Back Cast

We’re leaving town before sunrise, earlier than needed because the grouse will be feeding in the nearby crops when we get there and not loafing in the calf-high prairie grass where we can get at them, but it’s hard to dampen the eagerness of starting a new season that took 9 months to get here.

We aren’t the only ones excited to get where we are going. Or maybe it’s not excitement, but a dubious concern that our small party of three, actually four if you count the bird dog, which you always should, are somehow headed to the exact same piece of public land in a big county that has its share of it.

No matter their thinking, they pass us in a cloud of dust on a rural dirt road that should be negotiated with certain caution, not dirt track racing maneuvers.

While there are things I’ll never be able to wrap my head around when it comes to humans, my understanding of sharp-tailed grouse falls below that. After nearly 40 years of chasing these birds — and not missing an opening weekend that I can remember — I am often dumbfounded after a weekend of hunting in agreeable country that things have worked in our favor more often than not.

With my dog at home, likely already lazing on the couch after his Saturday morning pup cup from the nearby coffee joint, Boone, a bird dog not under my command who doesn’t flinch at the report of a shotgun and sprints back to the pickup when the trigger is pulled, works back and forth between the three of us. To me, he already looks birdy and it’s only been minutes since he crossed under the fence. His tongue is already hanging out of his mouth where it will likely stay for the next 3 miles, but his owner says he’s not birdy yet, but we’ll know it when he gets a nose full.

While it’s been too long since I’ve hunted behind a bird dog that I could scratch behind the ears and call my own, watching another hunter’s dog do things they are taught or wonderfully born with is still a beautiful thing.

At this time of year, the opener, the second weekend in September, we expect the grouse to play nice. To hold and flush — but not all at once — at a respectable distance because that’s how it mostly goes. That’s what years of doing this have taught us. Yet, so far, we’ve yet to shoulder our shotguns and have only pointed fingers at sharptails flushing wildly, at 200 yards or more, just like they do later in the season when there is snow on the ground and the birds have been bumped by hunters and dogs often enough.

Seeing grouse even from a distance is a good thing because we know they’re here, that we at least got the part correct about the kind of habitat these native creatures choose to reside.

We blame this late season behavior, the jumpiness, on the wind because that’s all we can figure. The wind is stiff. It dries our sweat from humping it up and down hills but waters our eyes as we walk into it. When my hunting partners do flush birds, I’m looking the other way and don’t hear the unmistakable chuckle of grouse taking flight, but I do hear their shotguns bark, which is a sound we can all get behind on a day birds are hard to come by.