As a lifelong pheasant hunter I’ve knocked on a lot of doors to ask permission to hunt. Most of the time the response has been a polite yes or no, and maybe a short conversation about the weather. But once in awhile a knock on the door has introduced me to a memorable character, and sometimes it has marked the beginning of a lasting friendship.
Down on the Yellowstone River south of Sidney a man named August and his wife invited me in for coffee and cookies when I asked permission to hunt. Their cozy kitchen had an old-fashioned stove and wonderful smells emanating from the oven. We were on our third cup of coffee and had pretty well covered the state of the world when August’s wife gave him an exasperated look and declared: “August, can’t you see this poor man wants to go hunting?” I was younger then and itching to get after the pheasants, and apparently my body language had begun to show it.
Many years later I read in the paper that August and his wife had passed away and left a substantial sum of money to Montana State University. Obviously, they could have built a McMansion to replace their humble farmhouse, but many farmers and ranchers of August’s generation seemed content to live at the old home place, often the same house where they were born and raised. Their kids and grandkids don’t necessarily share that notion and these days I see houses springing up in the wheat patch that would look right at home in an upscale city suburb. I can’t say that I blame them, but I miss the little old houses on the prairie and the kind, generous people within.
My friends and I sometimes offer to share the game we harvest with landowners who grant us permission to hunt, but they rarely take us up on it. I think sometimes they are just being polite but some of the older folks have childhood memories of living off wild game to get through lean times. Maybe when you grow up poor and don’t have anything to eat but venison and other wild game you begin to develop a fondness for beef and chicken. One rancher told me the story of his wife’s family who had to go hat in hand to the local banker when she was a child to ask for an extension on their loan. They explained they would have to butcher a bull to get them through the winter. The banker, worried about his bottom line, looked at them coldly and said, “You’ll go out and kill a deer to eat but by god you won’t lay a hand on that bull.”
Many years later, after these folks had built a successful cattle operation with an oil well or two thrown in for good measure, they could have bought and sold the flint-hearted banker. But to this day my friend’s wife doesn’t care much for venison.
On several occasions I’ve been invited to hunt pheasants with landowners and their friends or family members and for the most part it has worked out fine. But you never quite know what you’re getting into when you venture afield with strangers. On one memorable hunt my boss and a co-worker and I were guided by a guy named Norbert, a big raw-boned Norwegian farmer with work-calloused hands the size of dinner plates. Norbert was in his seventies when we met him and age had slowed him a bit but he was still a bear of a man. Legend had it he had been a formidable barroom brawler in his younger days, a fact that still earned him respect in the local watering holes.
When it came time for our pheasant hunt my boss jumped in Norbert’s truck, while my pal and co-worker, Mikey, rode with me. After several miles of bouncing down a rutted gravel road Norbert’s truck skidded to a stop in a swirl of dust. Showing remarkable agility for a septuagenarian, Norbert bailed out, racked a shell into the chamber of his old Model 97 Winchester and cut loose at a rooster sprinting down a fencerow.
“Winged him!” yelled Norbert. “Catch him, he’s gittin’ away!” The sight of our boss, Speedy, who liked to lecture us on hunting ethics, racing down the fencerow in pursuit of Norbert’s ground- sluiced pheasant had Mikey and me in stitches. I suppose Mikey’s yelling “Fetch, Speedy, fetch!” wasn’t in our best career interests, but we weren’t exactly on the fast track for promotion anyway.
There was a farmhouse on the other side of the road and the young farmer who came boiling out didn’t look happy. He may have had designs on that particular rooster for his Sunday dinner. Norbert met him head on and began explaining certain facts of life to him, while Speedy sheepishly retrieved Norbert’s ill-gotten bird. We couldn’t hear everything being said since we thought it prudent to stay in our truck and let the locals sort things out for themselves, but we did hear Norbert remind the young farmer that he hadn’t even been a gleam in his mother’s eye when Norbert had been getting shot at on a European battlefield during World War II.
“You’d be speakin’ German right now if it wasn’t for me and my buddies,” declared Norbert, poking a sausage-sized index finger in the man’s chest. The sight of Norbert’s big hands, square jaw, and steely eyes had a calming effect on the young farmer, and with a shrug he turned around and retreated to his farmhouse, shoulders slumped, and muttering to himself.
Mikey and I debated for a time whether Norbert had actually broken any laws, and finally decided he hadn’t. It’s legal to carry an uncased, loaded gun in Montana, as long as there is no shell in the chamber. At the time it was legal to hunt roadside ditches, although that is no longer the case. The land wasn’t posted and permission didn’t seem to be an issue, since Norbert knew everyone in the county, or they knew him. But the whole episode wasn’t a shining example of good hunting ethics. In our defense, we certainly hadn’t seen it coming. We were just along for the ride.
Later that fall I turned into the gravel drive of a Hutterite colony near Great Falls. Hutterites are communal farmers who speak a German dialect as well as English, adhere to a strict dress code, and own all property jointly.
“You must ask Jacob about the hunting,” said a woman clad in traditional dark dress and polka-dot headscarf, pointing to a nearby building. She spoke with a thick German accent. I was wearing sunglasses and as I entered the darkened building it took a moment for the scene to register. I had already blurted out “Where can I find Jacob …” when I noticed the room was completely quiet and that about fifty men sat silently at large dining tables, hatless, heads bowed in prayer. I had the presence of mind to remove my hat and dark glasses and bow my head while they finished praying, but I figured barging in on such a solemn moment didn’t augur well for my hunting prospects.
When their prayers were finished a short, gray-bearded man approached and stared at me sternly through steel-rimmed spectacles. “Vot iss your name?” he asked. I usually introduce myself as “Dave,” but for some reason I said “David.”
“Dafitt. Dot iss a gut bible name,” he said. “You go ahead and hunt dose birds. I hope you get a dussen of ’em.” I thanked Jacob profusely and made a hasty exit. I didn’t shoot “a dussen” of his roosters, but I bagged my limit of three in short order.
Then there was the man in the Missouri River Breaks who had a very large and menacing “No Trespassing” sign at the entrance to his ranch driveway. The sign noted a long list of undesirables who should not darken the man’s doorstep, including salesmen, government parasites, hunters, city slickers, and college pups. I wish I could remember the whole list. This was Missouri River gumbo country, where rainy weather can render the roads impassable in a matter of a few hours.
When my two friends, college pups and city slickers of the first water, slid off a gumbo road into the ditch, they found themselves hopelessly mired not far from the ranch house of the man with the sign. This is lonely country and there was no one else for miles to turn to for help, so my friends had to screw up their courage and knock on the man’s door. To their amazement, David turned out to be a friendly fellow who seemed mildly amused by my friends’ predicament. He pulled them out of the ditch with his tractor and refused their offer of payment.
Down Otter Creek way I met a man named Charles, who lived in a beautiful old log ranch house out in the middle of nowhere. This guy had lots of pheasants in his creek bottom and I couldn’t help but notice the two dozen fat mallards swimming in a nearby beaver pond. Charles was a thoughtful, intelligent man whose wife had passed away and whose children were grown and gone, and he was obviously starved for conversation. A presidential election was close at hand and our discussion naturally turned to politics.
I had driven a long way and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, but Charles wasn’t giving me any clues about which candidate he favored in the election. Most Montana cattle ranchers are politically conservative and lean toward the Republican Party, but with wheat farmers you never can tell. To confound matters further, lots of Montana landowners have varied holdings with cattle, hay, and grain. I did some tap-dancing and seemed to be getting through the political quagmire without causing offense. I breathed a sigh of relief when Charles said, “Sure, you can hunt my birds. I’ve got too darned many of ’em, and I’m afraid they’ll catch a disease and have a die-off. How many can you shoot?”
I said by law I could only shoot three. I stood in one place at the edge of a cattail patch and shot my limit of roosters, then watched while my black Lab flushed a dozen more. I left his place with three roosters and four nice mallards, but Charles seemed genuinely disappointed that I hadn’t reduced his pheasant population to a healthier level. Or maybe he’d been looking forward to a good political argument and was put off by my namby-pamby approach to political debate.
Years ago, before the advent of computers, cell phones, and satellite TV, some country folks did indeed live isolated and simple lives. But anyone who thinks that rural people today are unsophisticated rubes is in for a big surprise—many of the farmers and ranchers I know have college degrees in things like agronomy or range science and all of them have an excellent grasp of economics, commodity prices, and modern agricultural techniques. They are computer-savvy business people who regularly make financial decisions that would give corporate executives pause for thought. Gambling on the weather and deciding when to buy fertilizer, fuel, and machinery, what and when to plant and when to harvest, and when to sell crops, cattle, or other products takes knowledge, experience, and a shrewd sense of timing.
In addition to possessing business acumen, farmers and ranchers also need to be good mechanics, veterinarians, electricians, plumbers, and carpenters. When one of my hunting partners, Buck the Whiner, locked his keys in the truck at the end of a trail a mile from a rancher friend’s house, he commenced a moaning that could have been heard in the nearest town seven miles distant. He morosely pondered his options and had finally settled on throwing a rock through the window when someone wisely suggested, “Wait a minute, let’s see if Jon is around before you do that.”
Jon Bolstad raises Angus cattle and grows wheat and other crops on his ranch near Medicine Lake in northeastern Montana. We found him loading bales not far away and asked him if he had any ideas on getting into Buck’s locked truck. To make a long story short, Jon unraveled a piece of barbed wire and opened Buck’s truck in about ten minutes, and he doesn’t even do that sort of thing for a living. We didn’t ask him where he learned that skill but it did come to light that he’d had some formal training in car body repair as a young man. “When you make your living ranching and the nearest town of any size is thirty miles away,” said Jon, “you learn to fix things and build things or you don’t last long.”
My friend Penny is a country girl, born and raised on a farm in eastern Montana. She is a go-getter, resourceful and smart, a hardworking entrepreneur in a small town where moneymaking opportunities are in short supply. She has assembled a half-dozen or so apartment units with kitchen facilities and a small RV park, and when pheasant season rolls around Penny’s place is humming with activity. Her apartments may be modest by big-city standards, but they are clean, well-stocked with dishes and cooking utensils, comfortable, and reasonably priced.
A few years back she booked some hunters from a Midwestern city for opening week of the pheasant season. “They seemed like honest guys,” she said, “so I didn’t ask for a deposit.” In the small town where Penny resides, people tend to keep their word and no one worries much about locking a house or vehicle. The hunters showed up the night before hunting season, noted the lack of cable TV, and said they wanted to look around a bit before committing to the rental. When Penny pointed out that they’d verbally agreed to rent her apartment unit and she had turned down several parties in the interim, they shrugged. “This ain’t no #@$# Hilton,” snorted one, and away they went.
Of course, there are no available motel rooms within eighty miles of the town in question on the opening weekend of pheasant season, something the city boys had failed to take into account. A few hours later they were back at Penny’s place, apologizing in a most respectful tone of voice. In the meantime, Penny had rented the unit to the next group of hunters who knocked on her door. The city slickers then asked if they could park their vehicles at Penny’s RV park and sleep in their trucks. She agreed, but drove a hard bargain on the price, charging them close to what they would have paid for the apartment rental in the first place. So, of course, to those of us who stay there often, Penny’s place will always be known as “The #@$# Hilton.”
I guess I’ve reached the age where pheasant hunting isn’t just about pheasants anymore—it’s about people and places and being in pheasant country during a beautiful time of year. Getting to know the local folks is a large part of what makes it so much fun. We need to keep in mind that hunters, farmers, and ranchers are all in this thing together—the fate of our wildlife has always hinged on cooperation and goodwill of landowners, and it always will.
So, city slickers, next time you’re out in pheasant country, give a farmer or rancher a big hug. Or on second thought, just shake his hand and give him your heartfelt thanks.