Amidst the Drummers Desirous

Tympanuchus cupido:

 

I. (THE COCK):

comes the little drummer desirous, comes he to the April grounds, the booming, dancing, scratching ground, the old lek, comes he to boom whoom-ah-whoo-om! a mile through the stilled dawn (what ethereal sound is this across the tallgrass: beast, bird, sky, something dreamed?), comes the boomer, whoom-ah-whoo-om! (like far thunder or deep breath over the round lips of a great empty jug), to the hillock to tymbal the fogged morning, to the cropped rise smoothed around, trampled down, the open knoll; so have his generations done at the crossing of the equinoxes, whoom-ah-whoo-om! the flung call, the muted prairie anciently voiced; to dance too, to boom and jig, a fling of stepping, stamping, strutting, pivoting, legs pantalooned, the capering clawed feet rolling out their sound, the little thumping dance: one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four; comes the cock to cock the neck feathers, rotating, flashing into halos, aureoles of dark light, devils’ horns, erected pinnae (his signature); to hoist the long tail, fan it, spread the festooned delta; he into displayed pomposity, puffed, puffing, inflates jugular sacs, blown tight, orange drumheads; to cock the head and beak, to blow the sacs into whoom-ah-whoo-om! (inflation, exhalation: the sails of a pinnace in full wind, bulging to dump it), booms again; now a second cock to join, engage, and he too blows into vociferance, moves into his antic cavort; challenger levels spine: stamping, trampling, dropping wings to drag the ground, raises orange eyebrows (grotesquerie, gaudery: fat and arched, puffed caterpillars), stomping, charges: they vault, violent volitation, feather wrecking, thudded breasts, beaten wings, juggling of birds, and down again, and challenged again, and again into the pinion-torn air: and so, they all come to dance the ground, to boom whoom-ah-whoo-om! come they the cocks to the parliament of fowls to transact the passage of generation: O birds, nothing more prairied than you

 

II. (THE HEN):

arrives to the concupiscence flaunted, the quickened avian heat, to nonchalant edges of the round boomed and danced, to pull a blade, a bud, to seem to idle in the whooming among the cocks rising; she waits to make selection, tread a territory, be treaded, taking the cock’s cocking, to move in and squat low as if to get under the gambols (Audubon painted this), under the ruckus, the raucousing wing-necks, the bag-necks; she leaves the waited edge, enters the lists (called there), going down low and spread to his nuptial bows, and then their wings almost concealing the passage, and, rising cock, he: whoom-ah-whoo-om! she goes from the round, her circle not the boomed ground but scant dried grasses laid so poorly into a nest (its haphazardness also concealment: harrier arrives, hanging low, and she squats into a lump of dun-mottled immobility, invisibility, a hot-blooded stone); soon she lays; sits over her shelled ones, breaks the spring winds; then: she rises in front of coyote, falls, calls him to her feigned broken wing, rising, calling (coyote following), chunking herself up again and again until the damp canine nostrils lose the nidal scent; hen returns to take the sun-hammered heat, night dew; her mornings like this: head rising, surveying, she leaves the clutch, crouch-walks, head periscoping, sizing up, briskly stepping, halting, moseying, suddenly rising, locking wind under her pinions, and gone; and returning is this: gliding, circling, dropping, crouching, waiting (always this), closing the circumference as if drawing the center to her breast, orb tracking, retracing the arcs, waiting: then she breaks the circle and runs down the radius to the naked eggs, covers them like silt (she the precipitate of prairie): O thatchback, treeless thing, await your parliament pipped

 

III. (THE BROOD):

sod-backed bird sits twenty-two days: then ptchweep, and the rumped parliament speaks, she rises nervous (as a hen), bills eggs around, stares at the holed shell calling, covers the synchrony, hides the pipping, ptchweep! feels under her the fracturing, dithers above; then: squirting from under her, cracked into the prairie light, grassed liberty, they swarm into the bluestem, she calls, retaining the circle, they leap onto her back, tumble of downies, she calls, and from all the calling prairie they know hers and heed it: heading out, returning, assembly, dispersing, returning to her whistle, they leashed to her voice, she holding the circle tight; and: the longwinged-shadow hover; she calls now differently, and, to these notes never heard by them before, they know to squat-freeze and blunt the harrier vision; speckled-back disappearance; then she calls for assembly, they gather, sixteen fuzzes now generated and footed and they follow from the cracked-open nest and strike a slow course away, to walk themselves into wings (one day to use only when necessary as a turtle uses its shell); she calls the bevy, holds the circle of bug eaters, commands the little parliament, calls it to order, and keeps it until full grouseness arrives; O cockettes, learn your whooom-ah-whoo-om!

 

IV. (THE DESCRIPTION):

the adult greater prairie chicken (some call it prairie hen, but then you end up with a prairie hen cock) is a couple of pounds and a foot and a half of gallinaceous bird: that is, its shape is fowl-like (large plump body and small head: a walnut atop a watermelon), its bill stout, short, slightly decurved, its hind toes or spurs elevated on the leg; the male is polygamous, the female’s clutch numerous, the hatchlings downed and ready to leave the nest and peck up their own food immediately; given the ancestry of the bird, a better name is prairie grouse, but settlers tended to interpret the land in terms of edibility; grouseness means completely feathered legs, plumage of barred and mottled browns and grayed whites (a camouflage so good that it and the propensity of the bird to depend on it and take wing only at the last moment can put a hiker’s heart into his throat on a quiet prairie walk); its escape flight is deceptively swift, a lovely pumping and gliding never very high off the prairie floor: a burst of wingbeats, then wings bent to gentle arcs, a sweet volplaning, and another powering of wings; quickly, the bird (its grounded plumpness sleeked for the air) is a mile gone, and this flight is so distinctive that even a novice will recognize it after seeing it once; a pair of long and dangling black neck feathers—the pinnae the male erects on the booming ground—distinguishes the species and gives its other name, pinnated grouse; the bird eats seeds and insects, many of them noxious

 

V. (THE HUNTER):

Whitt says: we were out west of Bazaar, down in Miser’s old field, four of us, Jim Bell, Wilbur Mann, Jesse, and me: the Misers had their corn shocked up, the way we did then, and we all took a shock and worked it around until we could get inside it like a tepee; then, just before dawn, a prairie chicken flew in and landed right on top of the shock Wilbur was in, but he didn’t see it, and we couldn’t shoot at the bird or we’d hit him; I pointed up, but Willy didn’t know what I meant; then I wagged my hands like they were wings, and I pointed up again, and he saw the tail; he laid his gun down and, real slow, reached up for the bird; then he grabbed for the damn chicken, tried to catch it by the legs, and off it went: we fell out of the shocks, laughing at him, and that was the end of that hunt

 

VI. (THE COMMENTARY):

if there is a signature bird of the tall prairie, it is this grouse whose range before the coming of the white man was almost a map of the long grasses; early western explorers only infrequently wrote about prairie grouse, so it seems that its numbers were not large then; a Kansas biologist, Gerald Horak, who has studied the birds in Chase County, believes the grouse declined as bison were driven from the tall prairies because it depends on seasonal grazing to open the grass, and Horak thinks that settlers planting cereal crops helped the bird increase again with a new blend of grains and pastures; item: in July of 1870, two hundred prairie chickens flew right through Cottonwood, and four years later Doctor Cartter, who bought Sam Wood’s house in the Falls, had a competitive grouse shoot: his team won, ninety-two to eighty-seven; item: in 1873 nearly three quarters of a million prairie chickens were shot or netted, trapped, and bludgeoned (usually at night when the birds are slow to flush), and shipped to fine restaurants in the East and Europe, five hundred birds to the massive barrel or, in a boxcar, a couple of thousand gutted and strung up on wires like laundry; the slaughter edged the bird toward extinction (a subspecies, the heath hen of New England, is gone) and several middlewestern states enacted their first-ever game laws; by 1910 the grouse population began to grow again until farmers plowed up more and more grassland during the world wars; under this remorseless cultivation the bird once again declined (an example: from 1912 to 1967 the prairie chicken population in Indiana went from a hundred thousand to extinction); in Kansas, the state with the most prairie grouse today, the bird is most numerous along the eastern front of the Flint Hills where there is a good mix of cultivated grains and permanent grass and where a number of farmers practice crop rotation, strip cropping, contour farming, and no-till plowing; Cassoday, Kansas, three miles south of the Chase line, calls itself the Prairie Chicken Capital of the World, but grouse here must compete harder against overgrazing and annual pasture burning than against hunters (who annually in the state kill fifty thousand prairie chickens); the bird thrives on moderate grazing and fire only every few years: too much of either can do it in, as can too much cultivated land; in other words, this signal bird, so easy to recognize and to anthropomorphize, is an excellent load-indicator, a sign of how much the grass country can bear, an emblem of a diverse and balanced prairie, the requirements of bird aligning with those of men: as goes the prairie chicken, so goes the prairie and its people; now, this question: the whoom-ah-whoo-om!, is it a drumroll for survivors triumphant or for those to be executed: