Knuckleball

Mulak Reader - Knuckleball

I have a letter from Jay Cassell dated 9/9/81. Jay was then senior editor with Sports Afield, and in that letter he agreed to purchase Knuckleball! I had made my first sale to Sports Afield, and began a working relationship with Jay that lasted ten years and 22 stories—a period I look back on as “the best of times.” That relationship took the form of quick notes and long-distance phone calls to discuss story ideas and the directions they were taking. Jay did me the great service of demanding only my best, and never accepting anything that fell short.

KNUCKLEBALL!

"It's not so much the missing the little buggers that irks me, its the looking foolish doing it."

Henry Mulak

          I slowed as I drove around the last curve. Up ahead, where I had intended to pull off the road, another car was parked on the shoulder outside the Bondsville covert. All during October I continually delude myself with the idea that cars parked by my woodcock coverts belong to hikers or mushroom pickers—Anyone but another bird hunter. But there were no delusions possible this time: Two fellows in fluorescent vests were uncasing their shotguns. Maybe they were rabbit hunters. I crossed my fingers and stopped the truck abreast of them.
          "How's it going, fellas?" They were among the ever-growing number of sportsmen who are considerably younger than I. One of them leaned in the truck window. He had a pheasant feather in his hatband.
          "We limited-out on roosters this morning, so we thought we'd try our luck on partridge. We really don't know much about 'em—Does this look like a good spot to you?"
          I hoped he hadn't seen me wince. Although these two hardly seemed serious woodcock hunters, sharing my pet coverts with strangers is not my idea of loving my fellow man. "It looks to be as good as any," I said. "You're liable to find birds 'most anywhere this time of year."
         There. I hadn't lied to them—I hadn't even mentioned woodcock. Smiling, I drove on, thinking I was foolish to worry—They wouldn't find much in there without a dog. I glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see them let a Brittany out of their car's trunk. If I were a cowboy, what I muttered would be classified as a "discouraging word".
          A half-mile farther down the road I stopped at another of my coverts. Around the cut-over areas, the sassafras bushes were in lovely color, and my setter did some nice work on the two woodcock we found there. It wasn't until I was sitting on the tailgate with a cup of coffee that I took notice of the frequent shots in the distance. They sounded out in bunches of three and four rather than as single reports.
          Driving back out to the highway, I passed the Bondsville covert just as the same two fellows were coming out. Of the three, only their Brittany looked happy. I slowed to a stop. "Well, how'd you do?"
          Their expressions said they wished I hadn't asked. "We found a lot of birds in there."
          "Great!" I tried to look sincere. "Where were they?"
          "Everywhere." He shook his head. "Every time we turned around the dog was on point. We finally ran out of ammo."
          "No kidding. How many did you take?" The answer was so obvious that I wondered if the question wasn't a bit sadistic.
          "Well…” He looked away for a moment. “They were woodcock, you know." That served as sufficient excuse.
          Later, it dawned on me that I had seen ballplayers wear the very same embarrassed look: It was when they returned to the dugout after being struck out by a soft throwing junk pitcher. As a matter of fact, I'd bet a nickel that the first pitcher to throw a knuckleball was probably a woodcock hunter.

          Woodcock seem easy. They hold so well for even a mediocre pointing dog that there is seldom an element of surprise in their flush, and, in a race with all the other gamebirds, the woodcock is so slow that he'd finish dead last.
          Ah, but he's tricky.
          So much so that even if someone were able to point out his flight path ahead of time it would be of little help to the gunner. I knew a fellow who contended that woodcock have more space around them than other birds. He may be right. They flutter up, plainly seen but too close for a shot, weaving their way through the overhead branches until they've found flight room, then they'll mindlessly dip back down into the trees again. Their unpredictable maneuvers and flank turns keep the gunner waving his gun like an orchestra conductor's baton. Then, after having been "woodcocked" several times in a row, the hunter finally steadies himself to wait out the bird's off-speed tactics. That's when the next one will blast off the ground like a grouse, buzzing away low and fast.
          As I said, they're tricky.
          The habits of the woodcock so overlap those of the ruffed grouse that they're frequently found side by side in the same coverts. One bird is the ideal compliment for the other: The quickness of a grouse's flush and the erratic dodges of a woodcock's flight are a combination that can keep anyone off balance. Frank Woolner made an accurate comparison when he stated that if the grouse is a high- performance jet fighter, then the woodcock is one of those bi-wing stunt jobs. The difference is never more evident that when a tense grouse hunter walks in over his dog's point, fully expecting the thunder of wings and instead flushes a woodcock. A bookmaker, if he's at all merciful, would refuse the bet: The tightly wound gunner will shoot too quickly and miss every time.
          During the course of a morning in the uplands, woodcock will provide the hunter opportunities to use both the deliberate shooting style of the waterfowler as well as the snap-shooting methods of the brush gunner. Sprinkle a few grouse around the same coverts and you can begin to understand how so many spent shells can still add up to an empty game bag.

Looking for and actually locating woodcock hunting areas are not necessarily the same exercise. If pinned down, the experienced woodcocker might say that the surest thing to look for when searching out a place to hunt woodcock is... woodcock. He would not be avoiding the question. The bird can be as unpredictable in his habits as he is in flight, and the birds are indeed where you find them. At times they'll concentrate in one small section of a covert, ignoring the rest of what seems an ideal area. They will sometimes continue to come to a favorite place long after it has been turned into a housing development, yet they will unexplainably stop visiting another spot that seems unchanged. Why? Who knows?
          An eerie feeling of deja vu sets in when I revisit a covert and take a woodcock from exactly the same spot where I took one the last time. Sometimes it goes on all season long, and there's no escaping the feeling that maybe I only thought I shot the woodcock that was here last time, because here he is back again! Evidently, birds from consecutive flights single out that one particular corner or tree as an ideal resting place, although what sets it apart from its surroundings is unobvious to me. Maybe there's a hidden aspect only woodcock see from the air—I've tried interrogating those that I've captured, but they never tell.
          Occasionally, when a once-flushed bird is pursued and flushed a second time, two woodcock will take flight. It happens too frequently to be shrugged off as coincidence: The first bird flew to join his partner. But how did he communicate and know just where to go? More mysteries.
          There is a mistaken belief that woodcock depend entirely upon protective coloration for their survival. That idea is fine as it applies to hawks and dogless hunters, but what about weasels and foxes and other scenting predators who hunt with their noses? The bird's camouflage doesn't keep my bird dogs from finding him, and I can't imagine it hampers a hunting fox too much, either. It's a safe bet that at night, when most of the fellows with the big teeth are on the prowl, the woodcock is alert to danger and quick to take wing. It's only in the daylight that he lets his guard down and relies on his protective coloration.
          Which leads to the idea that when a hunter's bird dog points a woodcock, he may sleeping off a long night of snagging worms and dodging foxes. I know I'm not immediately "with it" when I first wake up, and the fact that a woodcock may be both awakened and flushed by the hunter's approach goes a long way toward explaining some of the crazy things he does in flight.
          There is an old joke that a woodcock's eyes are positioned so that he can find holes in a shot pattern, and his stubby wings enable him to fly right through them. Occasionally a 'doodle will get through a pattern with only a ruffled feather or two, but that's simply because there's a very small bird under those brown feathers. All gamebirds, of course, are considerably smaller than their silhouettes, but it is difficult to conceive of how tiny a target he really is until you hold up a naked woodcock by the foot. (I'll guarantee you'll trade-in your 7-1/2's for 9's after you do.) Those "hole-finding" eyes seem the strangest thing about this strange bird until he is seen drilling for worms. Then, the utilitarian design of big, night-vision eyes that can see "up" while his bill probes "down" becomes apparent.
          As if to prove that they are not exclusively nocturnal birds, occasionally a woodcock will be taken with fresh mud on his bill or a live worm in his mouth. A dog that strikes the meandering trail of one of these daylight feeding birds might appear to be working that debatable entity, the running woodcock. On occasion I have seen them, out of impatience, walk out from a point. But any contention that woodcock run is a sad reflection on the contender: In the world of gamebirds, nothing holds better than a woodcock.

          It is one of the happy coincidences in the sporting world that the game of woodcocking, where a dog is an absolute necessity, also happens to be the one sport where a dog needn't be champion to do a good job. The woodcock dog needs only to handle and to have a modicum of manners. The birds are strongly scented and hold so well for a point that the finer things expected in a grouse or a quail dog are luxury options on the basic utility woodcocking model.
          But the same reluctance to flush that makes the bird hold so well for even a sloppy point works against the dogless hunter. By chance, he'll almost step on one occasionally and get a shot. But for every 'doodle the hunter kicks up blindly there will be ten more squatting invisibly on the leaf mulch that he will walk by unknowingly. A dog—any dog—will triple the number of birds he finds, and a good dog will triple that number.
          Although they hunt them joyfully and point them intensely, most bird dogs don't like to retrieve woodcock. Popular theories are that the bird is loose feathered or bad tasting... Believe whatever explanation you like. Dogs do so many other weird things that cannot be explained logically that it's anybody's guess why they'll enthusiastically fetch in a nasty clawing bundle that is a wing-hit pheasant, but not a woodcock.

          Most types of hunting, and fishing too, suffer a gap between the sport as it should be and the reality of the sport as it actually is. The sportsman's imagination can close the gap considerably if he can get out of sight of houses and parked cars. He can believe for a little while that he is hunting pheasants in the Nebraska farmlands rather than stocked birds on a state management area. Or, that he is casting for steelhead on the Yellowstone rather than some local brook. But today's woodcock hunting is just what it should be: The little patches of cover just outside of town are what sportsmen the world over conjure-up when they dream of a woodcock hunting trip, and the suburban hunter can make of the game whatever he cares to and not have to pretend anything. A man doesn't have to go to New Brunswick or Cape May for the world's best woodcock hunting—It's probably right there at the end of his street.
          If you pursue woodcock you will meet others afield who are sure you're wasting your time. Some will sneer so boldly as to say they wouldn't waste a shell on a woodcock. (Obviously, these men are chicken hunters. Why else waste a shell?) If a gaudy trophy of a bird strutting by the roadside can bring out the unsportsmanlike worst in some hunters, then woodcock, which are hardly trophies and rank considerably below chickens as table fare, can bring out the very best. Woodcock hunting, after all, is pure fun. Success in the October woodlands is measured in terms of the enjoyment the hunter derives from a day afield with his dog rather than the weight of his gamebag. And, in this case, the secret to this particular success lies in the fine art of not taking yourself seriously.
          It seems a perverse human trait that, at times, we are able to derive enjoyment from our own failings. Woodcocking will do that to a man. There is a hunter inside all of us, a hunter who takes pride in our shooting and knows that 'doodles are so easy we should never miss one. Each time we are "woodcocked" into poking a couple of holes in the sky, the hunter part of us is disgusted. Ah, but the other part of us, the human that offsets the hunter inside—He throws his head back and laughs!

When the sumacs turn crimson and the calendar announces the autumn equinox, the woodcock hunter feels the press of the approaching season. The aspens follow the swamp maples into flame, and for a brief instant in time heaven becomes an overgrown pasture in New England, complete with stone fences and clear brooklets and feathers floating among the birches. The whole year was spent waiting for these few weeks, and they are seized with an urgency. Then one rainy day the autumn colors lay on the ground and the trees are bare again. And, soon after, the woodcock are gone. By mid-November the woodcock hunter has turned his full attention to grouse. The coverts are not the same... not worse, really, because grouse hunting is an addiction only postponed until after the woodcock migration. The woodlands are simply different. Like everything else worthwhile, the woodcock season is a fleeting thing. Impermanence, it seems, is a prerequisite to love—No one loves plastic flowers, after all. But if I were ever to find myself in a story where I was granted a magic wish, I'd be sure to inquire by how much I could lengthen the month of October before I made my decision.

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This site was last updated 09/21/06