The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  “You are snipe,” I say, addressing—well, them, I suppose. “Where’ve you boys been?”

  Two more whiz in and out of the image, too quickly to follow, two more of my favorite of all game birds. Habitat changes around here so much from year to year, with the great fluctuations in water level from the dam, that this marsh, which was full of snipe three years ago, has shown none at all so far this year. What snipe hunting I’ve found has been in temporarily puddled fields, after rains, and in a smaller marsh.

  “I thought you’d never come,” I say. “Moon!” I open the car door. “Moon, let’s go.” My heartiness is a little false, for snipe are my favorite bird, not Moon’s. He’ll flush them, if he must, but apparently they’re distasteful to him, and when I manage to shoot one, he generally refuses even to pick it up, much less retrieve it for me.

  Manage to shoot one? Last year, on the first day I hunted snipe, I shot 16 shells before I hit my first. That third pheasant can wait there in the hole with the other aces.

  Remembering the 16 straight misses, I stuff my pockets with shells—brush loads still for the first shot but, with splendid consistency, high-brass 7½s for the second, fullchoke shot. I won’t use them on a big bird, like a pheasant; I will on a tiny bird, like a snipe. The snipe goes fast, and by the second shot you need all the range you can get.

  I should have hip boots now. Go back and get them? Nuts. Get muddy.

  Down we go, Moon with a certain silly enthusiasm for the muskrats he smells and may suppose are now to be our quarry. I see that the marsh water is shallow, but the mud under it is always deep—thigh-deep in some places; the only way to go into it is from hummock to hummock of marsh grass. Actually, I will stay out of it if I can, and so I turn along the edge, Moon hunting out in front. A snipe rises over the marsh at my right, too far to shoot at, scolding us anyway: scaip, scaip. Then two more, which let the dog get by them, going up between me and Moon—a chance for a double, in a highly theoretical way, I shoot and miss at the one on the left as he twists low along the edge. He rises, just after the shot, going up in a tight turn, and I shoot again, swinging up with him, and miss again.

  At my first shot, the other snipe—the one I didn’t shoot at—dove, as if hit. But I know he wasn’t; I’ve seen the trick before. I know about where he went in, and I decide not to bother with Moon, who is chasing around in the mud, trying to convince himself that I knocked down a pheasant or something decent like that.

  I wade in myself, mud to ankles, mud to calves, up to the tops of the low boots I’m wearing; no bird? What the hell, mud over the boot tops, and I finally climb a hummock. This puts up my diving snipe, 10 yards further out and scolding, but the hummocks are spaced too far apart in this part of the swamp so there’s no point shooting. I couldn’t recover him and I doubt that Moon would. I let him rise, twist, swoop upwards, and I stand as still as I can balanced on the little mound of grass; I know a trick myself. It works; at the top of his climb the snipe turns and comes streaking back, 40 yards up, directly overhead. I throw up the gun for the fast overhead shot, and miss.

  I splash back to the edge and muck along. A snipe goes up, almost at my feet, and his first swerve coincides with my snap shot—a kind of luck that almost seems like skill. Moon, bounding back, has seen the bird fall and runs to it—smells it, curls his lip and slinks away. He turns his head to watch me bend to pick it up, and as I do, leaps back and tries to take it from me.

  “Moondog.” I say, addressing him severely by his full name. “I’m not your child to punish. I like this bird. Now stop it.”

  We start along again, come to the corner where the marsh dies out, and turn. Moon stops, sight-pointing in a half-hearted way, and a snipe goes up in front of him. This one curves towards some high weeds: I tire and miss, but stay on him as he suddenly straightens and goes winging straight out, rising very little. He is a good 40 yards away by now, but he tumbles when I fire, and falls on open ground. It takes very little to kill a snipe. I pace the distance, going to him, and watch Moon, for Moon picks this one up. Then, when I call to him to bring it, he gradually, perhaps sulkily, lowers his head and spits it out again. He strolls off as if there were nothing there. I scold him as I come up, but not very hard: he looks abashed, and makes a small show of hunting dead in a bare spot about 10 yards from where we both know the snipe is lying I pick up the bird, and tell Moon that he is probably the worst dog that ever lived, but not in an unkind voice for I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.

  This a pleasanter area we are crossing now firm mud, patches of swamp weeds, frequent puddles Moon, loping around aimlessly, blunders into a group of five or six snipe at the far side of a puddle, and I put trying to get a double out of my mind; I try to take my time: pick out an individual, follow him as he glides toward some high reeds and drop him.

  Now we go along, towards the back of the marsh, shooting and missing, hitting just twice. One shot in particular pleases me: a snipe quite high, in full flight coming towards me. I shoot, remembering a phrase I once read: “A shotgun is a paint brush.” I paint the snipe blue, to match the sky, starting my brush stroke just behind him, painting evenly along his body, completing the stroke about three lengths in front where I fire, and follow through. This is a classic shot, a memorable one, so much so that there are just two others I can put with it—one on a faraway pheasant last year, one on a high teal in Chile. The sky is all blue now, for the snipe is painted out of it and falls, almost into my hand.

  It is just 3:55.

  There is magic in this. The end of the legal pheasant hunting day is four o’clock.

  4:00 Just after the pheasant, I kill another snipe, the sixth. He is along the stream, too, and so I follow it, awed at the thought that I might even get a limit on these. But on the next chance, not a hard one, I think too hard, and miss the first shot, as he twists, and the rising one as well.

  We leave the watercourse for a tiny marsh, go back to it (or a branch) through government fields I’ve never crossed before, by strange potholes and unfamiliar willow stands. We flush a woodcock, cousin to the snipe, but shooting him is not permitted here. We turn away in a new direction—snipe and woodcock favor different sorts of cover. And sometime along in there, I walk up two snipe, shoot one very fast, and miss a perplexing but not impossible shot at the other, as he spirals up.

  “There he goes,” I think. “My limit bird.” He flies into the east, where the sky is getting dark; clouds have come to the western horizon and the sun is gone for the day, behind them.

  5:03 In this remnant of perfect habitat, the sky is empty. It is five minutes till sunset, but it is dusk already, when my last snipe does go up, I hear him before I see him. I crouch down, close to the ground, trying to expand the area of light against which he will show up, and he appears now, winging for the upper sky; but I cannot decide to shoot, shouldering my gun in that awkward position. And in another second it is too late, really too late, and I feel as if the last hunter in the world has let the last snipe go without a try.

  I straighten up reluctantly, unload gun, and wonder where I am. Suddenly I am tired, melancholy, and very hungry. I know about which way to go, and start along, calling Moon, only half lost, dragging a little. The hunting is over and home an hour away.

  I think of quail hunting in Louisiana, when we crouched, straining for shots at the final covey, as I did just now for the final snipe.

  I find a little road I recognize, start on it the wrong way, correct myself and turn back along it. A touch of late sun shows now, through a rift, enough to cast a pale shadow in front of me—man with gun—on the sand road.

  We were on an evening march, in some loose company formation, outside of training camp. We were boys.

  I watched our shadows along the tall clay bank at the side of the road. We were too tired to talk, even garrulous Bobby Hirt, who went AWOL later and spent two years, so we heard, in military prison. He was a boy. We all were. But the helmeted shadows, with packs and guns in silhouette, were
the shadows of soldiers—faceless, menacing, expendable. No one shadow different from the other. I could not tell you, for after training we dispersed, going out as infantry replacements, which of those boys, whose misery and defiance and occasional good times I shared for 17 unforgotten weeks, actually were expended. Several, of course, since statistics show what they do of infantry replacements. Statistics are the representation of shadows by numbers.

  My shadow on the sand road is of a different kind. I have come a little way in 19 years, whatever the world has done. I am alone, in a solitary place, as I wish to be, accountable only as I am willing to be held so, therefore no man’s statistic. Melancholy for the moment, but only because I am weary, and coming to the end of this day which, full of remembering, will be itself remembered.

  Moon is beside me, tired now too, throwing his own pale dog-shadow ahead. And the hunter-shadow with him, the pheasant hanging from the hunter’s belt, sniper bulging in the jacket—the image teases me. It is not the soldiers, but some other memory. An image, failing because the sun is failing, the rift closing very slowly. An image of. A hunter like. A dream? Not a dream, but the ghost of a dream, my old, hunter-and-hisdog-at-dusk dream. And the sun goes down, and the ghost with it, and the car is in sight that will carry us home.

  Intelligence

  DATUS PROPER

  During the next week, Trooper and I healed all six feet while I applied my head to the problem. That dog was a great recuperator. From Sunday through Wednesday he slept under the kitchen counter, except when my wife rolled him over and reminded him that he ought to go out and kill some shrubbery. By Thursday he was up in the morning and asking if I was headed for the office or someplace worthwhile. By Saturday he could make a standing long-jump into the rear of the wagon. And by then I was ready for some head-hunting, which was intended to work better than foot-hunting

  I pretended to be in Ireland. Irish birds cope with a paucity of good protective cover, fields grazed bare, and 5 million Irishmen devoted to roast pheasant. Sounds like parts of America in the bad new days. In Ireland my friends had concerned themselves with intelligence, so that is how Trooper and I set about doing it to the recently scarce pheasants of the New World. We could hardly do worse than we had by roaming where a free spirit beckoned.

  By “intelligence,” I do not refer to the brain cells, though Trooper had those, too. (For instance, he had quickly perceived that pheasant tastes good, and nothing would persuade him that it was wrong to have a little chew.) No, by intelligence I mean the kind of information collected by the Department of Dirty Tricks about our opponents overseas. In the easy old days, my approach had been to get hunting permission in several places before the season, then hunt wherever it felt good. It worked when there were lots of birds and few hunters, but not vice versa.

  In Ireland, Ned Maguire would tell me of a conversation with Mrs. Murphy after the Mass. She had heard a cock crowing during a picnic at Roundwood. Right: let’s get the dog and have a look. Sometimes we found what we were looking for. We never found more than one, but chasing it was more fun than shooting an easy limit, and more meritorious. You do not want to shoot many of the clever ones. Inflation depreciates the currency of emotion.

  The Irish gave me a new way of looking at brown trout, gray partridges, and red grouse; and no Irishman was ever heard to suggest that pheasants occupy a lower pedestal than any of these. At the Irish dinner table, the pheasant sits above the salt with the woodcock. An old cock pheasant is, perhaps, the toughest to hunt of the lot.

  It did not hurt that the Irish shared my passion for pointing dogs—which they considered the most practical way to convey bird from hedgerow to table. Trooper was not with me there, but we’d turn loose Ned’s English setter, Paddy’s Irish setter, Bryan’s dropper (pointer-setter cross), or Liam’s shorthair. The dog would take a quick run around all four sides of a field. We’d wait and, if the dog came back, go through the gate to the next field, and the next, and a dozen more. We’d hike five miles while the pointer ran fifty and found the pheasant that someone had told us to look for in one of them. When the point came, the fellow who was not the handler (me) would discover that he could, after all, get through a hedge made for turning dairy bulls. I’d get more scratches than birds. Still, during the season, the rope in the coal shed usually had something hanging from it, aging: a pheasant.

  One cock pheasant.

  Singular Hunting

  The idea is not to look for pheasants, plural and abstract, but pheasant: a singular, particular, concrete cock pheasant. You have to find them one by one, not collectively. Consider it a kind of big-game hunting—not a ridiculous comparison, these days. While pheasants were decreasing, deer were increasing, and now I can usually shoot one for venison in an hour or so. A good buck still takes intelligence, and so does a cock pheasant.

  You might spot one from your car, especially early and late in the days before the season opens. Take binoculars. The cock is not as wary of cars as of people on foot, but he is more shy than he was in 1945 or 1969. You will do better exploiting his tragic flaw: He talks too much. The cackling decreases, but does not cease, as the days get shorter. It goes on even during the late season. Mostly the rooster brags to the neighborhood in early morning and late evening, when hunters are drinking coffee or putting ointment on blisters. He is most likely to blow his cover one-half hour before sunrise. If you are listening, you can wait till the legal shooting time, then go out and amputate his reveille.

  Of course, if you live two hours’ drive from the hunting, arrival before sunrise means getting up early in the morning, or perhaps late at night. You could talk instead to the fellow who lives there: the farmer. He, as you might expect, knows something about musical performances on his acres. He may share the knowledge—and the hunting—with a solitary hunter who looks as if he can be counted on to stay out of standing crops: farmers are extra-wary of hunters who come by the van-load.

  During that Pennsylvania November, one farmer told me that he had heard a cock crowing behind the house the evening before I stepped into the field carelessly, figuring that the bird had moved on, and flushed it within ten feet. Pheasants love dirty tricks. This one found out that I can shoot my old double 12-gauge pretty fast. On the other hand, a repeater might have allowed me to miss five times instead of two, earning some sort of award for nonexploitative use of the environment.

  At least the intelligence was good.

  Where They Aren’t

  In heavily hunted country you may be surprised, on the dawn patrol, to find how many pretty places have no cocks. Trooper and I almost stopped hunting on land that was not posted—my favorite old coverts. In places where hunters could just jump out of their cars and get going, the birds departed early in the season and did not return till it was over. I had no special private access but spent some time knocking on doors. It was much less fun than hunting. I felt like an encyclopedia salesman, but encyclopedia salesmen presumably sell the occasional encyclopedia. I got permission to hunt in the occasional place that had birds.

  When the Pennsylvania season ended, Trooper and I went south of the Mason-Dixon line, into Maryland, and hunted for six more weeks. It was a pattern that we had followed for years. In 1982, however, we found more pheasants south of Pennsylvania for the first time. Maryland had become, in effect, all posted property. A new law made it illegal to hunt except by written permission from the landowner—with high fines and no excuses. It hurt. Then it improved the sport. What impressed me most was the discovery that Mennonite farms had no pheasants even in Maryland. The Mennonites, bless their souls, would sign anybody’s permission slip, and everybody knew it, including the pheasants, which moved out.

  Posted signs meant the end of hunting in the free old way. I’d rather take a trip in back in time than anywhere else, but the change saved hunting near Washington. Most of us hunters thought of the problem as finding birds. The bigger problem was escaping from people.

  Cover

  But there
was still the matter of hunting in the right cover, because cocks were nowhere abundant, and they did not spend all day at the site of their reveille.

  One of the most useful bits of intelligence was that pheasants were no longer in standing corn. Hunters have been slow to cope with this atrocity. Pheasants and corn used to go together like apple pie and cheese, love and marriage, horse and carriage. The biggest losers have been hunters without dogs, who could flush birds from corn more easily than from most other cover. I do not mean that pheasants now dislike corn: they feed on broken ears lying around after harvesting, and before that they run into standing corn when pushed. But they do not dawdle there. The problem seems to be that herbicides have killed off the grass and weeds in “no-till” corn. It was the undergrowth that pheasants used to like, more than the tall stalks. Check a cornfield in the snow now and see how scarce tracks are. Even the mice have left.

  Half a dozen farmers gave me the same story: they had just harvested forty acres of corn (or thirty, or a hundred) and hardly a pheasant had flown out of it. Bobwhites were even more scarce. Pheasants were still around, but less of them, and elsewhere.

  Elsewhere turned out to be big fields—the bigger the better—ungrazed and overgrown. Call it grass, in shorthand. More precisely, it is herbaceous cover: grasses, forbs, legumes, annuals with lots of seeds. Later in the eighties, the Conservation Reserve Program would give us the best of all: fields of tall, stiff grasses that would not mat down even in the winter. But there were some good places even in 1982. Old, unmown hayfields were best.