobbery.
Outdoorsmen are lucky because there seems to be less snobbery in our pursuits than in other sports, such as golf or tennis. But it is there, particularly in sporting clays, grouse hunting and grouse hunting's aesthetic twin, fly-fishing for trout. I think we've all encountered someone who acted as if the accumulation of accoutrements earned access to a fraternity. What these people don't understand is that we go to the woods to escape the social scale, not to climb it.
When trout fishing, I use spinning tackle --the horror!-- and favor spinners and chub tails as bait. My pet stream is a jungle laced with deadfalls, swamp muck and stinging nettles, and I like to get so far back that the only boot prints I see are mine from a month earlier. I despise coming back-- cut, stung and sweating, cooled only by the leaks in my waders-- to find some sneering chap belaboring the bridgeside pool for the few remaining hatchery trout because backcasts are easier to make there, and besides, those alder thickets upstream are just so nasty.
Enough of my vendetta. Back to grouse.
When I was in college, my friends and I hunted a small patch of woods near Polonia, which is near Stevens Point. We hunted a lot, and our grades reflected it. The land was beautiful-- a brook trout stream ran through it, and a peak gave way to reveal a golden cornfield framed on three sides by flaming maples and aspens. The spot looked classic, and every time I paused there I thought of a painting: Two birds roar away from a pointing dog as a gentleman shoulders his side-by-side.
But the birds didn't care about art. They were in the thick stuff; a nearly impenetrable jungle of black spruce. We got through by lumbering, sweating and falling, cursing as we became mired in muck and as branches slapped us in the face. The partridge were there, but we couldn't shoot what we couldn't see until one of us hunkered low to the ground and walked like a crab. We imitated him. Shots came awkwardly, but at least we could see. One memorable day, we killed three grouse that way; all on the wing, which was an important distinction in those days. We celebrated with beer and pickled eggs in a Rosholt tavern; bent low over the bar to minimize the pain in our backs.
A week later my grandmother commented on my poor posture.
Maybe I'm just being cranky, and I-- who received 12 years of Catholic education-- should be more sympathetic to the old idea of grouse hunting and its quirks. After all, what is grouse hunting to the people who live for it but a religion? And discounting snobs, maybe the fine guns and the hand-signed, limited-edition prints are just symbols of the religion, which gets its faithful through off-seasons and off-cycles when birds are scarce. Maybe my old pump-gun ethic is itself a form of snobbery, and I'm guilty of confusing poverty with morality.
I don't know.
I bought a glossy sporting magazine the other day; the kind where the writers have names like landed gentry and where you swear the publishers have infused the pages with the smell of English leather. In the magazine was an advertisement for a gun; a fine gun with two barrels, gold inlays and exotic wood to match an exotic name. I want that gun.
A turnaround?
Maybe.
But at night, when the moonlight streams through the blinds and glints off the barrel of the pump-gun leaning in the corner, I hide the magazine under the mattress, like a teen-ager with a copy of Playboy.
One year, we hunted up north, the entire Jump River crew. It was the third day, and we divided into groups, each with a dog, to explore new territory. Before we left the logging road, Kevin's golden put a bird up. It flew straight away-- an easy shot.
I missed three times.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to limit my magazine's capacity to one to conserve lead.
Hours later, we were exhausted and soaked, and I remembered why they call it Indian Summer: it was hot.
We missed everything we shot at, and the dog had long since departed for parts unknown. Below us was a vast expanse of bog that we had to cross to reach a birdy-looking stand of popple. There wasn't a New England-y stone fence or apple orchard in sight.
We started down the slope, calling for the dog. I thought of the words of another New England icon, Robert Frost. Other lines are more famous, but I remember these:
"And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep."
I did sleep later-- a nap before the campfire-- and I dreamt of grouse. They were as big as turkeys, and they were laughing at me.
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