We’ve long endorsed at Game and Fish the importance of building quality hunter-landowner relations, including what bonehead moves not to make to weaken them.
It’s straightforward stuff. Stay off private land you don’t have permission to access. Don’t litter. Leave gates the way you found them, and so on.
Simple enough.
Even so, I get unnecessarily uneasy whenever I’m approached by a landowner, thinking that I overlooked something, messed up and didn’t know it.
We’re milling around my pickup on public land in western North Dakota on the sharptail opener, grabbing shotgun shells from boxes, taking slugs of water, but mostly deciding how to walk this large chunk of public land that seems to stretch forever but really doesn’t as private property breaks things up here and there, according to the GPS navigator that’s dominated my phone’s screen since sunrise.
I heard the unmistakable, low rumble of a four-wheeler in the distance some time ago, didn’t pay much attention to it, but now I’m sure its rider is heading in our direction on the other side of the fence that is certainly private.
Maybe he’s checking fence, looking for a cow that’s gotten loose, I wonder out loud. I guess we’re about to find out, I say to my sons.
We meet at the fence, offer “good mornings,” and immediately start talking about the weather, the universal icebreaker. I tell him that earlier this morning we saw frost on an alfalfa field down in one of the valleys west of here and he says that he had to pull out a quilt last night to fight off the chill.
Yep, the weather has changed, we agree.
We talk about elk and elk hunters, and he says he’s seen more of the latter than the former of late. We move on to grouse, the reason my sons and I are parked on this hilltop, and he says he saw some while haying, making it sound like it was days ago, not yesterday.
I’m not good at guessing age, but for whatever reason I think maybe we’re close to the same age even though my beard is certainly the grayest. It’s not important, really, just a curiosity as we visit over the barbed wire divider.
We don’t exchange names, but I do learn that he lives near here in the general direction he motions to over his shoulder with his thumb without turning.
While I’ll likely never know who this gentleman is, it’s at least apparent why he’s gone out of his way, veered off the main gravel road to slowly negotiate the two-track on his side of the fence to this hilltop. He simply wanted to visit. Shoot the breeze during a pause in his morning. Talk about the weather.
We shake hands over the fence, say our goodbyes, and he wishes our small party good luck, adding: “If you see any kitties, don’t tell me about it.”
I chuckle at that, because he does, guessing it passes for mountain lion humor in these parts.
I’m still thinking about our conversation as we hike this up and down public land, heading from one buffaloberry patch to the next, looking for just three more grouse to fill our bags. And it dawns on me that while much of the onus in hunter-landowner relations reasonably falls on the hunter, the gate of this relationship certainly swings both ways.
