Upland Autumn

by William G. Tapply

  We followed the game trails (which were suspiciously littered with spent shotgun shells) through the grass-and-briar course while the dogs quartered ahead of us, and every 50 yards or so they pointed, Lyle kicked, and we shot. The birds came mostly in pairs, they flew straight, and Rick and I rarely missed.

  When we came to the end of the course, Lyle muttered, “Twenty-two, right?”

  “I wasn’t counting,” said Rick.

  “Well, suh, I’m pretty sure we flushed twenty two,” said Lyle. “We got us a couple more somewheres.” He scratched his head for a moment, then nodded. “This way, gentlemen,” he said.

  We followed him to a corner of the course that we had missed. Lyle called over the dogs, and a minute later they were pointing again.

  Two more quail in our pockets.

  The man really knew his quail, I was thinking.

  Back at the truck, Rick and I unloaded our game pockets and laid 19 birds on the ground. Lyle said we’d flushed 24.

  I’d never shot more than five upland birds—a woodcock limit—in one day in my life. That had cost me almost a box of shells. Today I’d shot ten in three hours, and I still had a fistful of shells left from the box I’d dumped into my pockets.

  Sometime around then I figured it out. When I did, I felt stupid and naive.

  While I had been eating the first grits of my life that morning, Lyle was at our course planting the two dozen quail Rick had bought. He tucked the birds’ heads under their wings and rocked them dizzy so they’d stay put, then set them out, a pair under this hummock of grass, another pair in this briar tangle, five under this shrub—the same places, no doubt, where he’d put them out the day before for some other pair of Yankee shotgunners.

  Southern plantation hunting was the private, upscale equivalent of northern put-and-take public pheasant hunting—pen-raised birds and scientifically-managed terrain, all designed for the shooting enjoyment of anyone who could afford it.

  Rick, of course, knew all this, and he’d assumed that I did, too. He knew that we were paying about $7 for every quail that was planted for us, whether or not we shot it. “We could have had chukars or pheasants,” he said, “but they run $10 or $15 apiece. I figured we’d go for more bang for the buck.”

  It was a lot like learning that my father was Santa Claus, and I’d like to report that my disillusionment was so profound that I packed my bags and flew back into the New England winter.

  But I didn’t. I stayed the week and enjoyed the southern cooking, the southern hospitality, and the southern springtime. Seeing the dogs work was a treat and, of course, we did a lot of wingshooting. In the end, my disappointment that the quail weren’t wild was more than offset by the knowledge that shooting dozens of them had no more impact on the fragile natural balance of things than buying a shrink-wrapped chicken in a supermarket.

  Lyle told us that truly wild coveys of quail were so scarce and hard to find in the South these days that not many people hunted them anymore. When I told him that this plantation deal seemed kind of artificial, he shrugged. “In the old days,” he said, “when the birds were wild, the plantation owners grew crops to feed them and cut and burned the fields and woods to make cover for them. They knew where all the coveys were, they only let their friends hunt them, and they made sure enough of them survived to maintain their numbers. It wasn’t all that much different. They raised ’em for hunting back then, too. This here’s what we got for quail hunting nowadays.”

  Here in the Northeast we call them preserves, not plantations, but it’s the same deal. Pheasants, not quail, are the most popular bird, but they can put out chukars, quail, or Hungarian partridge if you want. It doesn’t matter if the birds can survive in our climate. Their life’s purpose is to be shot.

  Once you understand how it works, it’s impossible to conjure up the same stomach-clenching anticipation as when you wake up for a day of real hunting. On the other hand, this fake, designer hunting is not much different from fishing for hatchery-raised trout, and I’ve learned to call that trout fishing.

  I imagine that one day they’ll figure out how to breed domesticated strains of slow-flying ruffed grouse and non-migrating woodcock, hybrid birds that will sit tighter for a pointing dog and are easier to shoot than our clever native varieties. Dumber birds would make good economic sense: better return for investment; greater customer satisfaction.

  They’ve already done that with pen-raised pheasants and quail.

  Call it virtual hunting. It takes only a few minor adjustments in your thinking to call it, simply, hunting.

  Until they come out with that video game, this is the future.

  Chapter 18

  OPENING DAY

  Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.

  —Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 1854

  I went to bed at 10 PM and set my alarm for 2:15. I read for a while before I turned out the light, then I stared at the ceiling, waiting for the alarm to go off. I never sleep the night before Opening Day of duck season.

  We called our secret pond Tranquility, after the book by Col. Harold Sheldon. We’d found it on a topographic map, where it had a different name. We’d followed the lumpy old tote road to Tranquility’s muddy banks in Keith’s 4WD truck and, yes, it was loaded with mallards, woodies, and blacks. They traded back and forth to the swamp over the hill at sunrise and again at dusk.

  We’d had a lot of fun all summer, watching the ducks fly over our pond and anticipating Opening Day. Now it was upon us.

  Tranquility is shallow, weedy, and mud-bottomed, the product of an ancient milldam on a little trout stream in the hills of southwestern Maine. We made countless trips across the pond in Keith’s Old Town canoe to the site we’d chosen for our blind—on the tip of a point on the east bank, so the morning sun would rise behind us, with the head-high cattails at our backs. We loaded the canoe with plywood, 2 x 4s, stainless-steel stakes, and chicken wire, and we sweltered under August skies, up to our hips in water, to cobble our blind together. We paddled the creek channel so many times that its meandering course was imprinted on our brains, and we knew we could find our blind at 4 o’clock on a moonless October morning.

  The streets were dark on the drive to Keith’s house. I felt foolishly virtuous, being up and around while the rest of the world was squandering that magic time. The orange glow from Keith’s kitchen window was a beacon in the night. I tapped softly on the back door, found it unlocked, and went in. The mingled, evocative aromas of frying sausage and perked coffee greeted me.

  I sat at the table and Keith slid a mug of coffee in front of me. Raisin, his old brown Lab, shuffled over and plopped his chin on my knee. I scratched the special place on his forehead. He whimpered and thrashed his tail. He knew it was Opening Day, too.

  We ate two-handed—a fork for stabbing hash browns and sausage, a biscuit for sopping up egg yolk. “Three-duck limit, you know,” mumbled Keith. “Hardly worth it.”

  “That’s how everyone else will figure it,” I said. “They figure, buy a license, federal duck stamp, and state waterfowl stamp, then give up a night’s sleep and a day’s work for a lousy three ducks? It ain’t worth it, they’ll figure, so we’ll have the birds all to ourselves. A three-duck limit sounds good to me.”

  “If they’re flying,” he said, “it’ll be all over in the first 15 minutes.”

  “So?”

  He nodded. “Valid point.”

  The moon had set, and except for a billion stars, the October sky was black when we got to Tranquility. We loaded our decoys, camouflage netting, shotguns, shot-shells, Thermos bottles of coffee, and bags of donuts, then the three of us got into Keith’s canoe, and we paddled across to the blind by starlight. Out of deference to the quiet, we were careful not to thump the gunw
ales with our paddles,. We could hear ducks gabbling softly in the potholes. They were all around us. Raisin whimpered, and I thought I heard Keith whimper, too.

  By the time we got to the blind, the stars had started to blink out and the sky was turning sooty. We shoved the canoe under some bushes, and I began draping the netting around the blind, cutting some cattails and sticking them across the top to break our silhouettes. Raisin sat beside me, scanning the horizon.

  Meanwhile, Keith was in his hip boots setting out the dekes. I looked up when I heard him whistle. A big flock of mallards came skimming over the blind, turned, and splashed into the decoys all around Keith. He quacked at them. They ignored him. Then he laughed, and the birds jumped and flew away.

  We were all set up by 6 o’clock, a half hour before legal shooting. “We probably won’t see any more ducks all day,” Keith said. “Just those dumb ones that didn’t even notice me muckin’ around out there.”

  “They weren’t that dumb,” I said. “They knew it was too early to shoot.”

  Just then about a dozen black ducks materialized in front of us. They dropped into the decoys and noodled around for a while before they paddled off. A pair of wood ducks circled a couple of times but didn’t set in. They sky continued to brighten, and as it did, we saw skeins of ducks passing back and forth over the pond. Some of them tilted toward our decoys, then continued on their way. Others turned for a closer look. A number of them set their wings and skidded in. They stayed long enough to figure out that the decoys were fakes before they wandered away.

  In that half hour before legal shooting, we could have killed several limits apiece. “It’s gonna be too easy,” said Keith. “It’s gonna be over before it starts. All that work for 10 minutes of shooting.”

  “Since when,” I said, “did easy ever bother us?”

  “I got an idea,” he said. “Let’s get our money’s worth. Let’s watch the birds fly for a while before we start shooting.”

  I liked that idea, so that’s what we did. The air was full of ducks: blacks, mallards, woodies, teal, pintails, and redheads. We hunkered in our blind, drank coffee, and watched them fly while the sky brightened and the sun came up behind us and set the autumn foliage across the pond afire.

  Finally Keith said, “We probably ought to shoot our ducks pretty soon.”

  I agreed. We loaded up, and Raisin, who knew what that meant, shivered.

  And that’s when the ducks stopped flying, of course. We sat there until 9:30, watching as the dawn turned into a bluebird October morning, and we never fired a shot. Then we shrugged, collected the decoys, took down the netting, piled everything into the canoe, paddled back across Tranquility, loaded Keith’s truck, and went home.

  We laughed about it. But we agreed that it had been a memorable Opening Day, and when we got to Keith’s house and told his wife about all the ducks we’d seen, she said, “So you don’t need to go hunting, shoot guns, and kill things to have fun, then?”

  “You miss the point, sweetie,” said Keith. “If we hadn’t gone hunting, we wouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

  Chapter 19

  WILD PHEASANTS

  I haven’t even seen a wild pheasant in 20 years, much less shot one. A lot has changed since I was a kid growing up in a little farming community in eastern Massachusetts half a century ago.

  Back then, there were pheasants in every field, oak ridge, swamp, and hedgerow. In the fall, after the cornfields had been cut, ringnecks prowled the brown stubble and jabbed at leftover kernels. In the winter they scuttled into our backyards to peck at the cracked corn and sunflower seeds that spilled from our birdfeeders.

  Toward the end of August, as soon as the chicks had grown their flying feathers, we worked our bird dogs on wild pheasants. It was great pre-season practice for the dogs—not to mention a lot of fun for their handlers—to flush a covey of not-quite-grown pheasants over our setter’s points and then chase down the singles.

  It was also pre-season scouting, of course.

  Everybody hunted wild pheasants in those days. They were our most popular, and most common, game bird, and on Opening Day, which in Massachusetts always fell on a Saturday, all of those fields and swales where we’d worked the dogs on broods of newly fledged pheasants swarmed with hunters.

  My hunting pals and I did not compete with the mobs on Opening Day. We had our own tactic. In the northwest corner of town lay about 400 acres of field and swale—an area that was thick with pheasants, and well-known to local bird hunters. A little knobby hill covered with briar, scrubby oak, and stunted pine rose up in the middle of this expanse of pheasant cover. It looked like a green derby hat sitting on a big brown table.

  We got up in the dark and were hiding on that hilltop a half hour before legal shooting on Opening Day. There we waited. About the time the sun peeked over the horizon, the armies of hunters began their invasion. From our observation site on the knoll, we could watch the dots of blaze-orange caps weave through the waist-high grass where, a month earlier, we’d worked our dogs. Soon we’d begin to hear distant shouts as ringnecks burst out of the fields, and we’d see the muzzle flashes and then hear the time-delayed volleys of shots as the birds flew the gauntlet.

  Many of those pheasants headed straight for our ambush on the knoll. We always got our limits in the first hour or so of Opening Day.

  After Opening Day, the mobs stopped coming, and we hunted pheasants the conventional way, criscrossing the fields with pointing bird dogs, and limits were hard to get.

  Opening Day, I always believed, taught those crafty wild pheasants everything they needed to know about survival. They learned to run, not fly, and when they had to fly, they flaunted their size and speed. They burst up at the unexpected moment, cackling in panic, or derision. They were big birds, and their long tails made them seem twice as big as they were. They accelerated quicker and flew faster than they appeared to, and the tendency was to forget to lead them and shoot off their tails.

  None of the farmers in my town had any problem with a couple of teenaged boys with shotguns prowling through their cornfields and hedgerows. Hunting was considered normal behavior when I was a kid. “Hunt anytime,” those farmers always told us when we asked. “We got loads of pheasants.”

  Everything’s different now. Mostly there are housing developments, condominiums, shopping malls, highway cloverleafs, and golf courses where the meadows, woodlots, and cornfields used to be. One by one, the old farmers yielded to the temptations of real-estate developers, and those who were left posted No Hunting signs around their properties. Sometimes, if you asked politely, they might give you permission to hunt, but most of them no longer trusted people with guns.

  Many of the towns in the part of the world where I grew up have banned hunting entirely.

  There aren’t many wild pheasants left anyway. All those developments make poor pheasant habitat, and housecats, skunks, raccoons, crows, and hawks—creatures that are well-adapted to suburban civilization—prey efficiently on pheasant eggs and newly hatched chicks. It may be coincidence, but I trace the virtual disappearance of wild pheasants in eastern Massachusetts to the explosion in the coyote population over the past 20 or 30 years.

  Today ringneck pheasants remain the most popular quarry for Massachusetts hunters, but the birds are no longer wild. They are raised in pens, and throughout the season they are released into the fifty-odd Wildlife Management Areas (our delightful euphemism for public hunting grounds) across the Commonwealth—the way hatchery trout are stocked in our ponds and streams—for the specific purpose of providing sport for licensed sportsmen.

  Many of these WMAs offer classic pheasant habitat. The Division of Fisheries and Wildlife plants them with corn and millet, and they leave tangly edges and hedgerows. Many of the WMAs are bordered by boggy marshlands and swales, alder and poplar hillsides, and evergreen and oak forests. There’s a science to the creation of pheasant habitat.

  But if you’ve ever hunted wild pheasants, a
WMA won’t fool you. Armies of hunters have beaten permanent paths through the marshes and swales, and they leave empty 12-gauge shotgun shells scattered on the ground like confetti after a parade. There’s always a lot of camaraderie on a WMA. Dogs sniff strange dogs, and hunters on the way out pass along rumors about how many birds were stocked that morning to the guys on the way in. The most important tactic for hunting success at a WMA is to get there early when there’s still a space in the parking lot.

  It’s canned hunting. A WMA feels like an artificial trout pond, where you pay by the pound for the fish you catch. Pen-raised pheasants, like hatchery-raised brook trout, are not creatures of nature. They are not particularly cagey, swift, or smart. They are not survivors. They are raised to be “harvested,” a wonderfully politically correct Fish and Wildlife euphemism that means “killed.”

  It’s easy to shoot these pheasants without guilt. Their abundance, in fact, is directly proportional to the numbers of them that we kill. The more hunters who buy licenses and visit the WMAs, the more birds Fish and Wildlife can afford to raise and release for our hunting pleasure. They take surveys and use the results to lobby for their budgets. Pheasant hunting is politics these days.

  I hunt them because if I want to go hunting for a few afternoon hours the way I used to when I was a kid, a WMA is all I’ve got amid the forests of No Hunting and No Trespassing signs.

  I wouldn’t think of visiting a WMA on a Saturday, but once in a while towards the end of a wet Thursday afternoon in November I find the parking lot at my local WMA empty. Burt and I work the thick edges where any pheasants that survived the morning’s onslaught have likely taken cover. Stocked pheasants don’t like to run the way their wild ancestors used to. They’ll sit for a pointing dog. Burt likes that, and I do, too.