Drumming Logs

Mulak Reader - Drumming Logs

Here’s an essay—a very sentimental essay—that was my first big sale. Outdoor Life used it in their November 1980 issue. Up until Drumming Logs, I had sold things to little quarterlies and house magazines, but never had anything published by one of the majors. And it seemed strange to me that even though I was specializing in short stories, my first big sale was for an essay. From this initial success, I developed a style for the “read piece:” a conversationally-toned story that read like an essay but contained a great deal of useful information.

Drumming Logs

An Essay

          Researchers have devoted a lot of time and energy to the scientific study of the ruffed grouse in recent years, and have produced a surprising quantity of useful information. But no one has yet come up with a convincing answer to the question 'Why do they drum in the fall?'
          No one except me.
          Grouse strut their stuff and fill the autumn woods with their thunder for the same reason that otters slide down mud banks and crows harass owls... For the hell of it. They are celebrating the wonder of existence, and their drumming is a statement to the world at large that there is a ruffed grouse here, and he is alive and damn glad of it. I dare say, there are fall days when I feel like jumping on a log and drumming for all I'm worth, too.
          Instead, I go hunting.
          On an October day, there is nothing in all my being that is quite the celebration of living that is bird hunting. Nothing else comes close. The grouse coverts I hunt are scattered through the four counties at my end of the state. I go there to drum, in my own way, and although my name does not appear on the title deed of any of these places, they are mine as surely as they belong to the animals who live among the stone walls and the songbirds that nest in the thickets. Here, in my own piece of the world, I drive through the pre-dawn gloom and can almost smell the brilliant colors sleeping in the darkness. Do I love this season because I hunt? Or do I love hunting as fervently as I do because it takes place in autumn? I do know for sure that when the sky turns the infinite blue of October I follow behind my bird dogs knowing there is no place on earth I would rather be, and no other thing I would rather be doing than this. That there are fast shots and floating feathers among the golden aspens only lends credence to my reasons for being afield. I return home at sunset, drunk with the fullness of life that the season imparts, knowing that no grouse who spent his day celebrating life on a drumming log is more pleasantly weary than I.
          Grouse hunting comes frighteningly close to being the reason I live. There is no one I must perform better than nor prove anything to... Not even myself. The simple pleasure of just being there is enjoyment enough. Yet, a 'my-sport-is-tougher-then-yours' attitude persists in magazine articles about grouse hunting: "...brambles that tear your clothes and rip your flesh..." and so on. The sport is often made out to sound like something for masochists. Sure, occasionally I get my feet wet, and no one ever denied that some coverts are thicker and some shots tougher than others. But one of the real pleasures of grouse hunting is that you can have a good time without beating yourself to death, and the challenge of the sport is so obvious to anyone who pursues this violent bird that it needs no exaggeration. About the worst thing that has ever happened to me in the woods was to have a sapling snap back and hit me just to the left of my right thigh.
          Each of my coverts has its own name and its own character; I walk the stream at London Basin. In each pool there are a few little brook trout. I have often wondered how they managed to survive the evolutionary process with such brightly colored fins... Electric Fence, where two old Packards and a Plymouth sleep away the years among the hawthorns, their chrome rusted through and their windows gone the way of all things breakable. I can think of worse fates than to be abandoned in a grouse covert, and hope someone will be as considerate of me when my motor finally quits... A huge spreading white oak towers over Grand Oak Orchard. Inexplicably, most of the grouse I've taken here are marked in chocolate rather than black... The untypical covert that is Tripwire, unusual because there is not a single apple tree among the birches and aspens in this overgrown tobacco field... Second Farther Down hides what may be the last chestnut tree. I visit the old monolith and wish it well each time I drum in that covert... Straight-up Orchard has a curse on it, or so it seems. In spite of numerous points and easy chances I have yet to take a grouse from that covert... Year after year, Indian Oven produces far more birds than that little covert could seemingly support, and I've never figured out why... Left Hook, where I've often filled my game pocket with butternuts from the grove above the far alder run. Once, when a wing-tipped woodcock got up between us, John put him down-for-the-count with a swipe of his free hand and gave the covert its name... Little Perriwinkle, with its family of pileated woodpeckers... Four Corners... Barrberry Brook... Darkside... Quailshooter's Swamp... How I treasure these places and the memories they contain.
          As far as grouse country goes, the hills of my native western Massachusetts rate, at best, just a "fair" rating. But if numbers of birds bagged were the sole measure of my enjoyment, I would long ago succumbed to the urgings of those who whisper, "Come to Maine - What grouse shooting!" or "Minnesota has grouse like Massachusetts has starlings!" Thanks, but no thanks. I love my coverts, and their worth to me can never be measured in terms of the numbers of birds they might contain. Each holds a supply of memories living there among the grouse and apple trees. Birds, coverts, memories—Each needs the others to give it complete meaning. Every time I hunt Cathedral, I visit a giant old crab apple tree beyond the overgrown pasture. Duffy made his first point there. If I close my eyes, I can still see him, puppy-cute, although I am frightened by the number of seasons that have passed since I've been without Old Duff. In my mind the scene is unchanged: A flash point, a missed shot, and a single snipped tail feather floating among the shafts of morning sunlight that stream through the apple tree's twisted branches. And I still hear my muttered curses, all the more profane in the cathedral-like atmosphere.
          A grouse hunter's memories are as real as the birds he pursues, and often more meaningful. I can always scare up a lovely memory of Win's first retrieve by hunting the hemlocks along the field at Willie Lay's Orchard. And here's where I found Duffy, deaf as a stone in his last season, on point after I thought he had gotten lost. And a little farther along this slope is where I missed that easy cross shot at the brown grouse with the missing tail feather... Memories: Sweet hurts of dogs now sleeping and missed shots that still echo in my mind. If you happen to be along on the hunt and I pause to retell an incident that happened here a few seasons ago, bear with me, even if you've heard the story before. It's just that I must vocalize my memories every now and then to be sure they can still impress someone, even if it’s only myself.

          I sit on the tailgate and share a cup of coffee with Mister Hancock before I hunt his land. He tells me again about when he was a boy and his mother would send him out to get a "paa'chige" for supper. His false teeth click as he talks. Back then, a single shot .22 was all he needed to bring home a bird. Things were different. Then, after the war, he used to hunt fox out in the orchard. I've never had the nerve to ask which war.
          But were things so different, Mister Hancock? There is a gap a half-century wide between us, yet aren't we alike? We both take our coffee black, and you've said that my young setter could be the dog your father used to shoot over, and my canvas shooting coat looks like the one you bought from Sears & Roebuck... when? And when I hunt your orchard today I'll look for the same things you used to—Not foxes or grouse, really, but the chance to do something exactly right. Not to do it better than someone else, and certainly not for the sake of a pelt or a half-pound of poultry. You and I both know the satisfaction of doing something just the way we planned it to be. Then tomorrow, and all the tomorrows for fifty years, to savor the memory of a single maple leaf spiraling to the ground in the stillness after the shot when the bird lays in the leaf litter beneath the trees.
          But Mister Hancock isn't alone. On every chance I get I share the memories of other men who hunted "back then". We sit and talk whenever we get together, sometimes over a drink in a cafe, sometimes just while we rest between coverts. I've been back on the Agawam meadows with my father when he was single, hunting behind a setter named Rod who now lives only in a little picture framed on the mantle. I've been with George out behind the reservoir before they built the Air Force base there. And I've been at Shin's shoulder when he hunted the farms of Willimansett with a grand old Gordon that was gone years before I was born. Like sportsmen everywhere, there is very little recollection of shots made and limits taken. Mostly, it's the painful misses and noble dogs that are remembered. That, and the unexpressed joy of simply being there, undiluted by the intervening years. When the dreamy look leaves their eyes and the time machine in my mind deposits me back in the present, I wonder, sometimes out loud, was the hunting truly so much better back then? And if it was, does it really matter? Talking to these men from an earlier time it becomes evident that for them hunting was as much a celebration of life as it is for me today. I'll buy the next round, and we'll toast to those indelible memories of bird dogs and places long gone—Your memories, and a few of my own.

          In the Northeast nearly every piece of land is owned by somebody somewhere. Posted or not, it is all private land. If a man hunts, he is a trespasser, and admitting it makes it no less true. Each new piece of cover is examined, not just for the quality of the hunting it might offer, but for the chances of getting behind the signs. There is a subtle but very real difference between a "No Trespassing" sign and one that proclaims "No Hunting". If the owner lives on the land, or is at least serious enough to make his signs legal by putting his name on them, I can contact him. Given a chance to shake hands and talk face to face with a farmer or countryman, more often than not I can hunt on his property.
          I park the truck in front of Mister Kulig's house and leave the engine running. He comes out of the barn and, as always, seems glad to see me. "Hello, hello!" He waves, then calls into the yard, "Helen, young Steve is here." (He is also very kind in his use of adjectives.) "Why don't you shut off your truck and come in for a cup of coffee—and bring in those bird dogs of yours—How Helen loves that little one!"
          I sit and spend twenty minutes chatting with these two country people who are old enough to be my parents. The coffee is accompanied by a slice of home-baked apple pie. They ask me about my family. We come here during the winter to cross-country ski, and have camped under the summer stars by their lake. I covet the old farm with its square mile of grouse cover. But more, I treasure their friendship. A Christmas card can't say it. Neither can the frozen gamebirds I being them, nor the jars of Susan's bread & butter pickles.
          So I do.
          "It's a pleasure to know you, Mister Kulig, and I appreciate your friendship. I like to think that hunting was once like this everywhere—That hunters were welcome on folks' land."
          "You're always welcome here, Steve. Any time. But those city hunters..."
          "I live in town."
          "Yea, but it's those young punks..."
          I smile.
          "Well, hell, we like you..."
          "And I like you too, Mister Kulig."
          And the young city punk goes off to follow his dogs through the most productive grouse covert he knows, all because he took the time a few years ago to stop and talk to the man who nailed up the "No Trespassing" signs.

          Out of necessity I devote several winter nights each year to my collection of topographical maps, searching for new places to hunt. If I stare at a map long enough, I begin to see beyond green blotches and wavy elevation lines to the old farms and orchards they represent. When I drive to the areas I've circled in red, sometimes a housing project has been built since the map was printed, or a golf course. At other times I'm simply wrong, and the area that looked good on the map is clothed in tall pines, or is a sparsely wooded gravel field.
          But occasionally I find the second growth I hope for; A stand of hemlocks along a bog, an abandoned orchard on the hillside, a pasture taken over by gray birch and juniper, an alder run along a brook... I've found a grouse covert to drum in! I return to the truck and write a notation in the map margin and pretend that the place isn't circled on some other hunter's map.
          The search goes on. It is never ending, because I must constantly replace the several places I loose each year to the disease. Every piece of open land in the Northeast is threatened by the disease to some extent. Sometimes it strikes very quickly: I drive up to a covert I hunted last fall and find a shopping center in its place. The disease has claimed another victim. But more often the symptoms can be found years before the end comes; Wooden stakes with florescent ribbons mark where a surveyor has worked, or spray painted symbols on tree trunks mark the future route of roads and power lines. Pulling up the stakes won't help. Neither will putting other identical paint marks on other random trees around the woods. I've done both, but couldn't stop the bulldozers. Where there is a street, there will be a house. Soon the house will have neighbors, and so it goes: The disease.
          New England's population is supposedly shrinking, but you couldn't tell it from the number of houses being built. Of the many things coverts are lost to, none are so permanent as housing projects. The area is stripped and graded, then perversely named after the trees that used to grow there, as in "Applewood Manor" or "White Birch Estates". Only the centuries can return the land to its wild state once the foundations are poured.
          I used to wonder what could be done. The amount of open land is shrinking all the time, and the problem is evident to anyone who knows enough to be concerned. In the face of the situation I felt insignificant and helpless. Then an incident brought me a comforting insight: Out of greed, I lost a bird at Sacket Brook. I knew the shot was too long when I pulled the trigger, and I barely winged the far flushing grouse. I worked the dogs after that grouse until they thought they were being punished, but never found him. It bothered me, and my shooting was inhibited for weeks afterward.
          A year later I was back in the same covert when I found the first drumming log I had ever seen. They undoubted had always existed all around me, but like Indian arrowheads and yellow lady's slippers, I always assumed they were intended to be discovered by more expert naturalists than I. Yet, here it was—massive, moss covered, sheltered at one end, so obviously a text book example of a drumming log that I half expected to find a small brass plaque attached: Drumming log of the Ruffed Grouse (Bonasa umbellus). It was even replete with a supply of grouse droppings, looking like pieces of miniature donuts—some plain, some powdered sugar. Finding that log somehow eased my conscience about the grouse I had lost the previous season. To me, it was a symbolic message from the grouse community of Sacket Brook: "We're alive and well (No thanks to you and your lousy shooting.) We have been taking care of ourselves for thousands of years, and no matter what you do to us, we'll still be here long after you've gone, celebrating life on logs like this one."
          Two hundred years of intensive farming had not displaced this bird from New England. Droughts, forest fires, ice ages—He had survived them all. I imagine the ruffed grouse must look upon 20th century man as something of a transient. As long as there is a piece of woodland somewhere that autumn comes to, so will the ruffed grouse. And as long as I am able, so will I.
          When Henry David Thoroux was on his death bed, his sister asked him if he had made his peace with God. He replied that he was not aware that they had ever quarreled. I feel a bit of Thoroux's sentiments each autumn day that I find myself in one of my grouse coverts. I have never been one to pretend that grouse hunting is any fun for the grouse. But I am only as mortal as the bird I pursue. At some time I will know my last autumn and take my last grouse and fire my last shot. If the echoes of that shot ring out in one of my autumn coverts where I go to celebrate life, then there shall be no regrets when the last empty is removed and the smoke blown from the barrels.

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This site was last updated 09/20/06