A Wonderful Fall

I hunted the first 15 days of the season before I took a break, but couldn’t relax on my first day off because I felt like I was missing something.

Now, at the end of November, I still feel the same way, like I’m missing something if I take a day off.

It all goes by so quickly. Big game season ends this weekend. Antelope is already over. Same with sage grouse.

Upland bird runs through the first of the year, and I’ll go out at every opportunity, but it, too, will be over before you know it.

It seems a long time ago that I dropped that first sharptail, a bird my old dog Jem fetched up for me. He’s 12 now and often gets left at home with his older sister Spot.

Ace and Ruth have become the go-to dogs. At the age of seven, Ace made his first retrieve this fall. I thought he had finally turned the corner, but it was apparently a one-time deal. He hasn’t picked up a bird since.

Ruth, on the other hand, has become an aggressive, soft-mouthed retriever. She picks up everything.

I shot a rooster last month that flushed from a creek bottom and dropped out of sight over the bank above me. By the time I climbed the bank, Ace and Ruth were 50 yards out in the sagebrush tracking the wounded bird. About the time I saw them, I spotted the rooster, high-tailing it back towards the creek.

He was magnificent, iridescent colors flashing in the sun, a tail that looked six feet long.

The dogs saw him, too, just as he raced under the barbed wire fence above the creek. I cringed, but they slipped under the bottom strand unscathed.

The cover along the creek was waist high and the dogs disappeared into it. A few moments later I spotted Ace looking puzzled. The bird was gone. Then a wet Ruthie clambered into view, a soaking wet rooster in her mouth.

However, somewhere during the chase, the rooster had lost its tail. He was as blunt-butted as a sharptail.

I can still see him, tail and all, racing through the sage like a roadrunner.

I see a lot of things that were: Jem carrying that first sharptail; Ace with a cactus ball stuck to his foot; a big whitetail buck standing at the edge of the Russian olives; Ruth with her first duck.

It’s been a wonderful fall.

I wish it would never end.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected].