Mulak Reader - Notes on Opening Day

Here’s one exactly the way I conceived it; that is, notes in italics as might be written in a shooting journal, and then the conversational explanation of those notes. I’ve got a pile of such hunting journals that record each day I’ve hunted since 1969, and this is an elaboration on one of those days. When Gun Dog published the piece, they used the four watercolors I had done to accompany the story, but not the “notes and explanation” format that you see here. Later, the story led to the idea of an entire book based on a hunting journal, and when Brief Autumn was written, I used this story, with very few changes, as the opening chapter.

NOTES ON OPENING DAY

September 29th: Drove up Vermont and began at Hill Road.
There is an almost hypnotic quality in driving through the alternating stripes of light and shadow on the back road. At the bottom of the hill I"slow and find a place where I can ease off the right-of-way without putting the tires into the ditch. Today I've got Stella with me. Her tail thumps against the backside of the truck seat.

Started in at 9:45
I glance at my watch: Opening day is about to begin. With the gun under my arm, I feel through the outsides of my pockets for the things I know are there—knife, keys, wallet. After a glance up and down the empty back road, I whistle Stella out of the tuck and we start across a small field that borders the cover.

Found two woodcock along the near edge.
We've hardly gotten starter when Stella's bell goes silent. I start toward where I last heard her. After 20 years in the engine room of a tanker my hearing is no great shakes, and searching for something that has stopped making noise is like looking for something that has suddenly gone transparent. But she is standing in a little puddle of sunlight, pointing with one front leg crossed over the other. A march in front of her brings a woodcock twittering up. When the gun comes up it catches on a sapling, and in the moment it takes to pull free the bird vanishes into the yellow foliage overhead. But then a second woodcock pops up, and I track him until he too disappears behind the leaves.
"I'd have had that second one." I say to Stella. I make believe I'm talking to the dog rather than just babbling out loud. It's still September, and only grouse are legal game today. Pointing woodcock without me shooting is nothing new for my bird dogs, but I always wonder what they think when birds are shot one day and then thrown back on another.

Weather: Clear with a light breeze, warm - upper 60s.
The trees are still seemingly fully leafed, and I can hardly see the sky overhead. Explain, then, this carpet of fallen leaves. I grab a thin maple. Several dozen leaves come down with a shake. I scan the dense foliage again: It won't be long.

Moved two birds from the pasture apples along the back.
          Every cover has a sweet spot, and I cut into the pine woods so that I can come out through some scattered apples that border a little opening. There's just a handfull of trees—hardly an orchard—but in a poor year for apples like this one the few trees with fruit become grouse magnets. And one of the trees always has apples.
          But my approach cannot be quiet, and there is the briefest rumble of grouse wings in the foliage ahead. I stand for a moment, straining my ears for a direction, and hear only Stella's bell. Conclusion: The bird must have short-hopped up into a tree. I approach the apple grove cautiously knowing the bird is alerted, but there is another rumble, more continuous this time, and I know I've flunked the first grouse test of the semester. When I exhale I realize I've been holding my breath.
          Moments later, in among the apples, another bird rockets for the treetops off to my left. Although the gun comes up cleanly, I'm not quick enough and the shot passes behind him. There had been two, and now I am acutely aware that there might be three. I stand stock still for a half minute until Stella comes in, panting, and seems to diffuse the possibility of another grouse in the immediate vicinity.

Note to file: Adjust suspenders
Shooting the gun shouldn't hurt, but that one did. Beneath my vest the metal clip of my brand new suspenders has been sitting in the hollow of my shoulder—right where the butt plate nestles when I mount the gun. I make a mental note to have Susan cut some of the slack out of the elastic so the clip will make-up lower. It seems no matter how well I get ready, opening day manages to find a few overlooked deficiencies.
For that matter, why hadn't the accused been alert for the possibility of a second bird, particularly this early in the season? I plead stupidity, your honor. I forget how to do some of this stuff. It'll take a few outings to get back in stride.

Took 20 minutes for coffee...
New England hunting is done in bits and pieces, with rests in between, and those rests are best enjoyed on the tailgate with a cup of coffee. Although it's nice to dream about a heaven where it's always the beginning of November and the hunting never ends, there is something about the inevitable wax and wane of the seasons that gives meaning to it all—Something that a continuous November could never have. Bird season seems to consist of three parts: the early going when the foliage is still up, then November, and then snow. I know for sure that it all slips by too fast, and it seems I've no sooner hit my mid-season stride when my wife is making up her Thanksgiving grocery list and I begin to feel a panic that comes of seeing yet another autumn slipping away.

Posted signs at the Abandoned Farm...
          I drive a bit farther down the road to a deserted farm grown to grouse cover. I don't notice the signs until I'm at the spot where I pull off. The place isn't legally posted—there is no name or date on the signs—but what is lacking in quality is more than compensated for in quantity: It says "No Trespassing" every 30 or 40 feet. I won't be hunting the Abandoned Farm covert today.
          On the drive back to town I go by a garage where a fellow is working on a garden tractor in the driveway. There is a rack of antlers over the open door. I wave and pull over, and go through the amenities of how the weather's been and how early the color is. Then I cut to the chase: "About a half mile back on the left there are a bunch of new posted signs. I've hunted in there for years. You wouldn't happen to know who I could talk to about getting back in there, would you?" I'm hoping I'm talking to the landowner, but he grimaces.
          "Some folks from Massachusetts bought that piece last year. They're only up here two-three times a summer, but they got some funny ideas."
          He pronounces idea with an "r" at the end. I confess to being a visitor myself from the land of funny ideas, but I'd like a chance to talk to those fellow out-of-staters.
          Each year I loose a few coverts to posting. Much is written about loss of habitat and unfavorable legislation, but the single greatest problem faced by outdoorsmen today is posted land. In the Northeast there is more than enough open land for everyone, but so much of it is posted that we're all being squeezed—Not just hunters, but anyone who does anything out-of-doors. In a time when the legal community can give a landowner a hundred reasons to post his land, it would seem that the fish & game folks might come up with a few good reasons for him not to. Some of the western states give landowners tax breaks for keeping their land open, and New York has a co-op program that seems to be working. Creative leadership is what's needed in fish & game—and what's lacking.

Decided to try Isaac Newton...
          As I drive off, Stella snoozes with her head resting on the open gun while I mull over the options: Most of my coverts close by are primarily woodcock coverts. Not that there couldn't be a grouse in them, but I have just so many hunting hours in my legs, and I'd rather spend them where the odds are favorable. My plan had been to make a charge at the abandoned farm and then go into town for lunch, but that's out. Instead, I decide to drive north of town and give the Isaac Newton grouse cover a try. The first time I hunted there I found a single beat-up apple along the brook at the bottom of the hill. In New England, apples and grouse go together like rock and roll, so I expectantly looked around for the tree that produced the apple. There was none within eyesight, and any of the several explanations I came up with would have made the National Inquirer. A quarter hour and several zigzags later I was halfway up the hillside and passed beneath an apple tree. I picked up a windfall and took a bite, then tossed it aside. Even with the bite out of it, the apple was fairly round and rolled all the way down the hill - down to the spot below where I had found the other apple fifteen minutes before. In my mind, the headline read: "Nincompoop Finally Discovers Gravity". Isaac Newton had nothing on me. The place turned out to be a pretty good grouse cover, but runs to brushy undergrowth and spruce that seems more like Canadian flora than that found in central New England.
          We head in, but the thick brush slows me down, and after a short while I find I'm not hunting any more so much as fighting the heavy cover. In my eagerness to find a grouse I've made a poor decision: This early in the season the thick stuff soon strips your internal gears.
          An hour later I'm back at the truck and glad to be. I twice fill a plastic bowl with water and watch as Stella laps it up. She is tiring and has only another half hour or so before her needle hits "E". No matter what I do in the way of conditioning, nothing seems to prepare my dogs adequately for a full day afield. When you own three, you often end up running them as a pack out of necessity. Dog writers like to talk about hard-charging all-day bird dogs having "heart", but in the real world there is no such thing as Superman - and there are no superdogs, either. There is no substitute for conditioning.

Finally tried the place across the street.
I've never hunted the hillside on the other side of the road mostly because there are two houses at the top and the rest looked like so much open pasture and brushy woods when I first came here ten years ago. But lately ash trees have sprung up in the fields, and the shadows are dappled with pools of sunlight. For the past several seasons I've been meaning to scout the place, and suddenly it seems like a good idea.
Sometimes looks are deceiving, and what appeared okay from the road turns out to be made up of separated pockets of ash and popple without the understory that grouse seem to require. Stella finds a single woodcock in the 40 minutes it takes to work the cover to a logical conclusion. Before we start back up the road I send her into a thickly wooded edge of the little stream that runs along the bottom, more to get a drink than out of any hope of finding a bird.

Took one over point on a blind shot in some hemlocks.
          Once into the hemlocks Stella's bell goes silent. I haven't been paying attention, and now I'm no longer sure where she is. I whistle, then whistle again, but I hear nothing when I strain to hear her bell. My first setter, Hazel, used to move her head when I whistled, even if she was on point, and her bell would ding and let me know where she was. Stella won't. Her problem is that she is too staunch on point. Believe me, I've made a study of problems, and being too staunch is a good one for a bird dog to have, but that doesn't do me any good right now. I hate pussyfooting, but I find that's what I'm doing as I search for the dog. I stop for a moment and whistle softly, then, when I start again a grouse erupts close behind me. I turn in time to see the bird heading for a hemlock-framed patch of blue sky. I snap off a shot at the instant the bird disappears, then hear him falling through the branches. "Stella!" I holler, and hear her bell somewhere. I call for her again, sounding like Stanley Kazinsky in Streetcar, and push my way through the thick stuff to where the bird fell. Now Stella is behind me. Under the evergreens I cannot stand upright, and turn to tell her to fetch... and discover she already has the bird.
          She must have been pointing, and because I didn't know where she was I inadvertently flushed her bird. At least, that's the interpretation that will go into the journal. I hope she is equally charitable when she tells the dogs back in the kennel her version.
          I have her carry the first grouse of the year to a sunny opening where I can sit on a fallen tree trunk and tell her how lucky I am to have a dog like her.

Pooped. Decided to cash it in at 2:10
It's now just a little after two. With a bird in the cooler, four hours of hunting seems like enough. There was a time—not so many years ago, too be sure—when opening day was a time for hard charging. If I was still that young athlete there are several more places where I could occupy my time until dark. But I'm pooped, and hunting tired can be a lot like work. And of the many things bird shooting is, it should never be anything but fun.
It isn't every opening day when fresh grouse appears on the supper menu. It would be nice, too, to get home before dark for a change. And I'll stop at a farm stand on the way home and pick-up the Macoun apples Susan asked for. For a formerly young man approaching the half century mark, each grouse season is something to be savored—and best eased into.

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This site was last updated 09/21/06