That bird wasn't so special after all

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 out on the land with the dogs, the lack of birds began to weigh on me.

I needed a new approach, a new target.

Then he cackled.

I was hunting sharptail grouse on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge near our cabin on Fort Peck Lake. Sharpies are the predominant game bird in the area, but there are also sage grouse, partridge, and pheasants to be found there.

The dogs had flushed a rooster in the same spot a week earlier and I hadn’t gotten a shot. Ditto this time. I was on the wrong side of an olive tree when he took flight and I only caught a glimpse of him through the branches.

But he cackled and I thought I saw a glint in his eye.

This was becoming personal. I would kill that pheasant and that pheasant alone.

A few days later I was back, planted in the middle of the rooster’s previous escape route while the dogs worked the cover. But this time, instead of fleeing the cottonwoods and willows along the lake, when he flushed he sailed through the trees in the opposite direction, cackling or heckling as he flew. It was hard to tell.

Yesterday I returned to the spot I’d seen him last, hoping this time perhaps, he’d charge me and I’d kill him in self defense. The dogs, however, flushed him again and this time I got off a shot, missing him completely, but watching closely where he flew. There was no doubt this was the rooster. While they all bear the same markings, this one had that familiar glint in his eye.

He’d disappeared over a ridge into the next draw and when we got there the dogs quickly picked up scent. The rooster flushed out of the sagebrush and I dropped him with a single shot.

He wasn’t as large as I had thought. His tail feathers weren’t six feet long and his wingspan wasn’t enough to block out the sun.

But it was him, the glint in his eye only now beginning to fade.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]