Upland Autumn

by William G. Tapply

  We got out to look it over. The field rolled down to a stand of poplars that gave way to a screen of evergreens. Off to the right, a hillside thick with brush, briar, and birch rose to a ridge lined with oaks, and behind the cellarhole, the glimmer of a brook wended through a string of alders.

  “Well,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “Looks kinda birdy,” said Dad. “Worth a look-see.”

  By the time we got our shotguns loaded, Duke was pointing in the poplars that rimmed the bottom of the field. Dad shot that grouse. A minute later he dropped another one that rumbled out from a clump of hemlocks. He doubled on a pair of woodcock that helicoptered up from a patch of alders, and then he nailed another grouse that we surprised pecking apples in the corner of the old orchard. In between, half a dozen grouse and at least as many woodcock escaped. I shot at several of them.

  When we got back to our car, Dad emptied his game pocket, picked up one of his grouse, and stroked its crest with his forefinger. “Eureka,” he said softly.

  It had been the best three hours of bird hunting that we could remember.

  “Do you realize,” I said, “that you just went five-for-five?”

  He grinned. “Of course I do.” He reached into the back seat, pulled out our map, drew a circle on it, then arched his eyebrows at me.

  I took the pen and wrote “Five Aces” on the map.

  Hippie House, Stick Farm, John’s Knoll, Arnold’s Picker, Red Bloomers, Lost Eyeglasses, Marilyn Monroe, The Old Hotel. Five Aces, especially. Just reciting their names floods me with half a century’s worth of memories: Dad, of course. Burt Spiller, Gorham Cross, Frank Woolner, Harold Blaisdell, and Corey Ford, the men of my father’s generation who shared their wisdom and their grouse covers with me. Keith, Art, Skip, Tony, Marty, and Jason, bird-hunting partners of my generation. Macko, Bing, Duke, Cider, Bucky, Waldo, Freebie, Burt, and Lilly, bird dogs both mediocre and gifted, all lovable. Points and retrieves, flights of woodcock and broods of grouse, shots made and shots missed.

  I don’t suppose my hunting partners and I will ever find another Five Aces, but we keep looking. We scour our topo maps, drive the back roads, track down rumors. Every year we do manage to come up with a few new grouse covers.

  This past season we found a brood of grouse at the end of a rocky road that crosses over a river and cuts through some woods. We’re calling it Grandma’s House.

  Curse Buster is the little pocket of apple and evergreen where Jason dropped his first grouse after nearly two seasons of shooting and missing.

  And the old pasture where a grouse caught me—literally—with my pants down and my empty shotgun on the ground, and the only thing I could shoot at it were words as it glided brazenly across the open field, we’ve named Expletive Deleted.

  The October after my father died, I piled Burt into my truck and we went hunting for Five Aces. When I finally found the narrow, rutted old dirt roadway, I saw that it had been paved, widened, and straightened and lined with mailboxes. The rocky stream that ran alongside it now flowed through culverts and concrete gutters. Half a dozen more-or-less-identical colonial-style houses had sprung up around a cul-de-sac in the field, and they’d bulldozed the hilltop flat where the old cellarhole had been. More houses were scattered along the new roads that had been cut through the woods.

  I’m glad my father wasn’t with me to see it.

  Chapter 6

  LITTLE RUSSET FELLERS

  Freebie’s tail was a blur as she snuffled and snorted a slow zigzag through the alders. She stopped abruptly, poised with her weight canted precariously forward.

  “We finally got a point over here,” I called to Keith on my right flank.

  The Stick Farm, our morning leg-stretcher, had been empty. John’s Knoll, the sun-drenched slope where a mix of poplar, pine, and apple grew—also empty. Arnold’s Pasture, muck-bottomed and alder-studded, fertilized and trampled by the old farmer’s dairy cows—empty too. We had startled some spawn-minded native brookies from a rocky pool in the little rill that meandered behind the Hippie House. But no woodcock.

  There didn’t seem to be a woodcock in the entire state of Maine.

  I’d been studying reports and talking with biologists, game wardens, and hunters for the previous several years. Everyone agreed that woodcock were in trouble.

  I’d seen the evidence myself, but I’d fooled myself into discounting it. I’d blamed the dog. I figured we’d been looking in the wrong places or mistimed the flights. I didn’t want to believe it. But on this day, the second Saturday of October, usually prime time, I finally believed it. The woods were empty of the lovely little game birds. Woodcock were definitely in trouble.

  I eased myself forward. “Easy, Freeb,” I murmured. “Good girl. Steady, now.” She rolled her eyes back at me.

  I stepped in front of her.

  The round little bird rose with its characteristic twitter: slow motion, angling sharply upward to the top of the alders, pausing there as if it might lose its struggle against gravity, then slanting to its left, quartering away.

  My shotgun had mounted itself, and the bird was a lollipop over the muzzle. An easy shot. A gimme.

  “Bang,” I said.

  The woodcock continued to fly.

  I fired my second verbal barrel: “Bang.” Then I lowered my gun and watched it glide into the alder swamp beyond the field.

  Keith came over. “Did I hear a woodcock get up?”

  “Yep.”

  “About time. Freebie bust it?”

  “Nope. She did good.”

  “You didn’t shoot,” said Keith.

  “Safety stuck,” I lied.

  “I thought I heard you say something,” he said. “Swearing at your gun again, huh?”

  “I gotta do something about that damn safety,” I said.

  “Get a line on the bird?”

  “Nope.”

  He shrugged. “No harm. One woodcock doesn’t make much of a meal. Anyway, I kinda like knowing it’s still out there.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  According to the Seneca Indians, after the Maker finished creating all the creatures of the earth, he looked around and realized he had some leftover parts lying around. There was a small pile of feathers—not big flashy ones, for those had been taken by the glamorous species he had already created, but drab earth-toned shades of gray and brown. There was a head, but the brain was upside down, the ears were misplaced in front of the boggled eyes, and the beak was disproportionately long. The Maker found a chunky little body, stubby legs, and sturdy but graceless wings. It was an ill-matched assortment of parts, but because the Maker hated to waste anything, he put them all together and called it a woodcock.

  The Maker realized he’d shortchanged the little bird in the body parts department, so he compensated by giving the woodcock an extra infusion of courage, stamina, wisdom, and mystery.

  Ornithologists and others who speak Latin call the woodcock Philohela minor, which means “little sun lover.” It’s actually a misnomer. Woodcock travel by night and hunker in dark, boggy places by day (although those of us who hunt them are never surprised by where we find them). Observers who saw them poking their long beaks into the ground in search of worms, their main nourishment, called them “bog suckers” and “mud snipe.” They’ve been called “Labrador twisters” and “mud bats” because of their erratic flight, and “night partridges” because of their nocturnal ways.

  Their most common nickname is “timberdoodle,” which perfectly captures the personality of the little bird. “Doodle” derives from a German word meaning “fool” or “simpleton,” hence “doodlebug.” Woodcock, in fact, look like big insects, and they behave like pranksters. “Doodle” also means “divining rod,” which conjures up the image of a small bird poking its long beak into the wet earth.

  Frank Woolner suggested “whistledoodle,” an apt nickname that recognizes the distinctive sound of a flushing woodcock. As far as I know, however, “whistledoodle�
�� hasn’t stuck.

  My old friend Burton L. Spiller affectionately called them “little russet fellers.” I always liked that.

  Sometime around the middle of March, the little russet fellers return home to New England from their winter sojourns in places as far south as Louisiana. They’ve been flying northward for several weeks, for thousands of miles, impelled by—by what? By the changing angle of the sun? By the sniff of warming air? By a new moon phase? By the northward shift of prevailing winds? By Nature’s most powerful urge of all, the instinct to procreate?

  It’s a combination of all of these things, no doubt, fine-tuned over countless generations and firmly embedded in woodcock DNA to assure the survival of their species.

  One thing is certain: The family urge is upon them. They fly by night, rest by day, and feed hardly at all, beating relentlessly northward to the precise field or hillside where they were born. Their hormones fuel their single-minded purpose. The males stake out their territory, and the females wait nearby to be courted. It’s called the “singing ground.”

  Biologists have yet to find a more reliable method for taking their annual American woodcock census than by counting the birds they hear singing in the evenings during their mating season and comparing the numbers with those of previous years.

  The comparisons haven’t been positive for a long time.

  For me, spying on courting woodcock has always been a springtime ritual. As much as cutting pussy willows, watching the ice break up in my pond, spotting my first robin, seeing my first mayfly, or casting to my season’s first trout, hearing my year’s first woodcock song marks the certain end of a long New England winter.

  The American woodcock is a peculiar, private, funny-looking, and altogether lovable little bird. Aside from a small breed of peculiar, private, funny-looking, and generally lovable sportsmen who hunt them with pointing dogs and double-barreled shotguns, few people are aware of the woodcock or would recognize one if they saw it.

  Those of us who have made the woodcock’s acquaintance find them elusive, mysterious, admirable, and altogether lovable. We worry about them, for their populations have been declining steadily for more than 40 years. Their habitat is disappearing steadily, it’s as simple (and complicated) as that, and there is no reason to think they will recover. We still hunt them in the fall, because we know we are the least of their problems, and because hunting them teaches us to understand, admire, and love them.

  Some of us might sometimes choose not to shoot them. But we still love to hunt them with good pointing dogs.

  And we seek them out in March, when they return from their wintering grounds, so that we can celebrate the arrival of springtime with them.

  I pick a cool March evening after a warm day, that delicious time of year when old snow still huddles in dirty patches under the evergreens but the fields lie brown and bare and the earth is soft and the brooks run full with snowmelt. I hunker at the edge of a winter-flattened meadow facing the pewter-and-pink western horizon, not far from my house in southwestern New Hampshire, and I watch the light fade from the sky. I know it will start about the time the evening’s first star winks on.

  No matter how expectant I am, the sudden buzz always startles me, both by its proximity and by its harshness. It sounds like the scrape of a thumbnail across the teeth of a metal comb. It is, technically, a song, but it’s hardly melodious. It’s called, inexplicably, a “peent.”

  The little bird struts self-importantly on the bare ground not 20 feet from where I crouch. His chest is inflated and his long beak jabs rhythmically at the ground. He swaggers and bobs back and forth like a wind-up toy, buzzing like a summertime cicada. In fact, a woodcock looks like a large, boggle-eyed insect.

  Abruptly he flushes. With a musical whistle of wings, he angles across the field. Then he begins to spiral up into the pale evening sky. He rises higher and higher until he disappears from sight, although I can still hear his distant, muted twitter.

  A moment later he reappears, zigzagging and parachuting back to earth like an autumn leaf on a soft breeze. As he descends, he utters a different tone, a liquid kissing note. He lands beside me, almost precisely at the spot where I first spotted him. He peents, preens, struts, then flushes again, full of heedless hot-blooded passion. He repeats his elaborate, intensely self-absorbed dance several times while the light fades from the sky and the night grows chilly.

  Soon it is full dark. The performance has ended. I stand, gaze up for a moment at the star-filled evening sky, then walk back out of the woods. The air still feels winter-cold. But I am warmed by the certain knowledge that my woodcock have returned for one more season, at least, and spring has finally come to New England.

  Chapter 7

  CAMP TIMBERDOODLE

  When Kenny called to fine-tune our plans before last October’s Annual Camp Timberdoodle Partridge and Woodcock Extravaganza, he told me he was bringing along a friend, if that was okay by me. “He seems like a good kid,” Kenny said. “Young guy name of Josh, just moved up from Delaware, of all places. Full of piss and vinegar. He’s all excited. Passionate about bird hunting, the way we used to be.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said. “I’m still pretty passionate.”

  “Lately,” Kenny said, “my passion seems to come more from remembering how it used to be in the good old days, rather than actually looking forward to it. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Memory, not anticipation. I think we dwell too damn much on the good old days.”

  “This kid, Josh,” said Kenny, “he doesn’t have any good old days to dwell on. No old days of any description, good or bad. No memories. Nothing but anticipation.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’d be nice if we could give him some memories. Grouse and woodcock need more passionate young friends. The main question is, does he snore?”

  “How the hell would I know?” said Kenny.

  Camp Timberdoodle sits on the banks of Arnold’s Pond up in the northwestern corner of New Hampshire where, on a road atlas, there are no roads. You won’t find Arnold’s Pond on your atlas, either. It’s just a dammed-up section of a small trout stream that eventually joins a river that wanders south and east into Maine. Kenny’s father, Arnold, built the dam to hold trout and attract waterfowl. You can still find the ruins of the old man’s duck blind on the point of land near the foot of the pond.

  Kenny’s sister got Camp Timberdoodle when Arnold died, which Kenny says was the old man’s perverted idea of a joke, and even though his sister lives in Seattle and hasn’t been east since the funeral, never mind the fact that she doesn’t hunt, she refuses to sell the place to Kenny. He says she’s just like his old man. Loves to bust his balls.

  Every year, Kenny has to ask her permission to use the place for our annual October weekend. Groveling, he calls it. Every year he expects her to turn him down, and then he ends up feeling unnaturally grateful to her when she says okay.

  Kenny, Ike, and I have been going to Camp Timberdoodle for 20 years over whatever weekend in October falls closest to the 19th, the date that, according to Kenny, marks the peak of the woodcock migration in northern New Hampshire. Kenny’s camp is in the middle of what we believe to be the best grouse and woodcock hunting left in all of New England, such as it is, which, of course, isn’t anything like the good old days.

  Camp Timberdoodle is your basic bird-hunting camp: woodstove, kerosene lamps, arm-powered water pump, two-holer out back. There’s a small kitchen, a big living room, and one bedroom, where Kenny always sleeps. He claims he’s earned that privilege because he’s the one who has to grovel before his sister every year. The rest of us unroll sleeping bags on the living room floor with whatever dogs we’ve brought along and take turns yelling at each other to stop snoring.

  Kenny, Ike, and Jenny, Ike’s new setter pup, along with a young guy who looked disconcertingly like Brad Pitt—Josh, I assumed—were on the screen porch drinking coffee and watching some mergansers on Arnold’s Pond w
hen I got there. Kenny made a show of looking at his watch and said, “About time.” Ike shook my hand without bothering to stand up. Jenny pushed herself to her feet and went over to Burt, my Brittany, so they could sniff each other’s privates.

  The young guy stood up and held out his hand. “I’m Josh,” he said. “It’s great to meet you.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Do you snore?”

  He smiled uncertainly. “I don’t think so.”

  I kept Burt at heel as the six of us—four men and two dogs—strolled down the long sloping meadow to the alder-rimmed brook. The hillside on the other side of the brook was awash in sepia and burnt umber, the colors of October in northern New Hampshire. Overhead, the midday sun burned thin and yellow through a layer of lacy clouds. There was a pleasant nip to the air; chilly, but not cold. It smelled of frost, mud, and dead milkweed.

  We planned to split the brook. Kenny and Ike headed for the far side with young Jenny. Josh, Burt, and I would take this side.

  While we waited for the others to cross the brook, Josh told me that he and his bride had recently moved up from Delaware, where he’d hunted stocked pheasants and wild ducks. Loved all kinds of bird hunting, he said. He carved decoys, devoured sporting books and magazines, read everything Burton L. Spiller had ever written. He’d met Kenny at a Ducks Unlimited meeting that summer.

  He was, he said, “totally psyched” to hunt grouse and woodcock.

  “Burt’s pretty psyched himself,” I said. “He’s going to go charging right down to the corner of the stonewall down there. He knows there are two grouse there. Problem is, the day’s first cover, he’s all crazy and will probably bust ’em wild.”