Love the Hunt
If you can learn to love the hunt, you'll hunt longer, happier, with more contentment, and with more energy than if you only love the covey rise.
I can remember many days of long walks, driving to different spots, talking with farmers and ranchers in small town cafes, and getting ‘hot tips’ from those I met along the way. Most of the hot tips turned out to be over-grazed pastures long devoid of any gamebird. And, upon reflection, I was never really upset at that. Most times, after the realization I’d been led astray, the situation would elicit a rueful chuckle and a grudging acknowledgement that it’s only natural to protect a good hunting area. I thought most of those times, the hot spot in question probably was, at one time, a great place to turn out a dog.
Montana, the Dakotas, the Sandhills, and the Grasslands saw many days of long casts with good dogs hunting hard. Occasionally, we would stumble across birds of one variety or another, but usually it would be tired dogs and legs when we reached the truck again. As I look back, I remember thinking, “I didn’t find any birds this cast (or even this day!), but I did find where they weren’t.” Slowly, I was learning what wasn’t good habitat. The days of walking grazed-over pastures became fewer and fewer- unless we crested a hill to the view of a plum-choked coulee crowded with Sharptail Grouse, or a fence protecting a grassy section of land bordering a cut corn field with Prairie Chickens flying back into the grass from the corn. In the Dakotas, a brushy ditch bordering a cut wheat field may meander out-of-sight from the road, full of Pheasant and discoverable only by a trudge through the wheat.
Sometimes the habitat was obviously good. The rain came in quantity and at the right time, and the grass was tall. Seeds that lay dormant for years finally sprouted in the desert Southwest, and the sand was covered with brown grass producing the next crop of seeds for the next year’s rainfall. Also, nutritious food for the local quail. But those days and years were rare as hen’s teeth. I tried to enjoy them as much as possible.
I began to realize that what I most fondly remembered overall was the great surprise of cresting a hill after an hour of slogging through hills and cactus and watering my dogs every twenty minutes, to a scene of diked alfalfa fields on a creek I didn’t know were there. Then, two hours of shooting Sharptail Grouse and Hungarian Partridge while the dogs hit the creek when they got hot.
Looking back, I smiled at the small victory of finding a place not well known by other travelling bird hunters. The only way I found it was by putting a dog or two on the ground heading into the wind. I realized my best memories were of times when I wanted to turn around and head back, but suddenly the beeper, or GPS pager alerted me to a dog on point.
Perhaps only a third of the long slogs bore the fruit of a new hunting area, but those new areas elicited an excitement and protectiveness that never went away. It took a lot of shoe leather to find them, and once marked on the GPS, or the BLM map, or Gazetteer, they were always cherished locations.
While the thrill of a gamebird flush and harvest is exciting, I grew to realize that the search, or hunt, itself is what I remembered. I now understand my motivation behind endless walks with bird dogs in hopes of finding a new area. I know the ability to go farther, longer, and more often is spurred by the satisfaction of putting the dog noses in the gamebird scent cone. I like the whooshing sound of the quail covey as much as the next hunter. Or the cackling and cursing of the seriously upset rooster Pheasant rising out of the shrub. Or the laughing and mocking “nuh-huh-huh” of the Sharptail Grouse rising from the grass alongside the alfalfa dikes. They all bring smiles.
The motivation is truly in the hunt itself. The memories of long walks with my many different dogs over the years in all kinds of weather and terrain is the motivation for the present season.
