My black Lab Maggie and I were hunting along Box Elder Creek in eastern Montana when she charged into a wild rose thicket and nosed out a rooster pheasant. The bird dropped a leg when I shot but continued flying up the creek and out of sight. I cussed my bad shooting and continued walking in the direction the bird had flown. Five minutes later I happened to glance over the bank into the creek and there was the rooster, quite dead, bobbing along in the current directly toward me. Maggie looked confused but happily jumped in to retrieve it.
One sun-drenched October morning my Brittany, Chief, pointed a rooster at the top of a big hill in the Judith Mountains. Somehow I fumbled an easy setup and put some shot in the bird without bringing it down. I watched it sail to the bottom of the hill where it stalled out in an aspen grove and appeared to tumble to the ground. I hurried down there confident I would find the bird dead or close to it.
Sure enough, Chief went on point about where I had seen the bird fall and I figured he had it located. When I said “Fetch!” he dived into the brush and came out with a freshly killed hen pheasant. I had clearly seen the bird I shot at, so there was no doubt in my mind about its gender. While I stood there scratching my head I heard a rustling in the aspen branches and looked up to see a hawk glaring down at me. Apparently the hawk had killed the hen shortly before I happened along and didn’t want to leave. After I put two and two together I realized what had taken place, but I might have had trouble explaining it to a game warden. To add to the mystery, I never found the rooster.
A few weeks later on that same hill I shot a rooster just before dark and couldn’t find it, despite the efforts of two good bird dogs. I was beginning to think the hill must be haunted. We happened to be hunting the same area the next day when one of my partners stumbled across the dead bird, about seventy-five yards from where I’d knocked it down. The weather was cold and the bird was perfectly preserved. It was a nice mature rooster with half-inch spurs, so I took it to the taxidermist and had it mounted. It’s sitting atop my bookcase as I write this.
Speaking of haunted places, I was hunting a federal waterfowl production area with my Brittany, Ollie, one foggy morning in late October when it seeped into my consciousness that I hadn’t heard his bell in awhile. I picked up my pace and started looking for him. When I got to a fence corner where a dry ditch intersected a hay meadow, I found him stretched tight as a fiddle string below the grassy ditch bank. A rooster flushed when I stepped in and I unloaded my over/under without ruffling a feather. Ollie bolted after the pheasant, certain it would soon fall from the sky—a case of misplaced confidence if there ever was one.
Experienced wingshooters know missing an occasional bird isn’t all bad, because it affords the chance to curse creatively and passionately. I took the opportunity to cuss out my gun, my shells, the fog, the dog, and the pancakes I had for breakfast. Then I moved on to the root of the problem: me. I stood there calling myself every bad name I could think of. I quickly exhausted the obvious ones and had begun working on more creative epithets when Ollie came to his senses and turned back toward me. I’d settled on “bat-blind, birdbrained bungler” by the time he arrived. Then I noticed a curious thing: There stood Ollie, ghostlike in the fog, locked up again almost exactly where he’d pointed the rooster a few minutes earlier. The scene gave me a strange sensation of deja vu. At first I thought he might be pointing scent from the departed bird, but the cardinal rule of pheasant hunting is always expect the unexpected.
Ollie looked dead serious, and he doesn’t make many mistakes on old scent. When I stepped into the clump of grass in front of him another rooster, a carbon copy of the first, sprang into the air. Much to my relief (and Ollie’s) the bird collapsed when I pulled the trigger. It isn’t often the pheasant gods give a bat-blind, bird-brained bungler a second chance.
A few years ago, while hunting sharp-tailed grouse in the sandhills of northeastern Montana with Ollie, I had another strange experience involving two birds. I had walked for an hour without coming across anything more exciting than a bedded whitetail buck, which jumped to its feet with a startled look and bounded away across the undulating terrain. Then suddenly, as often happens in this wide-open country, I struck paydirt. Or, more accurately, Ollie struck paydirt in the form of grouse scent put out by a whole covey of these pretty native birds.
Ollie’s bell had gone quiet in the vicinity of a chokecherry thicket surrounded by snowberry, a low shrub whose white berries provide a favorite sharptail food. When I finally spotted a patch of his white coat in the brush and moved toward him, the covey exploded from the far side of the trees, voicing their trademark cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk alarm call. Most of the birds escaped behind the trees, but a late riser veered to the right of the others and offered me a long shot. The bird kept flying when I pulled the trigger, which surprised me, because I felt my hold had been good and I’d often scratched down sharptails at greater distances. I watched the bird disappear over a dune, still bidding me a noisy farewell.
Since all the birds had flown in the same direction, I headed that way in hopes of finding them again. After we’d gone several hundred yards, Ollie pointed near the top of a grassy knob. This time a single boiled up, offering me a clear shot, and I downed the bird at thirty yards. Ollie quickly located the bird, but instead of picking it up and starting toward me with it, he just looked at me. I thought it odd, but I knew he was hot and thirsty, so I didn’t insist he retrieve the grouse.
I walked to him to pick up the bird, and while I stood smoothing its feathers and admiring it, Ollie trotted away a few yards toward a clump of bushes. I reached into the back of my vest for my water bottle, thinking I’d give him a well-deserved drink. That’s when I noticed he’d gone on point again. Sharptails aren’t known as tight- sitting birds, especially when they’ve been shot at a time or two, and I didn’t see how a bird could have sat quietly through the commotion of a flush, a shot, a dog running up, and a hunter walking in to pick up the downed bird. Still … you never know.
I edged cautiously toward Ollie’s rigid form, gun ready. Then I saw the object of his fascination, lying a few feet in front of his outstretched nose: a dead sharptail, obviously the one I had “missed” twenty minutes earlier. The two birds, shot twenty minutes and several hundred yards apart, had managed to end up stone dead within ten yards of each other. Ollie and I toasted our luck with a drink of water, then we headed for the truck.
Sometimes the Red Gods giveth, and sometimes they taketh away. On the chilly October morning that Joe Elliott and I turned our Brittanys loose in a northeastern Montana CRP field, we expected a perfectly normal hunt. I followed an edge adjoining a sunflower field, while Joe wandered off toward the center of the CRP. I hadn’t gone far when Ollie hit a fresh scent and cakewalked to a point. I flushed the bird, which turned out to be a rooster, and shot it. The bird thrashed around in the tall grass a bit but Ollie soon rounded it up and brought it to me. At that point, the rooster appeared limp and lifeless. I put it in the back of my hunting vest and continued walking. So far, so good.
A few minutes later, I felt the rooster flutter weakly—just once— a motion I interpreted to be the final spasm of a dying bird. Ten minutes later I called Ollie in for a short rest and a drink of water. I laid my gun on the ground and took my vest off and put it on the ground next to my gun. When I reached into the back of my vest to get my water bottle and collapsible dish, the dead pheasant suddenly came to life. He hopped out of the vest and took off running, with a surprised Ollie in pursuit. When Ollie made a lunge for him, the rooster launched himself into the air like a NASA space shuttle and flew toward the sunflower field.
Most of the sunflowers had been harvested, except for one strip about eighty yards wide and a quarter of a mile long. While I stared in astonishment, the bird flew several hundred yards and landed in the middle of this uncut portion of the field. Ollie gave me a confused look. Our perfectly normal hunt had suddenly taken a turn toward the paranormal.
Joe hadn’t seen this little drama play out, so when we got together back at the truck, I told him what had happened. He shook his head in disbelief. “I’ve heard you come up with some creative excuses for missing birds, but don’t you think this one is a bit over the top? I’m hungry. Let’s go to town for breakfast.”
Over ham and eggs and hot coffee, I convinced him I hadn’t been pulling his leg. “Let’s go back and run our Labs through that strip of uncut sunflowers,” I said. “It’s a long shot, but maybe they’ll come up with my rooster.” Both Joe and I had young black Labs that excelled at retrieving lost birds.
Our plan was to cover half of the sunflower strip on the first pass, then turn around and cover the other half on the return trip. When we entered the head-high sunflowers forty yards apart, I had the feeling we were looking for a needle in a haystack. We couldn’t see more than a few yards in front of us, and the dogs promptly disappeared into the maze. We trudged the quarter-mile to the end of the field, where we compared notes. “Sedge has been birdy part of the time,” Joe said. “I saw a bird hot-footing down the row ahead of me a few minutes ago. Maybe we’ll find your rooster on the way back.”
By the time I emerged from the sunflowers at the far end of the field, I was getting worried. I hadn’t seen Bailey in a long time. When Joe came out of the strip a short time later, he was grinning from ear to ear. He had both dogs with him, and he held up a long-tailed rooster for me to see.
“Bailey showed up a while back with the bird in her mouth. It was pretty lively, and she wasn’t about to let it go. I have no idea how long she’d been carrying it around. I wrung its neck, so I think it’s safe to assume it’s dead this time.”
The rooster pheasant is a tough and resourceful bird indeed. One day my black Lab Bullet flushed a bird from a patch of cattails and it flew across an open pasture toward a little creek. The rooster went down at my shot but it quickly jumped up and disappeared over a rise with Bullet hot on its tail. I was surprised when after a few minutes she came back without it. When I went to investigate, there didn’t seem to be any place the bird could have hidden. True to her name, Bullet was fast and I doubted the bird could have escaped her by running. I made a quick check of the creek, thinking the bird may have jumped or fallen in. No dice. Then I noticed a badger hole along the bank and when I peered in I could just see the tip of the rooster’s tail sticking out. It took some doing, but I extracted the bird.
Bullet was as fearless a retriever as I’ve ever owned, but she nearly failed me once. I had traveled to Idaho with friends in December for a late-season chukar hunt. A freak storm had covered the Salmon River country south of Grangeville with a foot of snow. The thermometer showed fifteen degrees when we drove through the little town of White Bird, which normally enjoys daytime temperatures above freezing, even in mid-winter. Shelf ice had formed along the river, and the creeks that wander down from the high country were frozen in places.
Side-hilling along a boulder-strewn slope high above the river, I shot a chukar that slid down a steep, icy chute into a narrow creek bottom. Bullet looked down at the bird, took a tentative step forward on the slippery slope and put on the brakes. When I said “Fetch!” she took another step, thought better of it, and dug her toenails in harder. Then I did something I’m not very proud of. I gave her a little push. She skidded down the incline all the way to the bottom.
She quickly rounded up the bird but now she couldn’t claw her way back up the icy slope. Upstream and downstream frozen waterfalls about eight feet high blocked her escape, trapping her in a miniature box canyon. I pondered the predicament, then carefully worked my way to a point directly below the downstream waterfall, laid my gun down and coaxed her to the edge. Teetering on a slab of rock on my tiptoes, I got my hands a foot or so above the ledge she was standing on and took the bird from her. Then I grabbed her collar and yanked. I tried to catch her on the way down, but we ended up in a heap in the creek bottom. I tried to be more careful about where I shot my chukars after that.
A friend and I were jump-shooting mallards on a warm-spring creek one snowy afternoon in late November. It was bitterly cold— about five degrees with a nasty wind—and I was about to call it a day when Bullet rousted a covey of Huns, too far for a shot. They flew in the direction I was headed so I followed. They flushed out of range a second time, and this time didn’t fly as far. When they flushed the third time they were closer and I shot once. It looked like half the covey dropped to the ground. This was before the days of steel shot and I was shooting my standard mallard load, an ounce-and-a- quarter of copper-plated sixes. The wind must have whipped the shot string through the covey in lethal fashion. Only two of the birds were dead and it took Bullet ten minutes to round up the others. My partner had heard me shoot once and was astounded when I pulled five Huns from my coat back at the truck. I wasn’t proud of decimating a covey with one lucky shot. I’ve killed two Huns with a single shot on several occasions, but never more than that. Knocking down five was just one of those strange happenings afield.