One Nation, Under God
One Nation, Under God
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I saw few other hunters this season. But it appears I’m in the minority. Apparently there were so many hunters from Washington up on Frenchman Creek this fall that even they were complaining about all the hunters from that state. In most places with good hunting the locals seldom embrace the non-resident hunters. We’re very possessive about our favorite haunts and like to keep them to ourselves. In Phillips County where I live it’s a bit more extreme. It’s not just the sight of out-of-state hunt...
A recent notice from the Phillips County Sheriff’s Department advised residents not to call the department about a hitchhiker near Malta unless he wandered into traffic. Apparently the mere sight of the hitchhiker had been enough to prompt folks to call to the cops. How times have changed. Hitchhiking didn’t used to draw that kind of attention. Not so many years ago it was an accepted mode of travel, and my favorite. There was something wonderful and freeing about it. You just couldn’t be in a...
In the end, and that end was a long time in coming, the bird I’d sought wasn’t so special after all. Two and a half months into the hunting season I had little to show for my efforts. The birds were scarce or not there at all. I’d shot a few and missed a few more. Long ago I’d quit worrying about killing my limit. We ate well on a bird a day, but now even that meager a goal had become hard to accomplish. Most days I came home with an empty bag. And while it was pleasurable enough simply to be ou...
My father certainly didn’t hunt as much as I do, but from the time I was 9 or 10 years old he always made sure to include me when he did go hunting. One trip we took every fall was to his cousin’s farm in Illinois where we’d stay in an old camp trailer out back behind the barn. Dad would pick me up early from school on a Friday, and I’d settle into the backseat with our beagle Patches while he and Mom’s cousin Carlton, who was like an uncle to me, sat up front telling stories and smoking c...
My dog Ace is the middle child. Seldom the center of attention, Ace is quite comfortable blending into the background. Except when he barks. And he barks a lot. He barks in the morning when I let him out. He barks when I feed him. He barks at anyone or anything that walks past his yard in Malta. He barks when he’s riding in his kennel in the back of the truck and I turn onto a gravel road. He barks when we drive through town on the return from hunting. He barks when we’re out hunting and I sto...
The season has been slow. I’ve only shot a handful of birds since the Sept. 1. opener. It isn’t for a lack of trying. More days than not I’m hunting, so often in fact that I’ve quit telling people I’m hunting and instead say I’m just running the dogs. The birds simply aren’t there. All my favorite places have been busts, but I’m too old to find new favorite places, so I hunt them anyway. I’d heard there were birds around the grain fields, but my preference is wilder country with sagebrush an...
I hadn’t hunted antelope in quite a few years and I missed it. I missed stalking them on the open prairie. I missed eating them. I even missed crawling through cactus to get within range. So when the antelope tag arrived in the mail last August I was elated. I decided then to take the time off from hunting birds until I filled that tag. Unfortunately, antelope season and pheasant season open on the same day, and given a choice, I’ll always go with the birds. After four days chasing roosters, how...
Every hunting season is different. This one exceptionally so. Drought, heat, and an infestation of grasshoppers guaranteed it. Since the upland bird season opened in September, I’ve been out more days than not. A lack of birds in my favorite haunts hasn’t kept me home. There’s still plenty to see. I was looking at pictures on my phone yesterday and a shot taken Sept. 1 popped up. Typically the pictures I take on the day of the opener are of my dogs and a dead grouse or two. This was a pictu...
Rare is the town that fails to make a list of the top ten places to do whatever: retire, ski, fish, buy an over-priced condo. As hard as I look, however, I can’t find Malta included anywhere. It even missed a recent list of the best places to retire in Montana that included Jordan. Really. Jordan with a population of 400, a dusty little prairie burg sitting on the banks of Dog Creek, was considered a better place to retire than Malta. I suppose that’s a good thing. We’ve got enough old peopl...
We hear all too often that if something is allowed to proceed, it will forever change life as we know it. It’s rarely true, but a lot of folks feed on fear and nonsense. Take the United Property Owners of Montana for instance. An organization supposedly put together to protect property rights, UPOM is on the fight with the American Prairie Reserve over that group’s plans to raise bison and change a few BLM grazing allotments. UPOM apparently has no other concerns at the moment but to put an end...
My wife and I have a new passion. It involves physical exertion, lots of teamwork, and kneepads. Sometimes it gets loud. We're mixing our own concrete and pouring a patio, one 32-inch square at a time. We finished two squares last week and only have 37 more to go. Because it's hunting season and I made a prior commitment to my dogs, we only get passionate in the afternoons. Once I return from the morning hunt, however, Barb and I get frisky. She tells me what to do. I tell her that doesn't...
I’d pretty much given up big game hunting and turned all my attention to birds. There were a number of reasons. I could shoot something every day for one. And if I was successful it didn’t take days to pack out the meat for another. But this season is different. Blame the drought or the heat or a combination of the two, but hunting birds lately is starting to feel more like an elk hunt. Over the first three days of the season, I saw one grouse and he appeared to passing through. I’m hunti...
There are places I’ll go this fall that I never see any other time of year ‑- small, intimate spots hidden from view, hard to reach, with little reason to be there unless you’re hunting or gathering cows. Some are places I’ve killed a bird or two. Others are places I always water the dogs, where the steep banks along the creek have sloughed off providing easy access to the slow-moving flow. There are a couple of ancient automobiles, abandoned on the prairie decades ago, that I always visit i...
I always get a feeling of melancholy this time of year. When I was young it was brought on by the realization that school was about to start again, that the endless days of summer were not so endless after all. Now it’s brought on by those necessary seasonal chores summer’s passing requires, one in particular. We pulled the pontoon boat out of the water last week. We’re not done fishing yet, but we have another boat for that and it’s kept in the garage when we’re not there. The pontoon stays in...
I’m always amazed when celebrities and politicians are forced to step down after a past indiscretion comes to light. Often it’s simply an inappropriate comment caught on tape that spells the end. Mike Richards, the newly named host of Jeopardy!, comes to mind. Shortly after being named to fill the shoes of the late Alex Trebek, it was discovered that Richards made demeaning comments about women and homeless during a podcast seven years ago. Fortunately, I’m technically challenged. I don’t...
I usually grow a big garden -- corn, potatoes, peas, beans, squash, and the like. This year I didn’t. So little rain fell in April and May that it seemed a good idea to skip gardening, and concentrate on fishing instead. I did plant a row of tomatoes and peppers, and I’m growing some pole beans, but that’s it. I just didn’t want to fight the drought. Instead I gave in. My yard dried out and yellowed a month ago. There’s no grass to mow, but I still knock down the weeds every couple of weeks. Wh...
Years ago, while living in Bozeman, I suggested that people who didn’t farm or ranch should live in town. I even recommended folks looking to move to Montana check out existing housing in the small towns scattered across the state where infrastructure is already in place. This was years before the onslaught of home fixer-upper shows on HGTV, and decades before anyone ever thought about working remotely. Still, it seemed a good way to slow down sprawl, protect agricultural land, and revitalize r...
It was 50 years ago this month that I first fished the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I was working for an outfitter in Cooke City and had been asked to accompany an elderly couple into the canyon and tend the horses. I don’t remember how the fishing was but I suspect it was good, good enough that I soon began making the trip on my own on foot. In the ensuing half century I rarely went a summer without at least one trip into the canyon. The cutthroat were plentiful and 40-fish days were common...
I wonder what’s next? First it was disease, then drought. Now we’re dealing with wildfires and an infestation of grasshoppers. Winter can’t arrive too soon. Or can it? It snowed Sept. 9, 1970 in the Beartooth Mountains. Early snow isn’t unusual there, but this was a dump, more than a foot of wet, heavy snow. We were in the process of setting up a hunting camp at Granite Lake and the string of horses we’d left there in a pole corral escaped and disappeared during the blizzard. The wrangler...
In 1985 I left a lucrative career in the construction industry for a newspaper job. It wasn’t for the money. In fact it was more than 10 years before I again began making the hourly construction wages I had given up. But I found the work interesting enough to make a career out of it, and there were the perks, free coffee among them. I also had the great pleasure to work with a number of talented photographers along the way. And while I never made enough money in the newspaper business to a...
Since hot weather is apparently here to stay, I’ve decided to embrace it. I have little choice. There’s no escape. While I can hide inside, the relief is only temporary, and if I move any farther north, I’ll have to learn to speak Canadian. Dressing -- or more accurately undressing – for the heat is of upmost importance. I haven’t worn long pants in weeks, and socks are even too much most days. It seems only a short time ago that I was dressing for winter, pulling on long underwear as soon as I...
Years ago I came west to escape the heat. Either that or I was headin’ down the highway lookin’ for adventure. Whatever the reason, I found both cooler weather and excitement in Montana. I got a job in Cooke City working for an outfitter. Riding and packing horses in the Beartooth Mountains provided plenty of adventure, and the high–elevation climate of Cooke was a delight. It seldom topped 80 degrees. I’d grown up in southern Indiana where the summer nights were sweltering, and we didn’t have a...
You know it’s summer in Yellowstone Park when the bison start goring the visitors. A 30-year-old woman suffered what the park is calling “significant” injuries recently following an “encounter” with a bison on a hiking trail near Yellowstone Lake. It’s a relatively common occurrence. Last summer in separate encounters with bison in the park a 72-year-old woman was gored, another woman was knocked to the ground, and a nine-year-old girl was tossed in the air. All were injured but survived. F...
I like to fish. A lot. But even though fishing is best this time of year, I can’t help but think it’s only a little more than two months until hunting season begins. And I really like to hunt. It seems only a short time ago that hunting season ended and seven months of waiting began. But the older I get the faster time flies. The once-interminable wait between seasons now hardly offers even enough time to dry my boots before I’m off again. I’m not alone in this. I have friends who are also co...
My father’s been gone for 15 years, and while I can’t say I think about him every day, he’s never far from my thoughts. Among the many things he taught me was how to hunt and fish, two pastimes that consume me for much of the year. He’d be fine with that, but he’d also remind me to call my sister, and go to church. My earliest memories afield go back to a squirrel hunting trip with him when I was still too young to carry a gun. He’d gotten permission to hunt a stand of hardwoods that border...
