Some of the best bird covers in New Brunswick are old garbage dumps. The word cover, used in the sense of hunting ground, is a variant of covert although there is nothing MI-6ish or Mossad-like about game birds as far as I can tell.
Birds do not go to the dump because they’re thinking that’s the last place I’d look for creatures of natural beauty and untamed grace. Nor do they need to. Given my faculties as a sportsman and the skills of my dog, birds could hide in the foyers of New Brunswick bed-and-breakfasts, in bowls of wax fruit.
Birds go to the dump because—I hate to break this to Friends of the Earth—animals have no aesthetics. Eels congregate in the sludge on the bottom of New York harbor. Trout bite on feather, fur, and tinsel dry flies as ugly as Barbie clothes. To a raccoon a trash can is Paris in May. Rabbits desert the most elaborate nature refuges to visit your messy and unweeded vegetable garden. Wild geese adore golf courses, even the unfashionable public kind. And there is nothing, it seems, more gorgeous and fascinating to a deer than the headlights of an oncoming car.
Considering animal taste, I’m not sure I want to know why birds are attracted to dumps. And considering my own taste—gin slings, madras pants, Ed McBain novels, Petula Clark recordings—I’m not sure I want to know why I’m attracted to bird hunting. But I will try to make sense of the matter.
I’ve been shooting in New Brunswick for a decade. Usually eight or ten of us make an outing in the fall. We are an ordinary lot, halfway through life’s actuarial leach field and moderately well fixed. We’re not likely to be tapped for a Benetton ad.
Some of us are avid hunters and deadly shots, and some of us had a gun last year that didn’t fit and needed a different choke and the safety kept sticking. I was using the wrong size shot and too light a load. I’m beginning to get arthritis in my shoulder. I had a new bifocal prescription. My boots hurt. The sun got in my eyes.
This is not one of those men-go-off-in-the-woods hunting trips full of drink, flatulence, and lewd Hillary Clinton jokes. For one thing, some of us aren’t men. A couple of us aren’t even Republicans. We pack neckties, sports coats, skirts, and makeup (although I don’t think anyone wears all four). There is little of the Cro-Magnon in this crowd. Though there is something about three bottles of wine apiece with dinner and six-egg breakfasts … Did somebody step on a carp? And you’ve heard about Hillary whispering to Bill, “Give me ten inches and hurt me!” So he made love to her twice and appointed David Gergen White House communications director.
Our New Brunswick sojourn is not a wilderness adventure either. We’re no Patagonia-clad apostles of the Rio Summit out getting our faces rubbed in Mother Nature’s leg hairs. And we’re too old to need a thirty-mile hike, a wet bedroll, and a dinner of trail mix and puddle water to make us think life is authentic. If we’d wanted to push human endurance to its limits and face the awesome challenges of the natural elements in their uncivilized state, we could have stayed home with the kids.
No. We spend the first half of the shoot in the deep woods but at a good lodge with an excellent chef. The chef not only cooks six-egg breakfasts and Bordeaux-absorbent dinners but packs delightful lunches for us, for example moose sandwiches, which are much better—also smaller—than they sound.
For the second half of the shoot we drive to the Bay of Fundy and stay at a handsome inn where the sensible innkeepers bring out the old bedspreads and second-string towels so there will be no need to apologize for the mess left by gun cleaning, dog brushing, and male pattern baldness. The innkeepers also let us into their kitchen to cook what we’ve killed. Some of us may not be brilliant shotgunners, but we are all serious game cooks even though I’m not really used to cooking on a commercial gas range and those copper-bottom pans the inn has heat up, I think, too fast and shouldn’t there be some kind of government standards or warning labels or something concerning butter flammability?
What we are hunting in New Brunswick is mainly woodcock, Scolopax minor, sometimes called “bog sucker” or “mud bat”—a chunky, neckless, blunt-winged, mulch-colored bird with a very long beak and a body the size, shape, and heft of a beefsteak tomato. Rereading that sentence I see I have failed to capture in prose the full measure of the woodcock’s physical attractiveness. Probably because it looks like a knee-walking shorebird in urgent need of Jenny Craig. It does have lovely eyes. And a wonderful personality, too, for all I know. Anyway, the woodcock is, in fact, a cousin of the sandpiper and the snipe but makes its home on less expensive real estate.
Woodcock live in the alder patches that occupy, in horizon-knocking profusion, the numberless streambeds and vast marsh bottoms of New Brunswick’s flat, damp topography. Alders are a pulpwood shrub whose branches grow in muddled sprays like bad flower arrangements. Hunting in young alder thickets is like walking through something with a consistency between Jell-O and high hurdles. Old alder thickets, which grow as high as twelve feet, present grim, decaying vaults of face-grabbing, hat-snatching limb tangles. But the alder thickets where the woodcock nest and feed are those, like us, in their middle years. And these have all the bad features of alders young and old plus a greasy mud footing and foliage which, even in late fall, is as dense as salad.
Once such a mess of alders has been entered it becomes impossible to tell the time of day or where you are supposed to be going or from whence you came, and the only thing you know about your direction is it’s not the one your dog is headed in.
Every now and then, deep within an alder patch, you come upon a dump. The overturned cars and abandoned refrigerators are, at least, landmarks. And if you’ve been in the alders long enough, they’re a positive delight to the eye. The old woodsman’s adage about getting lost is “always go uphill.” This is a problem in New Brunswick, which doesn’t have much in the way of uphills; indeed the entire province seems to be on a downhill slope. Anyway, from my own experience, the only thing going uphill when you’re lost does is give you a better view of no place you’ve ever seen before.
The woodcock are in the alders because the soil there is full of earthworms, which is what woodcock eat. The flavor of all birds is influenced by diet. A Canada goose shot in a field of corn is a treat. A Canada goose shot on the fourth green and filled with fertilizer and lawn chemicals is disgusting. Fish-eating ducks taste like fish that have been eaten by ducks. And I’m told “eating crow” is not an empty phrase. Woodcock are delicious. This raises the worrying thought that we should really be hunting and frying night crawlers. They are certainly easier to find and kill. But worm-digging gear is not going to look stylish in an Orvis catalog.
You need a dog to hunt woodcock. Most pointing dogs can be trained to do it, but the breed of choice is the Brittany, a knee-high orange and white canine about as long as he is tall with no tail worth the mention and looking like an English springer spaniel with a better barber and a marathon running hobby.
Brittanys were bred in the eponymous province of France about 150 years ago specifically for woodcock hunting. They have a character that is both remote and excitable—yappy and grave at the same time. Brittanys are very intelligent, whatever that means in a dog. Does a very intelligent dog have a unified theory of table scraps or a good and logical explanation for humping your leg?
What a Brittany has, in fact, is an intense, irrational, foolish, almost human desire to hunt woodcock. He possesses several techniques. He can run into the alder cover and flush a bird that is much too far away. Flushing is what a hunter calls it when a dog scares a bird silly and makes it fly. The bird will then fly in any direction that your gun isn’t pointed. This as opposed to pointing, which is when a dog scares a bird even sillier and makes it sit down. The Brittany can also run into the alder cover and point a bird that is much too far away. When a Brittany points he goes absolutely rigid and still (and does so in a way that makes him look like he’s about to hike a dog football or moon a dog sorority house rather than in that paw up, tail out, King Tut tomb painting posture dogs have in Sports Afield photographs or on place mats from the Ralph Lauren Home Store). The Brittany is wearing a bell around his neck. The idea is to keep track of the dog in the woods by following the noise of the bell. Then, when the dog goes on point, the bell will stop ringing, and you’re supposed to head directly toward the complete silence. You see the problem. Brittanys may be intelligent, but the people who thought up the bell were, to put it bluntly, French.
The Brittany can also do what it’s supposed to do and hunt right in front of you—“working close” as it’s known—in which case he’ll walk over the top of the woodcock leaving you to flush it yourself by almost stepping on the thing, whereupon it will fly straight up in your face with an effect as nightmarish as a remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds starring Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg.
When everything goes exactly right, which is none of the time, the Brittany will go on point someplace where I can see him do it. I’ll “walk up” the woodcock, which will take flight at an obliging distance. The woodcock has powerful breast muscles and is capable of almost vertical ascent. It will rise above the alders beating its wings so fast that its feathers make a loud whistling sound. Then, in a motion called towering, the bird will pause for a moment before flying away. This is when I take my shot. And, assuming that the alders haven’t jammed my hat down over my eyes or knocked the gun out of my hand and assuming that I remembered to load the gun in the first place and that I haven’t stepped on the dog while walking up the bird and gotten myself bitten on the ankle, then—if my hand is steady and my aim is true and nothing blocks the way—I’ll miss.
I regard it as armed shopping, a gentle pastime, if you think about it. Going to the grocery store is what’s bloodthirsty. Consider all the Perdue oven stuffers you’ve bought for dinner over the years. How many of them had any chance of getting away? You mighty nimrod, you—every chicken you stalked, you killed. Whereas for me, there’s hardly a bird that comes before the barrels of my gun that doesn’t get off scot free. Nay, better than free. The bird receives an education about what those orange and white and hairy—and pink and winded and pudgy—things are doing in the woods. I am a university for birds.
Birds, of course, do get shot on these trips, even if not by my gun. And the dog is actually as important to finding dead birds as he is to missing live ones. Woodcock possess almost perfect camouflage, and, while difficult to see when living, they—for some reason—disappear completely into the leaf mold once they’ve been killed. It is hard to imagine what Darwinian benefit there is to an invisible corpse. Though there may be one. If the thing that eats you can’t find you when you’re ready to be eaten, maybe that gourmand will give up on the whole enterprise. It’s a modification of the oyster defense mechanism, which is to look incredibly snotlike at mealtime. Anyway, there are a number of interesting evolutionary questions about woodcock. How’d they lose the beachfront condo? Why would anyone migrate to New Brunswick? And how come they eat worms? Is it a bet or something? According to Guy de la Valdène’s authoritative text on Scolopax minor, Making Game (Clark City Press), the woodcock has lived in North America since the middle Pleistocene, for a million and a half years. But there were no earthworms on this continent until the seventeenth century. They were introduced in potted plants from Europe and Asia. Before 1600 were the woodcock sending out for Chinese? Also, birds are supposed to be direct descendants of dinosaurs. So why aren’t woodcock extinct? My guess is it’s because whatever killed the dinosaurs was wearing new bifocals. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure. Any more than we’ll ever know for sure whether the tyrannosaurus went: PEEP
That dogs are able to find birds, alive or dead, is not surprising. Dogs more or less “see” the world through their olfactory sense. (Therefore what I look like to a dog after a long day in the alders is something I won’t dwell on.) Woodcock—to judge by my dog’s behavior—must smell to a Brittany like coffee in the morning or Arpège at night.
The surprising thing is that hunting dogs don’t leap on the live birds or gobble the dead ones. The whole point of breeding bird dogs is to come up with a pooch who—contrary to every imaginable predator instinct—doesn’t catch his prey. He lets you, with your shotgun, do it for him. (Or not, as the case may be. It is a fact known only to bad shots that dogs smirk).
Suppose you sat a seven-year-old boy on the end of a dock with a fishing pole, and every time the bobber went under you grabbed the rod and landed the fish. Suppose you got the child to put up with this all day and not only put up with it but like it.
V. S. Naipaul, in his history of Trinidad, said (apropos of what I don’t remember and God knows why V. S. Naipaul, of all people, would bring up the subject) that Sir Robert Dudley, circa 1600, illegitimate son of the Earl of Leicester, was noted “for being the first of all that taught a dog to sit in order to catch partridges.” A remarkable man was Bob.
And pointing is only half of what dog breeders have accomplished. The dog also retrieves. Imagine—to put this in terms comprehensible to the lowest common denominator of male readers—you found a Victoria’s Secret model in your front yard, wearing her professional attire, and intensely interested in affection. And suppose you carefully picked her up, being sure not to hug her too tightly or return any intimate caresses, and delivered her to your next-door neighbor, the guy who’s had your Skill Saw since last February and always lets his crabgrass go to seed.
I have no idea what dogs get out of hunting. And, come to think of it, I don’t have much idea what people get out of hunting either.
Partly it’s a social thing. All of us on the trip are good friends, and it’s nice to be off together in a place for which our bosses and offices can never quite figure out the area code. (“Where was that you said you were going? New Zealand? New Orleans? New Guinea? New Jersey?”) But we could go to each other’s houses and turn off the phones and run through the shrubbery in our old clothes, if we wanted.
There’s nature appreciation. But, though New Brunswick has some appealing coastal vistas and some handsome salmon rivers, the province is not a scenic wonder, and the land we hunt is hardly pretty. Still, we do appreciate it. There’s something about being out in nature with a purpose—even if that purpose is only to pester dogs and scare feathered creatures—that makes you pay more attention to the outside world. A hike is such a pointless thing, no matter how wonderful the view. You might love the way your house looks but you wouldn’t just walk around and around in it. When you hunt you have to keep a careful eye on weather, terrain, foliage, and dangerous animals such as me if I happen to be in the cover with you swinging my gun around in every direction trying to get the safety to release. There’s even a religious aspect to detailed examination of the outdoors. The universe, on close inspection, seems hardly to have been an accident. Or, if it is an accident, it’s certainly a complexly ordered one—as if you dropped mushrooms, ham, truffles, raw eggs, melted butter, and a hot skillet on the kitchen floor and wound up with a perfect omelet. That said, alder patches are something God created on a Monday, after a big weekend.
Hunting also produces a good, solid sense of false accomplishment. After a long day of bird getaways and gun bungles, of yelling at dogs and yourself, you really think you’ve done something. You don’t get this feeling from any other recreation. Probably it’s a throwback to the million years or so that man spent thumbing through the large stone pages of the Paleolithic L. L. Bean catalog. The cave paintings of Lascaux, after all, depict bison hunts, not tennis matches.
The fact that my friends and I don’t have to hunt to get food may actually be our reason for hunting. Fun can be defined as “anything you don’t have to do.” Or is that right? You have to eat. And eating is the one sensible (if you’re not counting calories or the fire extinguisher mess from the little problem I had with sautéing) thing that we do on this trip.
Woodcock, like most game meat, is almost fatless and can be cooked as rare as steak without a chicken tartare effect. Woodcock has a slightly liverish flavor, but it is liver to make a Neoplatonist of you. This is the cosmic ideal of liver, liver in the mind of God or, anyway, in the mind of Mom—liver that tastes like your mom thought you should think it tasted.
The only real meat on a woodcock is the breast. When cleaning a woodcock you can split the breast skin with your thumbs and pull the muscle off the carcass. Take this, cut it in half, and roll the halves around in a hot frying pan in good olive oil with a little salt and pepper and maybe a dash of Worcestershire sauce and a sprinkle of rosemary, and you’ve got … something nobody else in the house will touch. It’s ugly as a sea slug and smells like tripe, but it tastes superb. We use the drumsticks as hors d’ oeuvres, a kind of snob’s answer to buffalo wings. Really serious woodcock cooks sauté the “trail,” the intestines, and serve them on toast. We’re not that serious.
We have meals of high-savored woodcock. And we have meals of delicate-tasting ruffed grouse, whose meat is to Kentucky Fried as the fresh-baked baguettes of Provence are to ballpark hot dog rolls. And we have meals of wild duck, the piquant flesh of which bears not the slightest resemblance to the Donald-flavored item that’s bought in stores. Served with all these are steaming heaps of fiddlehead ferns picked from the nearby woods and bowls of piping New Brunswick potatoes, small as golf balls and sweet as pies, and rolls and buns and scones and jiggling plates of wild foxberry jelly and pots, tubs, and buckets of strong drink and desserts aplenty besides.
Here at last is something I really am good at. I can tuck in with the best of them. And I get better every year. I have the new holes punched in my belt tongues and the let-out pants seats to prove it.
When dinner is over we yaw and waddle away from the table and back to our rooms for one more drink or five and to make some truly inventive excuses for our shooting—“I was thinking about my ex-wife and I pulled the trigger too soon”—and to tell each other various bits of highly improbable avian lore. Then we are up again at dawn to hunt.
Ruffed grouse, or partridge as it’s called in New England, Bonasa umbellus, is an airborne special forces commando chicken. It’s about the size of a chicken. It looks like a chicken. It acts like a chicken—scratches, pecks, and does a chicken walk. But it’s decked out in camouflage khakis and browns. And it can fly, which is something a chicken can’t do. (I know because a fighter pilot friend of mine was once in a argument at the officers’ club as to whether chickens couldn’t fly or just didn’t want to. Someone drove to a local chicken farm, bought a chicken, got in an open cockpit biplane, took the biplane to three thousand feet, and tossed the chicken out. To this day there is a large dent in one of the Quonset huts on that air base. But that story’s better after dinner.)
Grouse prefer a more gentlemanly sort of country than woodcock. Grouse like old apple trees on overgrown farmland, brushy edges of conifer forests, and patches of hawthorn shrubs. These last are filled with sinister barbs, but you don’t have to go into them. You can send the dog. Nicer hunting ground does not mean nicer hunting, however. I have been consistently outwitted by ruffed grouse. Not that this is any compliment to the bird’s intelligence. I have been consistently outwitted by my VCR and my tuxedo bow tie. Nonetheless, for an animal with a … well, with a bird brain, the grouse is sagacious. Three of us were hunting a field one afternoon, and the man on the right put up a grouse. Instead of flying away and inviting a shot, the grouse hopped over the man’s head and flew straight for the middle hunter at eye level, thereby keeping either from being able to shoot without hitting the other. Repeating the tactic, the bird darted around the middle hunter and flew at me. And, when the bird got past me, it broke into every-which-way flight maneuvers and reached the woods untouched. A grouse can walk almost as fast as it can fly and will trot away from most encounters, silent and invisible. The bird rarely holds. And grouse droppings, or “chalk,” smell more like grouse than grouse do so you’ll often find your dog has spent ten minutes pointing bird shit.
When the grouse does get up, it flies with a tremendous bass note flutter of wings, a tremolo played on a tuba, a noise so startling that you’re likely to shoot your hat.
As do many game animals, grouse seem to check the calendar. They can be flapping around in scads and passels the day before hunting season opens, and the next morning they’re as rare as intelligent television. The locals in New Brunswick hunt grouse on the ground, waiting until the birds come out on the country roads at dusk to gravel, that is, to swallow the small stones that birds need for their gizzards, to break up food in lieu of chewing. Then the locals blow the heads off the grouse with full-choke twelve-gauge shotguns. It’s very unsporting to shoot a game bird on the ground, and we disdain this manner of hunting utterly. Unless we need the grouse for dinner. Or we’ve had a bad day. Or it’s after 3:00 p.m.
The peculiar thing about grouse is their learning curve. Savvy as they are where they’re hunted, in locales where they’re rarely or never shot, they are sap-green patsies. Some of our usual party went to northern Maine a dozen years ago to hunt grouse at a lodge where most of the customers were after deer, moose, or bear. We found the grouse sitting in rows on tree limbs. Spruce grouse, which are darker and differently marked, are famous for this kind of behavior. Spruce grouse not only look like chickens but are dumb enough to fly to a Sunday dinner and surrender. But these were ruffed grouse and no amount of shouts and dog barks would budge them. We had to throw sticks to make them fly, and, when even this didn’t work and we broke down and shot one off its perch, the next bird in line just shuffled over and took the deceased’s place.
One of our New Brunswick guides, Tom, who is Indian, says that when he was a kid his family was too poor to afford shotgun shells and he used to hunt grouse by sneaking up behind them with a noose on the end of a stick. I wouldn’t believe this from anybody but Tom, who is a chief of one of the local bands of Micmac and a practitioner of traditional medicine and spent a year traveling around the United States on a Ford Foundation grant, comparing tribal religious ceremonies. Tom has a shocking ability to see things in the woods and get up close to them. And he can walk through an alder patch without getting poked in the eye by a stick. Tom is a very convincing man.
Unfortunately, Tom is also a very convincing man when you’re out with him in the far middle of those god-awful gloomy alder thickets and the sun has gone down and you’ve got no idea how to get back to the car and he starts telling you about the Tjno, a giant Indian who turned wild and if you stumble into his territory he’ll catch you and make you work for him. That is, if you’re a woman or a child. “Husbands,” said Tom, “the Tjno eats.” Tjnos are now, I suppose, mostly employed as divorce lawyers.
There are also Pugalatmooj in the woods—little people who taught the Micmac how to make canoes and arrowheads. They sound a bit like leprechauns but more useful and less likely to make fools of themselves appearing on St. Patrick’s Day cards.
Another of our guides, Robert, is a retired RCMP officer and an expert on ducks. He can call ducks, shoot ducks, make duck decoys, name from memory every kind of duck found in North America, and give each kind its Latin moniker. Robert can tell you everything you want to know about ducks except why anyone would ever go hunt them.
The idea of duck hunting is to get up about the time that people who are having fun go to bed and get dressed in dirty flannels, itchy thermal underwear, muddy hip boots, clammy rain ponchos, and various other layers of insulation and waterproofing, then clamber, trudge, wade, paddle, stumble, flounder, and drag yourself miles into a swamp while carrying coolers, shell boxes, lunch buckets, flashlights, hand warmers, Buck knives, camp stoves, toilet paper, a couple of dogs, and forty or fifty imitation ducks, then sit in a wet hole concealed by brush cuttings and pine boughs until it’s dark again and you can go home.
Meanwhile the weather will either be incredibly good, in which case the ducks will be flying in the clear sky thousands of feet above you, or incredibly bad, in which case the ducks will be landing right in front of you but you won’t be able to see them. Not that any actual ducks are required for this activity, and often none are sighted. Sometimes it’s worse when they are. The terrible thing about duck hunting is that everyone you’re with can see you shoot and see what you’re shooting at, and it is almost impossible to come up with a likely excuse for blasting a decoy in half.
Last year I was in Bosnia covering the war there for Rolling Stone. And I was hunkered down in a muddy trench behind a pile of shrubbery and tree branches watching tiny Serbs attack in the distance. “This seems familiar,” I thought. It was, indeed, the very image of duck hunting (although for some reason, this time, the ducks had the guns).
And sure enough, one month later to the day I was hunkered down in a muddy trench behind a pile of shrubbery and tree branches with Robert and my pals. It was pissing down rain. I’d forgotten my pocket flask. Somebody had left the sandwiches in the bottom of the canoe and they’d turned into bread and mayonnaise soup. The glass liner had broken inside the coffee thermos. Everybody was out of cigarettes. And the dog had rolled in something awful. Of ducks, there were none. Not even any bottom-feeding coot, the recipe for which is
Arrange bird on a 1-inch-thick kiln-dried oak plank. Roast in oven for two hours at 350°, basting every 20 minutes with a red wine, olive oil, vinegar, and garlic clove marinade. Throw the coot away and eat the plank.
It is only natural that war and hunting are of a kidney. Hunting has been intimately connected with warfare since the beginning of civilization. And before the beginning of civilization there probably wasn’t a difference. The traditional leisure activity of archers and lancers and knights and such, when not killing people, was to kill other things.
We don’t need hunting in the modern world. It makes the wilderness so primitive. It upsets actresses and sensitive undergraduate types. And, anyway, we can easily bag a cheeseburger out the window of our car. But we do need war. At least I assume we do—to judge by the amount of it that’s going on in the world at any given moment. And it’s my theory that the entire purpose of the annual hunting trip is to make war look, comparatively speaking, like fun.