Back Cast

The blood-red buffaloberries that spill from the crops of the four sharp-tailed grouse we’re cleaning on the tailgate in western North Dakota are the same color as our hands.

We rinse the inside of the birds with water from a blue, 5-gallon water jug that rides around in the back of the pickup in a plastic milk crate to keep it from tipping over and leaking because the spigot has been broken for a couple of hunting seasons or more.

We wash our hands next and dry them on an old, stained rag that was likely last washed when the water jug spigot was still working.

We put the grouse in a cooler that holds a half-dozen milk jugs that I filled more than halfway with water and froze days ago in a basement freezer.

It’s a big cooler. Not as big as they come, but past experiences tell us it’s big enough to certainly hold the quarters of two adult whitetails and more.

We don’t need much room this trip if things go as planned. If you don’t count the sharptails that are impossible to ignore when we come across them, things haven’t gone as intended. I missed a pronghorn buck maybe a couple hours ago that was right on the edge of the yardage that I’m comfortable at.

No excuses, really. I just missed.

We spotted the herd, maybe a dozen or more, from a Slope County hilltop. Through good binoculars, borrowed binoculars from good friends, they simply registered as little white dots moving east to west on public land. The fact that we eventually get close enough to get a shot without getting busted by the many eyes and noses sort of feels like a win.

No matter, a missed shot still makes for skinny soup.

Hiking back to the pickup we find a deadhead in the sage and grass from a white-tailed buck that, like a lot of animals last winter, didn’t make it to green-up.

From right here where I hold his antlers in my hands, we’re about a quarter-mile from the creek bottom that runs through badlands country where we imagine the buck spent most of his time.

My pronghorn license says I can shoot a buck or a doe. My choice. My 20-year-old son, Jack, my sidekick, my young eyes, my pack mule, insists that we’re buck hunting. Doesn’t matter how many times I tell him they both eat the same.

We ignore the sharptails that flush from the edge of the two-track as we drive to another spot. It’s maybe an hour before sundown and critters are moving. Not just the grouse, but both the mule deer and whitetails have abandoned their beds, making themselves visible.

“There’s three.”

I don’t bother to ask what he’s spotted because I know. They’re just over the hill, now out of sight, but we still have time to make a play. We check for a second time to make sure it’s public land before negotiating the barbed wire fence.

Following Jack’s lead through the knee-high grass, it hits me that our long-held roles are now reversed. I’m the one following in his footsteps, obeying his hand signals to hurry it up just a bit. It’s been that way, now that I think about it, most of the day.

With the rifle I’ve been shooting for 45 years resting on shooting sticks, I pull the trigger and our pronghorn season is over.

It will be dark soon as we hustle to find the buck. I know that when we do, our hands will once again be the color of buffaloberries.