The Milk River originates in Glacier National Park and meanders eastward, partly in Canada and partly in northern Montana, about 700 miles to its confluence with the Missouri River north of Fort Peck Reservoir. On his way west with the Voyage of Discovery in 1805, Meriwether Lewis named the river for its “peculiar whiteness, being about the color of a cup of tea with the admixture of a tablespoonful of milk.” For much of its path the Milk parallels what Montanans call the Hi-Line, the east-west route of U.S. Highway 2 and James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway, now the Burlington-Northern line.
Last October, as Joe Elliott and I drove east on Highway 2 to hunt pheasants on a ranch where we’ve had success over the years, cottonwoods lit the Milk River bottom in shades of gold. East of the railroad town of Havre, once known as Bull Hook Siding, the Hi-Line towns rolled by, little burgs with names like Chinook, Zurich, Harlem, Dodson, Malta, and Saco. The warm sun on our faces, we cruised past grain elevators, gas stations, and small-town cafes. Traffic was light, mostly farmers hauling hay or poking along with their farm machinery. They gave us friendly waves as we pulled around to pass.
That evening we stopped at the ranch headquarters to ask permission to hunt, and the next morning we pulled up to a Conservation Reserve field and uncased our shotguns. The ranch has a combination of grassland and irrigated cropland sown to wheat, alfalfa, and corn, all bisected by several miles of Milk River bottom. Most hunters, given the choice of hunting the open fields or the riverbank tangles, opt for the former; Joe and I were no different. But the pheasant season had been open for a week and hunting pressure had been heavy. Most of the roosters had retreated to the wooded river bottom where they could elude hunters by slipping across the river to safety.
After working the fields for two hours with our Brittanys, Ollie and Gret, we had only one bird each to show for our efforts. We held a brief war council. “Longspur’s Lair?” asked Joe, glancing toward the river bottom.
“I guess it’s time to cowboy up,” I sighed. We’d hunted the gnarly stretch of river bottom we call Longspur’s Lair several times in previous years, and had always seen, or at least heard, roosters there. Walking is tough and shooting even tougher because of a profusion of cottonwood, Russian olive, buffaloberry, hawthorn, and wild rose. It’s the kind of place where a canny rooster can survive to a ripe old age.
We kenneled the Britts and took my black Lab, Jenny, since Longspur’s Lair is a place only a Labrador could love: brushy tangles, a river to swim in, and plenty of pheasant scent. Joe seemed unusually chipper for a man about to enter pheasant hunting purgatory. “The harder the hunting,” he said, “the more fun we’ll have. Let’s flip a coin to see who walks closest to the river.”
I lost the coin toss and had to walk next to the water where the brush is thickest. We hadn’t gone 100 yards when Jenny struck a hot trail and nosed a rooster from a buffaloberry thicket. I dodged to the left for a better look, tripped on a root and banged my knee. The rooster cackled profanities as he sailed away unscathed. Score one for the pheasants.
The next bird got up well ahead of us and made a clean getaway. The third bird wasn’t as lucky. It, too, flushed behind a screen of brush but gave me an opening as it flew over the water. When I pulled the trigger it dropped mid-river with a splash. Jenny hadn’t seen it fall, so I scrambled down the steep bank to a place where I could give her a line. Then I slipped in the gooey shoreline mud and ended up calf-deep in the river. The cold water seeping over the tops of my boots gave me a case of St. Vitus’ dance, and I slipped again and fell on my butt. By now the bird had floated downstream around a bend, so I had to bushwhack down the bank to catch up. Luckily the current is slow in this part of the Milk and the bird hadn’t gone far. Jenny quickly swam out to get the soggy bird.
An hour later, after several more fruitless flushes, a young rooster angled back in Joe’s direction, and he sent it tumbling into a patch of snowberry. We held another war council and decided to leave the field of battle to the remaining ringnecks. We clawed our way out of Longspur’s Lair soaked with sweat and punctured by thorns, but we each had the satisfying heft of a rooster in our hunting vest. Jenny the Lab, her coat caked with mud but still wagging her tail with joy, reluctantly followed.
The next morning we headed south on a gravel road through a checkerboard of sagebrush, golden wheat stubble, and grasslands baked khaki by the sun. Eventually we turned west toward a range of reddish hills, climbed slowly onto a prairie plateau and stopped at a barbed wire gate. When we got out, the pungent aroma of sagebrush filled our nostrils. We opened the gate, drove through and closed it behind us. Public land. Sharptail heaven.
We turned out the Brittanys, grabbed vests, shells, water bottles, and guns, and headed into the sagebrush. Keyed up from the drive, the dogs raced hell-bent toward the horizon while we tooted on our whistles trying to keep them from leaving the country. Far ahead, Ollie screeched to a halt. When I walked up I could see a large bird crouched in the grass in front of him.
While I pondered the situation, six sage grouse took my indecision as their cue to climb skyward. I picked a bird and toppled it into the sage. I could have shot again, but we had come here to hunt sharp- tails. I figured one sage grouse would be enough to let Ollie know I appreciated his staunch point.
Joe followed a fenceline bordering a cut wheat field while I dropped into a chokecherry draw that led down to a small reservoir. When I heard him shoot twice, I looked in his direction to see a dozen sharptails flapping and sailing toward me. They offered a crossing shot as they passed thirty yards ahead of me and twenty yards high. I swung hard, pulled ahead of the nearest bird and slapped the trigger. He slanted down and Ollie soon had him in tow.
Farther down the draw toward the reservoir Ollie pointed tentatively at the edge of the chokecherries. A grouse clucked out of the bushes, offering an easy shot. Three others flushed out of range up ahead. I heard Joe shoot two more times as he worked his way toward us. When we met at the reservoir to let the dogs get a drink and cool off in the water, he was smiling ear to ear. “Gret made two great points,” he said, pulling three sharptails from his vest. “I doubled on the first one.” After a rest we made a wide circle back to the trucks, bagging a sharptail apiece along the way.
That afternoon we visited an abandoned homestead near the Milk River, one of many such places along the Hi-Line slowly crumbling back to the prairie sod. Sadly, each year there are fewer of these dilapidated buildings standing, as they become victims of demolition, fire, or the ravages of time, wind, and weather. Perhaps some landowners view them as eyesores, or decide the land can be put to more profitable use. The farmers who once lived in these structures have long since passed from the scene.
Years ago we named this one “Wagon Wheel” in honor of a wooden-spoked wheel that leans against a weathered wall of the old house. We have often surprised a covey of Huns loafing in the shelter- belt that protects the adjoining farmyard, or a pheasant resting in the tall weeds growing up inside an old corral. I like to think of it as a happy place, where children once played in a sunlit yard and hot apple pies sat cooling on the windowsill. But it just as easily could have been a place of broken dreams, where a struggling family saw their hopes evaporate in a cloud of Depression-era dust. Once I saw a great horned owl resting on the ledge of a glassless window. As I watched, he closed one eye and then the other, as if winking at me; perhaps he knew the story, but he wasn’t about to tell.
As Joe walked the shelterbelt with Gret, I checked out the corral. When Ollie’s bell fell silent near the fence, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. A loose piece of tin on a shed roof twanged in the breeze, heightening the tension. Once I saw a rattlesnake disappear down a badger hole nearby; although October is a little late for rattlesnakes in Montana, on a warm day you never know.
As I approached, Ollie rolled his eyes toward me with a conspiratorial glance. “Whoa,” I said softly, more to steady my nerves than his. I tried peering into the grass. “Got a bird for me?” Like the great horned owl, Ollie knew, but he wasn’t talking.
I took one more step and a rooster pheasant clattered skyward, his plumage glowing bronze in the October sun. For a moment he hung there, suspended against a cobalt sky sprinkled with fleecy clouds, then leveled off and shifted into overdrive. My load of No. 6 caught up with him before he could make good his escape.
As Joe and I sat by the wagon wheel that day sharing our sandwiches with Gret and Ollie, I wondered aloud if the people who once lived here had been pheasant hunters. Pheasants were well established in Montana by the 1930s, and by 1940 the pheasant had become the most popular game bird in the state. I like to think there had been pheasants hanging in the shade to feed a hungry farm family many years before we wandered onto the scene.
New Englanders have coverts like the Old Stone Wall, Alder Jungle, or Drummer’s Log—names that conjure up an image of autumn hardwoods, a Belton setter, and pipe smoke on the breeze. Those are all good things.
Montanans have the Hi-Line, with its abandoned homesteads, Milk River tangles, wind-scrubbed prairie, and immense sky. Those, too, are very good things.