Friday, March 29, 2024
39.0°F

Christmas for the birds, the hunters chasing them and the dogs that bring them back

by Ralph Bartholdt Staff Writer
| December 27, 2018 12:00 AM

He hunted with his brothers and dad on Christmas Eve and the next morning, but that was long ago, he said.

The fields were usually lightly snow-dusted with bird tracks at the edges that let the hunters know what to expect.

He remembered that part.

This was around Ephrata, Wash., a place I regard as scrub land speckled with sage and rim rock, but others who farm consider it as good of a place as any to raise a lot of things, including grapes and apples.

That’s what he said over coffee, when he started thinking back.

He no longer lives there.

It was those stories that returned slowly like a swirl of cream in coffee, of hunting the edges of tilled fields, that got my attention like a stick-tight in a shirt collar.

He and his clan didn’t raise dogs for the Huns and chukar and pheasants they chased often around Christmas through orchards, and along the lips of wheat fields where the tall grass tipped downhill, making small tunnels to hide winged coveys and the occasional rooster.

The men walked three or four abreast, and one of them would fan out, acting like a flushing dog, hoping for a burst to veer within gun range.

After a fresh snow, he said, the hunters would follow gravel trucks because the sand the trucks spit onto the road for traction was favored by the birds that pecked for grit.

It made finding fowl a lot easier in that big land where his party carried 12 gauges to better reach out with more BBs and powder.

I had to wait a couple days after we met in a local cafe last week, for an opening. In the meantime I scrounged under the car seat, the back of underwear drawers, inside boots, the glove box and in garage boxes to recover a handful of 12 gauge shells chambered for the 3-inch tube. I don’t use the Mossberg 500 a lot anymore, but this man’s stories made me long to pack an 8-pound gun along the mucky edges of tilled fields looking for birds.

When the opening came a couple days later, I set the dog in the back of the SUV and sped south toward the rolling farm country of the pea and lentil capital of North America.

Somewhere around Lenville I loosed the pointer, whose whining as he stretched his nose out a cracked window had become almost unbearable. A Fish and Game warden parked along the road told me that this particular piece of Access Yes! property held a lot of birds earlier in the season. However, he came away disappointed when he hunted it yesterday, flushing just one grouse from a brushy covert.

The little shorthair shyly stopped its incessant whining and waited obediently for this roadside conversation to end so he could bust loose in no particular direction until his tongue flopped out like a geoduck.

Ten minutes later at the corner of the hunting area he locked up, but the rooster flew north onto private land. We watched it go.

Knowing a bird will bust from a fencerow is like watching butter melt on waffles. You anticipate the goodness, and salivate in a mental way that doesn’t involve taste buds, although in that moment before flush and flight your nostrils whiff the dirt and dead grass, and inhale the gray day’s somber perfume.

Walking toward a dog locked on point, slipping your thumb over the safety mechanism, you feel your still-calm heart beating a little faster before you tell the dog, casually, “awright.”

It’s just a moment. Not measurable.

The pointer, in a low crouch, takes one step, or two, or three, behind its torpedo nose and the electric wagging of its stub tail.

The rooster cackles and jumps skyward, its red face patch and blue head strain in a moment of self preservation. Its crown feather catches wind and the wings whirr in front of the long, graceful tail that is the color of canvas.

The bird becomes a slap of paint from the brush of Jackson Pollock. It’s orange underbelly and white neck ring are stamped as if in a picture.

If you’re a good shot, or lucky, like me, you watch the bird fold and the dog leap after it.

The man I spoke to over coffee remembered that part too. All of those roosters are somewhere tucked in his mind’s eye, he said, their graceful rust-colored tails, pushing sky.

And the meals too, that the birds became afterward in a warm kitchen, are part of the Christmas memories a lot of hunters make.