I was looking out my office window in Helena, Montana, watching it snow when the phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Dave, it’s Joe. You aren’t gonna believe this.”
“Believe what? Where are you?”
“I’m on my cell phone. I’m sitting here looking at the Conservation Reserve field we hunted last opening day.”
“Don’t tell me—there are pheasants running all over the place, big old roosters thumbing their beaks at you.”
“Nope. There is no Conservation Reserve field! There’s nothing but white as far as I can see. And there are no pheasants.”
“Whaddaya mean? Some of that grass was chest high and so thick we could hardly get through it. What happened?”
“Uncle Fred says an ice storm flattened it. Then it snowed two feet and the wind blew hard for two days. His power was out for over a week. He figures there are hundreds of dead pheasants under the drifts.”
“Go ahead, break my heart,” I sighed.
Last fall we had stumbled onto pheasant heaven. But the road had been a long and winding one. First we got the bad news from the landowner whose place we’d hoped to hunt on opening weekend. We had called a couple of weeks early to line up permission, only to find we’d been aced out. “Sorry, guys,” he said, “I’m booked solid for the first three days. After that you’re welcome to hunt. If you want to hunt opening weekend next year, call earlier.”
It was time to strike out for uncharted territory … again. When it comes to seeking new hunting spots—something we’ve had to do many times over the years—Joe Elliott and I have developed a “macro-micro” approach. First we touch base with fish and game biologists or other contacts around the state to get an idea of how pheasants are faring in various locales. Once we’ve narrowed the search to a county or two, we hit the road and trust our own eyes and ears to identify good hunting conditions. That’s when we start to employ micro techniques, which tend to be more creative and interesting. These include using the finely tuned antennae that every bird hunter develops to collect useful tidbits of information in sport shops, bars, gas stations, and cafes. The latter is where we got the tip that led us to the place we affectionately came to call “conjugal bliss.”
We were sitting in a small-town cafe in northeastern Montana eating breakfast when the waitress stopped by to refill our coffee cups. You know the type—young, blond, friendly—a pretty, blue-eyed descendant of the Scandinavian farmers who settled the northern plains a century or so ago.
“Are you guys pheasant hunters?” she asked.
“We will be on Saturday, when the season opens,” I replied.
“Lots of birds this year,” she said matter-of-factly.
Our ears perked up. “We just got here and we haven’t had time to look around yet.”
“You know where the Lutheran church is about five miles north of here? My Uncle Fred is hauling grain, and he says the birds are conjugatin’ there every morning.”
Joe gulped his coffee and commenced a coughing spasm.
“Right in front of the church?” I asked.
“They’re conjugatin’ across the road in the grain stubble, next to the shelterbelt,” she said.
The mental image of conjugating pheasants had tickled Joe’s funny bone; he was starting to convulse, like a volcano fixing to blow its top. I kicked him under the table.
“Is your uncle a bird hunter?” I asked.
“Naw, he’s a deacon. You know, he helps the minister pass the plate when folks all conjugate on Sunday.”
I thought Joe was going to wet his pants. He quickly excused himself to go outside and check on the dogs.
“Go out and talk to my uncle about hunting—he’s a mile west of the church,” suggested our Nordic benefactress. “It’s a big white house—mailbox says Peterson on it. He has a lot of land in Conservation Reserve.”
I finished my coffee, left a generous tip and made a beeline for the truck—and the connubial promised land.
Uncle Fred turned out to be an affable sort, especially when we mentioned we’d talked to his niece. He said there’d be a few other hunters around, but most of them would avoid his recently planted Conservation Reserve land.
“Those fields are new and they’re tough walking—an hour in there and you’ll have leg cramps.”
“Leg cramps are okay,” I said, “as long as there are pheasants.”
Daybreak found us on the county road waiting for shooting light. A rooster crowed in one corner of the field and two more answered. We looked at each other and smiled. Joe belled his French Brittany, Rana, and I buckled a beeper collar on my Brittany, Groucho. We knew we’d quickly lose contact with the dogs in the tall grass and weeds without a way to track them. The sun broke over the eastern horizon, casting a rosy glow on the white church steeple across the road. Time to go hunting.
We hadn’t gone far when Groucho’s beeper signaled he was on point. I walked in and bagged my first rooster of the season. Five minutes later Rana’s bell went silent; a hen flushed, followed by a cackling rooster, which Joe dropped in the tall grass. Rana quickly found the bird and brought it to him. The next twenty minutes dissolved into a pleasant blur of dogs pointing, pheasants flushing and the smell of gunpowder on the air.
As is sometimes the case on the first day of the season, we had our three-pheasant limits all too soon. But we’ve learned to savor these occasional bonanzas because we know that later in the season when the roosters are scarcer and wiser we’ll pay in spades for our opening day windfall.
Back at the cafe for lunch, we showered thanks on the lovely Brenda, with whom we were now on a first-name basis. I couldn’t help thinking that if I were twenty years younger—better make it thirty—I could fall in love with more than the Montana prairie and its glorious ring-necked roosters.
On Sunday, in deference to Uncle Fred and the other folks who would be attending services at the little white church, we hunted the far end of the field. This time I uncrated my black Lab, Jenny, who takes special pleasure in burrowing under weedy tangles to boost roosters from the thick stuff. It took a bit longer than the day before, but by the time the good Lutherans had begun to gather we had extracted another limit of pheasants from Uncle Fred’s field. As we were loading the dogs, Brenda drove by in her pickup truck and waved. My watch said 8:50 a.m.
That afternoon we drove forty miles north to a waterfowl management area with a mixture of upland and wetland habitat. Joe walked the grassland in search of sharp-tailed grouse while I sat in the sun on a windy pass between two ponds as teal darted past like rockets. I managed to accumulate an embarrassing collection of empty hulls in the process of bagging three bluewings and a green- wing. Joe straggled back with a couple of sharptails and complaints of birds flushing from the wrong side of the gray-green line of Russian olives a mile distant.
As you will recall from the beginning of this tale, our love affair with Uncle Fred’s Conservation Reserve fields ended sadly. The winter ice storm and subsequent blizzards took a heavy toll on the pheasants throughout the region. But there are always a few survivors to form the nucleus of a new population. With a little help from Mother Nature in the way of mild winters, plus vigorous and sustained conjugation on the part of the pheasants, Joe and I knew they’d eventually return to their former abundance. In the meantime, we’d take our macro-micro show back on the road, antennae tuned to the slightest clues concerning the whereabouts of our favorite game bird.