My friend John and I were tired from a day of fighting briars and stomping brush piles, but the tangle of discarded Christmas trees we discovered at a trailhead near dusk looked alluring enough and put thoughts of aching muscles out of our minds.
“Get ready,” I yelled to John as he took position. I kicked the boughs and a brown form squirted out.
O.K., technically we weren’t wing shooting, but rabbit hunting, but chasing bunnies is as close as I got to bird hunting last season. I used to do more wing shooting, but now the time constraints of adulthood (read: “job”) reduce my time afield. Plus I love hunting deer, and then there are family obligations during the holidays. Which brings us to January. Which means rabbit hunting.
I used to visit pheasant-hunting preserves occasionally in wintertime, back when I had more disposable income (actually, I had less income then, I was just more inclined to dispose of it.) Sure, preserves aren’t the same as the real thing, but then neither is hunting pen-raised birds on public land. But I always enjoyed the hunting and the happy moil of dogs and hunters in the clubhouse after a day afield. And if you’re willing to pay enough to hunt a certain kind of game farm, you can sit by a roaring fire with a glass of claret, perhaps puffing on a pipe between appreciative sips, and contemplate the grandeur of the sporting life in the afterglow of a glorious day. You can probably even hire a dog to curl at your feet and nap, intermittently waking to gaze loving brown-eyed glances up at you. All of this of course occurs while you ignore your own actual dog, which consumed three-quarters of a long-dead opossum and is consequently suffering acutely from what pharmaceutically-minded folks would delicately call “occasional stomach upset.”
The previous paragraph was written with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but dogs are an integral part of the feel of wing shooting. I’ll probably offend some folks, but I myself am a cat man. I have four, and one retrieves. Or did, until his ballooning weight deep-sixed a promising field-trialing career. Now he’s on low-fat kibbles, which he’s not wild about. He’s not keen on the Pilates routines and the 4 a.m. treadmill workouts either. So while I do not now own a dog, I have had the pleasure of chasing partridge and pheasants behind those of friends. Some of those dogs made us want to honor their artistry by trading our shotguns toward expensive models with gold-filigreed side plates. Others made us want to purchase rusted old single-barrels for ten bucks at an estate sale. Here I’m thinking of “Blue,” my friend Gregg’s springer spaniel. She was a wonderful dog, but like most springers, she was, well, just a bit excitable. And omnivorous, too.
Gregg, Blue, and I were in Gregg’s backyard one day, drinking beer and pitching horseshoes, when we discovered that Blue had swallowed a considerable mass of fishing line. A tag end of it protruded from her posterior. Gregg tugged lightly at the end and Blue yelped and shot off like a rocket with the line still in Gregg’s hands. We looked at each other, horrified, but didn’t move—at least immediately—to stop Blue. After all, we were fishermen and used to trolling, and wanted to wait until Blue had cleared the last stretch of productive bushes (I can only relate that story because Blue turned out to be absolutely fine.)
I began my wing shooting career (such as it is) in east-central Wisconsin, when I was in high school. My father fished, but didn’t hunt, and my grandfather’s hunting days were over, but that wasn’t enough to prevent me from becoming obsessed with ducks. I read waterfowling books and DU magazines during study hall, pored over my dog-eared copy of the Migratory Bird Regulations at lunch, and saw widgeons and teal and wood ducks in my dreams.
The ducks were not impressed.
You see, I assumed practicing (i.e., “shooting clay birds”) was for effete dilettantes. For me, I thought, shooting skill was natural, carried in my veins like a love for the Green Bay Packers. I reckoned I was a latter-day Daniel Boone. For some of my friends, that rang true. But not for me. So I missed, and missed, and missed some more. Often, I’d run out of shells and have to drive to town to collect money for more from my paper-route customers. It was a recurring theme:
“Why, good afternoon, young man.”
“Hello, Mrs. Johnson. I’m here to collect for The Appleton Post-Crescent.”
“But didn’t I just pay for this month?” (I hit her up frequently.)
“No, Mrs. Johnson, that was for last month.”
So, with Mrs. Johnson paid up through the end of time, I’d zoom off to buy more shells, hoping to be back in the blind before the evening flight.
I’m not proud of that, but it kind of sums up my start in bird hunting. That, and the greenhead which launched itself off of a mat of duckweed and then just hung in the air like a weather balloon, where I proceeded to miss with each of the three shells in my gun. The mallard was then potted with one shot by a kid whose mother had probably just sewn his hunter-safety patch on his jacket . Now, I’d be happy for that kid and shout my congratulations across the marsh, but back then my failure was a bitter pill to swallow.
I have gotten better since, though, through experience and practice on trap fields and sporting clays courses. So it comes that field shots now are a decidedly less-dicey proposition. Connecting is just not as satisfying as it would have been in high school, when I’d have sprinted back to my dad’s truck and driven to Forest Junction to call my friends from a pay phone. This is not to say that I don’t fall into slumps which bring me back to my youth, like a .350 leadoff man who falls into a month-long .200 swoon.
Which brings us back to the rabbit hunt I mentioned at the beginning of this column. I shouldered my side-by-side .410 as the cottontail made a straight-line dash toward another brush pile. It was an easy shot, and I anticipated the heft the bunny would bring to my empty game vest.
I missed.
First with one barrel, and then with the other.
My friend John rolled the bunny with an excellent shot and collected the final cottontail of his limit.
Rabbit hunting?
Sure sounds like wing shooting to me.
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