But a pheasant won’t circle like a rabbit. I learned to walk the corn stubble downhill toward some impediment—a creek, ditch, or an old sheep fence. A flash of red or green, a rustling in the stalks, and when I pressed them they’d cackle skyward, 20 or 30 feet, hang there a microsecond, then blast off horizontal chased by my Remington copper-washed #5s. Or maybe we’d kick them up in uncut alfalfa, preferably next to corn and water in the late afternoon. They’d eat, drink, then fly into the green snarl, safe from foxes, hawks, and owls. But the cover was too thick to run, and even a middlin’ dog worked fine. Doubles were common, even triples every so often.
Pheasant lasagna, pheasant spaghetti, pheasant fried, baked, stewed, pheasant à la king, pheasant à la corn bread, pheasant à la nothing, those cacklers got me through some mighty lean times. I stuck a 27-inch tail feather in my L.L. Bean shooting hat and won a chamber of commerce contest: a half case of 12-bore #4s, which I shot up soon enough.
Rice Field Blind by C.D. Clarke
And then came Minnesota, where I broke down on my way to Alaska and subsequently tarried, waylaid by a long string of redheaded, green-eyed Norwegian girls. A rocky farm at the end of a long mud road; bacon, beans, and kerosene; a drafty three-room shack where you could throw a cat through the cracks in the walls. Pretty soon there was a tribe of young’uns calling me Pa. Forty acres of pasture and field, 80 of slough and woods. After fur prices took a tank, most trappers hung up their Conibears and the beavers multiplied, plugging every ditch, creek, and culvert for 100 miles in any direction. I trapped a few to pay the taxes, a dollar an acre in those days. The rest I let do what beavers do best: making baby beavers and outengineering Ph.D. hydrologists.
A man could hire a machine to build a fine dam with a government-approved culvert overflow, and it would last till the first deluge, maybe. But a beaver could lay a shoestring of mud wattle that would hold back 200 acres of water for years. I never shot Arkansas, but I’d put that Minnesota flooded timber up against anybody’s—early season mallards, teal and wood ducks, and most years midseason wigeons.
Indeed, Minnesota was a bounty beyond casual consideration. I’d chuck stove wood in a pile—clack-clack—and pheasants in the cattails answered back clack for clack. Ruffed grouse roosted in the lovely black spruce around the outhouse, offered extensive commentary on my comings and goings. Had hunger ever overwhelmed ethics, we could’ve had hash browns and yard eggs with grouse and gravy every winter morn.
The warden was a legendary lawman called Big Swede, celebrated in those parts and fondly remembered now that I’m no longer subject to his affections. He was notoriously democratic, writing up everybody and ladling on side-mouth sarcasms till you wished he’d just skip the jawing and get to the paperwork.
I vowed to be a model citizen, and flirted with failure only once and briefly. Me and Leon and Runty were in the Alumacraft on Church Bay, cattails bent over the boat till it looked like a beaver hut. It was howling horizontal snow and the bluebills were decoying to dead bluebills. When we had 18 birds down, I called time. But there was one last bird just begging to be shot, coming into the wind with his feet hanging, a Sears, Roebuck & Company White Powder Wonder aiming for shell-box perfect.
Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Somebody did, but not me. One bird over the limit, I spread a generous cussing all around, evoking the Big Swede, lurking for all we knew. About halfway through the ass-chewing, a bald eagle plunged from nowhere and plucked a bluebill from the ice rind. All hands watched him flap away into the darkening birch and spruce never-never. “You satisfied now, Pinckney?”
I was.
And then there were guinea fowl along the headwaters of the Great Zambezi, across the rotten stone slopes of the blue N’Chindeni Hills. A guinea is striped like pillow ticking, about half the size of a Rio Grande turkey and twice as smart. You could see them moving in the mopane scrub—a flash, a flutter, a flitter—but they never gave you a shot. Press them easy, press them hard, circle around to cut them off: nothing worked, and the hillsides echoed with their derisive cackling the instant we abandoned the chase.
The safari car was a big Toyota diesel parked in the downhill willow-brush shade—no windows, roof, or doors, and the steering wheel was on the wrong side. The PH broke out sandwiches, bottled water, and Plan B. “I say there, bwana,” he ventured. “If you’re still set on birds, we could always try Adrenaline Alley.”
Adrenaline Alley?
“Just a wee bit of the thick stuff alongside the Luangua. But you best watch your step down there, bwana. No telling what we might kick up.”
