A BETTER WAY
I recently reread Spiller’s Grouse Feathers and thoroughly enjoyed it. Spiller’s book got me thinking about my origins and progression as a grouse hunter. It seems every Brush Worn remembers that first bird taken on the wing. In fact, many writers have written about that seminal moment in their lives. I figured it was time that I recorded mine and some of the lessons I learned at the time.
Brother Shawn and his red-phased ruff from Grouse Alley.
I didn’t start bird hunting in earnest until my first year of law school up in Moscow, Idaho in 1998. This year was a pivotal year in my life. I had graduated from undergrad in the Spring and had moved to Northern Idaho to attend law school. My love of the outdoors began to blaze and I was in a beautiful, game-filled area. At the same time, however, I really struggled with the negative law school environment and saw it as a battle of the survival of the fittest, which didn’t sit well with me.
In my book, Heaven on Earth: Stories of Fly Fishing Fun and Faith, I described my predicament:
. . . It only took reading a few court cases to open my eyes to the fact that, for the most part, the law was created because people are apt to do whatever they can—even taking advantage of their neighbor—to get ahead. Our legal system is so vast and complex because people do a lot of bad things to each other and the law has to cover all of the angles. My optimistic bubble was quickly deflating and the truth was depressing. I soon realized that I simply hated everything about law school and wondered what in the heck I had gotten myself into.
Instead of trying to fit in this negative environment, like a square peg in round hole, I withdrew. For me, there had to be a better way! Now bear in mind, I studied and went to class like other students, but as soon as class was over, I was out of there! I did not study or hang out at the school building or associate with other law students (except for a few close friends). I left school at school. Instead, that first semester, I devised a system in which I awoke at 4:00 a.m. and prepared for classes beforehand, which involved reading multiple cases and preparing outlines.
After class, however, I bailed out of the school as fast as my two legs would carry me, escaped to the great outdoors, and found much needed relief from the pressure. Moscow happens to be in the heart of the Palouse Prairie, which is a wildlife cornucopia. Unlike Southern Idaho, this highland prairie receives an average of 32 inches of precipitation each year and is known as one of the most fertile dry farm (no irrigation necessary) wheat producing areas in the nation. Indeed, this landscape is known for the rolling wheat fields as far as the eye can see. But for me, I sought out those areas that were untouched (or less touched) by the plow. The harvests that I was interested in were the abundant whitetail deer, elk, bears, pheasants, quail, ruffed grouse, blue grouse, Hungarian partridge, chukars, turkeys, and certainly not least, fish. I felt like a kid in a candy store and it was definitely hard to focus on school when this smorgasbord of outdoor goodness lay before me.
During this time, one of my favorite afternoon forays was hunting ruffed grouse, but I was not yet a Brush Worn. Before moving to Northern Idaho, I talked my dad into letting me bring his old Coast to Coast hardware store pump 12 gauge shotgun with me to law school, but I did not yet have a bird dog. Early that September, I hunted with Shawn and his pointer, Gibbs, in Deary, Idaho on some private property loaded with ruffed grouse. I vividly remember taking my very first grouse off of a tree limb. I was so excited to hold one of these beautiful birds in hand. I had no idea that this was not sporting. I was unaware of the deep tradition of hunting the ruffed grouse or of the ethics of true sportsmen. After all, the point of hunting seemed to be to bag your quarry, right?
The weeks that followed, many days after school, I threw my shotgun into the old rattle trap, Geo Tracker, and headed east to Deary, where I would walk the woods for a few hours in search of grouse, which were more plenteous that year than I have seen before or since. I had great success shooting sitting grouse that I found along cattle trails and abandoned logging roads. I felt like quite the hunter as the body count stacked up.
Some of my first grouse from 1998.
The more time I spent that semester in school, however, the more I cherished the peace of the outdoors. I recognized a stark difference between these two environments: The former was so stressful, negative, and chaotic and the latter was so peaceful and positive with an underlying order that appealed to all my senses. Soon the atavistic desire to kill and possess subsided some and I began to seek a new approach.
One of my very favorite areas to hunt that Fall was the University of Idaho Experimental Forest east of Moscow Mountain. The grouse were so plentiful that you couldn’t drive down the road in the afternoon without seeing numerous grouse right along the road. My favorite area to hunt, however, was along this trail that wound through some of the best grouse cover I can recall and the walking was easy. Over those weeks, I never went there without seeing and harvesting a few birds.
One afternoon in late September, as I walked this trail, I thought that it would be more of a challenge if I took one of these thunderous birds while flying. I realized that any oaf could take a bird sitting on the ground. As I walked toward a narrow clearing, I observed a ruffie flying low across the opening and I swung, shot and dropped the bird. As I picked it up, I can honestly say that I felt more pride in that one bird than all the others that I had taken home earlier that season. After that bird, I missed more grouse on the wing during law school than I can even begin to count and I gained a respect and love for Ol’ Ruff and his wiles that remains to this day.
A gray-phased ruffed grouse.
As I wrote in my book, this coincidentally happened around the same time that my addiction to fly fishing took hold. I recognized fly fishing as a more challenging, graceful way than the bait fishing and hardware chucking that I grew up on. At the same time, I independently came to realize that wingshooting with bird dogs was definitely the more sporting way of hunting. I’m sure this was no mere coincidence, but why?
Burton Spiller said it best in his book Fishin’ Around: “I believe that the intimate contact with nature which all fisherman [and I would add bird hunters] enjoy works a change in the inner man, and makes of him a humbler and wiser person.” In other words, when we immerse ourselves in the great outdoors, Nature and Nature’s Creator can teach us that there is a better way, not only in hunting in fishing, but also in life.
Misty’s first ruff of 2012.
