I suppose I was eight or nine when Dad and Uncle Hal gave in to my pleading and let me tag along on one of their Saturday ruffed grouse hunts. Of course, my dad and uncle didn’t call these birds “ruffed grouse,” nor did anyone else in the west-central Wisconsin of my youth. To us they were simply “partridge.”
So, on a bright October morning, with the hardwoods decked out in their autumn finest, I laced up my new leather boots and went, unarmed, on my first partridge hunt. Before we entered the woods Dad issued my marching orders: “Keep quiet, stay right behind me and stop when I stop.” I was happy to comply. Going hunting was heady stuff for a kid my age.
Dad and Uncle Hal were dogless hunters in those days. They had grown up in a large family on a hardscrabble Dunn County farm, and bird dogs had not been part of their heritage. But as boys they had spent plenty of time in the woods pursuing partridge, rabbits, and squirrels. They knew how to hunt.
It wasn’t long before my feet began to get cold, but I was determined not to complain. Dad and Uncle Hal moved quietly through the woods, always keeping each other within sight and sound. They stopped often, which puzzled me at the time. They certainly couldn’t be tired; the more we stood still, the colder my feet became. Later, Dad explained, “A partridge gets nervous when you stop walking. That’s when he’s most likely to flush.”
On one of our stop-and-listen sessions, a bird did just that. Its thunderous takeoff nearly made me jump out of my new boots. It bored straightaway, and a second later Dad’s “Sweet 16” Browning humpback roared. The bird cartwheeled down and I raced after it, forgetting Dad’s warning to stay behind him. Luckily for me, no other birds took wing. If they had, Dad might have benched me for the year.
The grouse’s wings were still fluttering when I got there, making it easy to find. I gazed down at the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Taking off my wool mittens, I picked the bird up and ran my fingers over its warm body, stroking the silky black ruff, mottled brown back and banded tail. For a moment, the grouse and I were alone in a wild sanctuary, a mystical world of golden tamaracks, purple dogwoods, and crimson swamp maples, where the pleasant aroma of decaying ferns permeated the air.
Footsteps crunching in the fallen leaves snapped me out of my reverie. “He marks the fall as well as most bird dogs,” said Uncle Hal, “but he’s a little slow on the fetching part.”
Dad laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. “Yep, it looks like we’ve got us a hunting partner.” I didn’t know it at the time, but that childhood encounter with the king of game birds changed my life. It marked the beginning of a long love affair with autumn, upland birds, shotguns, and eventually bird dogs.
The next autumn, Dad let me carry an unloaded gun—a Winchester Model 1890 pump-action .22, complete with octagon barrel and peep sight. When anyone in our party spotted a squirrel, I was allowed to load the gun. That sweet little rifle, handed down for generations, accounted for a lot of bushytails. I still have it today.
I’m sure I received some nice gifts on my twelfth birthday, but the only one I remember came in a long, heavy box. Heart racing, I tore open the package to find my first shotgun, a 16 gauge Ithaca Model 37 Featherlight pump. From then on, I would hunt partridge with Dad, Uncle Hal, and Hal’s son-in-law, Jack.
Had I known how many birds I would miss during those early years, I may have opted for a different sport. I was small for my age and the gun was stocked for a grown man. It had a modified choke, a bit on the tight side for grouse in close quarters. Dad was a thrifty man and he deemed shortening the stock a waste of good walnut, allowing that I’d “grow into it.” Burning up shells on clay pigeons was likewise considered a waste of time and money. He figured I’d learn to shoot as he had, by trial and error.
In my case there was plenty of error. Partridge were abundant, and the grouse cycle, of which I knew nothing at the time, must have been at its peak. I sometimes started out with a box of shells and returned at the end of the day, birdless and dejected, with only a few shells left. About when I had given up all hope of ever hitting a bird on the wing, a grouse roared out of a dogwood thicket and angled left. Although my track record suggested I should save my ammunition, I mounted the gun, swung and fired. When the bird tumbled to the ground I let out a yell that brought my father on the run. I’m not sure who was happier, Dad or I. Maybe he was just relieved that I hadn’t shot myself in the foot.
As I grew bigger the gun began to fit me better, and I began knocking down a bird here and there. College came along and didn’t allow much time for hunting. But in forestry school at the University of Minnesota I met Rod Sando, a husky, crew-cut farm kid from a small town north of the Twin Cities. A few years after graduation we both landed jobs with the research branch of the U.S. Forest Service in St. Paul and began hunting together.
It didn’t take me long to find out that Rod was the most skillful ruffed grouse hunter I had ever seen. He had laser eyesight and fast reflexes, but more important, he had grown up prowling the woods around his family farm. He seemed to know what the grouse were going to do before they knew it themselves. He also had a dog with a great nose, a yellow Lab named Punch.
Rod had a Remington Model 870 pump with a full choke, not exactly a grouse hunter’s dream gun. But even with that full choke, Rod was a deadly shot, especially later in the fall. Many times I saw him shoot through the leafless branches to bring down a grouse at more than forty yards.
In his classic book, New England Grouse Shooting, William Harnden Foster asserts that the ablest of the old New England market hunters often shot 300 or more grouse in a single season. “The old timers who were shooting pa’tridges for a business,” wrote Foster, “hunted practically every day for three months and some of them stretched the season a bit at that.” I have no doubt that Rod and Punch, hunting as many days, could have held their own with those old boys and their dogs.
I asked Rod for advice on how to cure my shooting woes. He said, “Get a Remington 870 like mine with a full choke.” Not surprisingly, that gun didn’t make me a better grouse shot. In fact, it made me worse, although on waterfowl and long-range pheasants it sometimes did me proud.
My epiphany came when I visited a skeet range for the first time. The manager watched me struggle through a round of skeet with my full-choke gun, breaking only ten or twelve targets, and took pity on me. He handed me a beat-up Browning over/under choked skeet and skeet, and said, “Here, try this.” I broke nineteen birds with it on my first round and twenty-one on the next. He then gave me a lecture on the importance of choke in shotguns, but he needn’t have. I already had my mind set on buying a new gun.
I moved to Montana not long after, and didn’t see Rod for several years. When we eventually got together again for a ruffed grouse hunt in Minnesota, a number of things had changed. Rod had traded his Remington Model 870 for a sleek little over/under choked skeet and skeet. Punch had passed on and Rod now had an English setter named Lars.
I had shelved my full-choke Remington in favor of a Browning over/under choked improved cylinder and modified, a good combination for Montana’s more open conditions, and I had a young Brittany named Chief. Smoking hundreds of clays at the trap and skeet club in Missoula had boosted my confidence.
Rod and I each shot several grouse over our dogs on that trip but the one I remember best came at the end of the last day. We were headed down a tote road on our way back to the truck when Lars stiffened on point at the edge of the trail. Chief was right behind him, backing. Rod motioned for me to walk in, figuring I’d miss, just like the old days, and he’d still have time to knock down the bird. I didn’t miss. He slapped me on the back and said, “You’ve been practicing, haven’t you?” I admitted that I had, but I couldn’t help reminding him that he’d set back my learning curve by several years when he advised me to buy that Remington pump with the full choke.
Although five decades of wingshooting have taken me from Canada to the Mexican border, I have special memories of Wisconsin, where the noble ruffed grouse reigns. Chief was getting on in years by the time we headed east to revisit the grouse woods I had hunted with my dad and uncle as a boy. We arrived at the Flambeau River early one October morning, just as the sun began to light the treetops with crimson, orange, and yellow. I poured the last cup of coffee from the thermos and relaxed as the melting frost unlocked the sweet, damp smell of decomposing hardwood leaves. Uncasing my Browning, I slipped a dozen shells in the pockets of my hunting vest and buckled a Swiss bell on Chief’s collar.
We’d hunted the better part of an hour when Chief’s bell fell silent near the river, under the alder trees. I circled toward the river- bank, thinking the bird might be pinned near the water’s edge. I had a clear shot when it topped the alders, and I heard it hit the ground with a thump. Chief came back a minute later with the ruffed grouse in his mouth.
I sat for a time on a pine log near the river, enjoying the sun on my face and smoothing the bird’s feathers, admiring its beautiful plumage, just as I had so long ago on that first hunting trip with my father. A gray squirrel chattered on a far-off hardwood ridge; the dark waters of the Flambeau glided along, murmuring their secrets of grouse and deer and wild places they’d been. When I shut my eyes and listened, I could hear the voices of old hunting pals calling Ruff, Rosie, or Sophie—ghost dogs whose names I hadn’t heard in years.
For those of us who appreciate tradition—and most wingshooters do—it’s comforting to know things haven’t changed too much in the grouse woods. Bird numbers ebb and flow, according to the vagaries of weather, habitat, and cyclic forces not completely understood. We now have modern conveniences like GPS units, Gore-Tex boots, and beeper collars, but the time-honored trinity of shotgun, bird, and dog remains. Wingbeats and heartbeats still collide at the crucial moment of the flush, just as they did for our fathers and grandfathers. Today’s grouse hunters find freedom and adventure, and on occasion, magic, just like the hunters of generations past.