YOU GO, BIRD! Last season, for the third year in a row, my setters Meadow and Maddie worked a grouse—probably the same super-wily “survivor” bird (as wildlife biologists dub them)—in one of my reliable woodcock coverts near McArthur, Ohio. Last November we were primarily after migrating woodcock, the chief staple of my gunning life in recent years. And once again, that maverick grouse flushed from his favorite spot: a copse of mixed evergreen, dogwood, and sumac fringed with alder. I nearly had a heart attack, so unaccustomed had I become to the sound of a grouse flush. Two months later, in snowy January, a few weeks before the end of Ohio’s grouse season, the Setter Sisters and I went back, full of predatory purpose and righteous indignation, to find that bully bird and even the score.
And we did, more or less. Young Maddie pointed the bird and gave me a clear shot angling right and away. But I didn’t shoot. I could have. My finger was on the trigger, the gun at my shoulder. I had time to shoot. No excuses, no impediments, no sun in my eyes, no annoying whipstick branch in my face. I saw the bird clearly against the white background and leafless cover. I had an unobstructed swing path. My dogs deserved the reward, and so on and so on through the thousand rationalizations, hesitations, and negotiations our frail human spirit is heir to at critical moments.
Long story short: once again that bird flew uninterrupted on its merry way. Second-guessing is a good thing in many areas of our lives; not so in the split-second grouse woods. But truth be told, except for a little embarrassment when the dogs seemed to look at me quizzically, I felt no regrets for wimping out. To smooth over the awkward moment, I wondered aloud to my canine partners whether that bird knew how close it had come to ending its survivor’s streak. That’s when I knew ruffed grouse in my locale had gotten into my head, had become an idea rather than an object. The video loop became reality.
“These moments, memories, mementos, video loops, spots of time— call them what you will—live inside us, and when they take flight in words, they live again.”
Frankly, I can’t always tell whether being so spooked is a good thing or not. I do know that atavism dies hard in those of us who are diehards. Regarding grouse populations in southeastern Ohio, in my particular piece of grousescape in Athens, Morgan, Vinton, and Perry counties, the trend is an irreversible downward spiral. I probably should give up hunting them here and be content with my annual trip to plentiful Michigan or Wisconsin in October, but for some perverse reason I keep at it locally anyway, for the sake of exercise—the dogs’ and mine. Though one possible plan for the coming year is to shoot blank shells in my over-andunders. In the rare instance that we find a grouse, there’ll be all the anticipation, excitement, noise, and hoopla we have normally come to expect, but without a consequent reduction of the precious gene pool. The dogs will get their due by doing what they are bred to do. When the gun goes off and no bird falls, they’ll probably mark it up to their owner’s usual blundering and not hold it against me. I can’t see any losers in that equation.
If that makes grouse hunting less a predatory sport than an aesthetic activity, so be it. (The late Robert F. Jones, who, in Dancers in the Sunset Sky, rejected making hunting a “gallery game,” will turn over in his grave.) But it would be our rough hunters’ equivalent of catch-and-release fly fishing. Ruffed grouse, in my part of the world anyway, are too valuable to be shot at only once. Of course, maybe after five-plus decades of pursuing grouse it’s not really grouse I’m after anymore, but some other more rarefied combination of physical and mental experiences. I like to think that questing after some deeper level of participation is part of the wisdom that comes to us in old age, but who knows whether or not that’s true? One thing is certain about this new dispensation: whether or not a bird is bagged, you can still make a story out of it. The thousands of books and articles written on grouse hunting in the past century suggest that narrative is the chief product of the chase.
It is late March as I write this. At this time a year ago, 7.7 percent of the United States was covered in snow; this year it’s 48.7 percent. This winter’s improbable tenacity has heightened my indoor life. Nothing like snow and sleet ticking against the windows, and sub-freezing temperatures day in and day out, to push attention toward avoiding the present and revisiting the past. Ohio’s grouse season closed nearly two months ago, and during the prolonged and monotonous indoor hours I fed my upland appetite by once again cruising through hundreds of pages of my hand-written shooting journals with their pasted-in photographs, scrawled maps of secret coverts, trophy tail feathers, etc.
I was hunting, but it was hunting in a different register, with a literary rather than a pragmatic goal. Proust had his madeleines to charge his memories; I have my journals and diaries to aid and abet reminiscences, which of course have a way of becoming reality in their own right as well. When I need solace for the empty game bags of the recent past I find it in words. Revisiting the days of former successes and failures fleshes out primal experience, provides a context that helps explain my upland obsession, and puts a linguistic foundation under the relentless video clip in my head.
“Each grouse casts its spell on the sport,” venerable George Bird Evans wrote, “and the dog and gunner reflect this.” These moments, memories, mementos, video loops, spots of time— call them what you will—live inside us, and when they take flight in words, they live again. The story’s the thing. Shooting flying and writing flying create a twinned, linked set of “moments of splendor” (Evans again) that I was fortunate enough to have experienced. As I pass into my seventh decade, I’m sobered by their rarity as much as I cherish their radiance.
Robert DeMott taught at Ohio University from 1969 to 2013. His recent books are Afield: American Writers on Bird Dogs (2010), and Astream: American Writers on Fly Fishing (2012), both from Skyhorse Publishing. He is just completing Fishing Plots, a collection of personal essays on fly fishing.