The Streak

Mulak Reader - The Streak

I tried as hard as I could to tell the unvarnished truth in this story, which appeared in the December 1987 edition of Sports Afield. In this one, I shoot a double on grouse, which is a once-in-a-lifetime event for even the most dedicated grouse hunter—the equivalent of a golfer hitting a hole-in-one, or a ballplayer hitting for the cycle. Then there appeared a letter-to-the-editor from a fellow who ran a small-time newsletter for grouse hunters. He considered himself an expert, and took me to task for claiming that I had shot a double on grouse. He sited a quote by Burton Spiller, saying that the birds had to take off at exactly the same instant, and since I didn’t see the birds take off I couldn’t be sure it was a double. I exchanged a few letters with the man, each one a bit more shrill than the previous. Doubles, of course, involve taking two birds that are in the air at the same time, and if the ghost of Burton Spiller had been along on the hunt that day, he would have been the first to congratulate me. But this man had gotten hung-up on the semantics of a definition, and remained unconvinced. After a while I concluded he was a crackpot, and it was me who was the chowderhead for letting his opinion bother me.

THE STREAK

"If the only satisfaction to be derived

from the sport lay in killing birds, I

would have quit the game long since."

Burton Spiller

It was a big male grouse at the Indian Oven covert that started it all: I was following an old pasture wall back toward the truck after chasing a flight of woodcock around some alder runs, and the breeze carried the faint cider smell of windfalls as I approached a line of broken-down apple trees. Hazel's bell indicated she was crossing up out of the junipers below me. The grouse must have been feeding on those windfalls and thought himself too far from suitable cover, because he blasted out of the blackberry tangles beneath the trees at my setter's approach, retreating back over my left shoulder. Evidently, he hadn't heard I'd been practicing that particular shot. The dog made a running retrieve, and when I posed her on the wall with the grouse that November afternoon, the picture was pretty enough to make the cover of Sports Afield.

          That started the streak—7 cock grouse with 7 shots. Big deal, I thought I heard you say. For me, it was. Understand that a single grouse riding in my game bag is a genuine thrill that I've never quite gotten used to, and in 20 years of grouse hunting I've had streaks where I've missed 7 in a row, but never anything quite like this. Let me tell you about it:
          The 4th of November was a gray and overcast day. I went to a place called the Junkyard to hunt woodcock. They normally spend most of the daylight hours sleeping, and because of that they usually hold well for even an inexperienced pointing dog. But when they're not catching Zs they feed by wandering around, probing for worms. The scent trail of one of these meandering woodcock is such that a hunter might think his dog was following a running bird. When a whole flight has shifted its routine and feeds during daylight hours, (Most likely because they've just flown in the previous night.) even a normally staunch pointing dog can look bad.
          At the Junkyard we got into an actively feeding flight, and Hazel was making a dozen false points for every bird she produced. As a result, I didn't think much of it when one of her walking points lead away from the brook we had been following. When the understory petered out, a grouse flushed ahead of her and tried to double back along the edge of the cover, presenting a retreat shot off my right shoulder. I've missed that shot often enough over the years to know how not to do it by now, but I can still miss it as often as not. This time, I didn't. Unnoticed until after I had pulled the trigger was the second bird, out beyond the first. He had been flying a parallel course to his partner, and I took him with the tight barrel. It happened so quickly that I stood for a moment wondering if I had imagined it all: There were no feathers in the air, no witnesses, only the two empties and a whisp of smoke coming from the open barrels. Then Hazel brought in the first of the pair and I new it was all reality.
          It was my first-ever grouse double. Honest-to-goodness chances to take a pair of grouse in the air at the same time are once-per-season opportunities—If you're lucky. One year, when I was really lucky, I had three separate chances at legitimate grouse doubles, but it didn't matter, though: I missed them all. So understand that having Hazel retrieve two cock grouse to me on that cloudy dark morning was not the sort of thing I took lightly. I was dumbfounded. It was a feeling that was to last all through the week. I hung the birds in a twisted little hawthorn tree and posed Hazel next to them for a portrait, then I sat on the tailgate of the truck, stretching out my coffee break in the hopes that someone would drive by and ask how the hunting was. No one did.
     On the way home I got off the turnpike in West Springfield and stopped at a liquor supermarket where they have virtually everything. I knew what I wanted. It was 5 o'clock, and in my Bean boots and tattered canvas shirt, the other customers must have thought I was the guy who mowed the lawn stopping in for his paycheck. But I didn't care—the only choice I had to make was between the Blanc-de-noirs or the Brut.
          Years ago, when my daughters used to come home from kindergarten and hold a crayon drawing up for inspection, my wife would say in her best Jane Wyman voice, "Why, that's very nice." There was a time her attitude toward my shooting exploits was pretty much the same, but with time that changed, and I'm now blessed with a wife who can recognize the importance of my accomplishments. So I was looking forward to sharing my excitement with her, and I came through the door with the pair of grouse in one hand and the bottle of Piper Sonoma in the other: "Look, Honey—After all these years I finally shot a double on grouse—a double!"
          She was peeling vegetables for supper, and barely turned away from the sink. "Why, that's very nice," She said. Then, after a pause, Jane Wyman asked, "What's the champagne for?"

          Two days later I was back out again, hunting woodcock in the rain on an overgrown farm in Bondsville. I named the covert after a hunter I met here one day a few years back: After we exchanged hello's, I asked him how he was doing. "Wonderful!" He replied, then, almost under his breath, he asked if I knew what the limit was on quail. Now, quail are not legal game birds in my end of the state for the same reason there is no open season on ostriches and flamingos—There aren't a whole lot of them running around wild. He showed me the 4 quail he had taken: They had long bills and funny feet and looked a lot like woodcock to me, but the other hunter insisted he knew woodcock, and these weren't them. That was okay by me—My father advised me long ago about not arguing with folks when they're carrying loaded guns. So I named the place for that hunter, and it's been "Quailshooter's" ever since. (One of these days I'm going to do a painting that'll clear up once and for all what those "things" are. It will be along the lines of so many I've seen of a hunter's daily kill hanging on a cottage door—But it will be entitled, "Woodcock, woodchuck, woodpecker, wooden pecker, wood duck, & wooden duck". With my luck, it'll be a big hit, but they'll misspell the title as well as my last name, and it will only add to the confusion.)
          At Quailshooter's, Hazel worked along the edge of the cover with her head high. Where a finger of aspens hooked out into a field she doubled back, and when she pointed it was more tentative than solid. With Hazel, every point imparts its own meaning, and I hurried ahead knowing that this bird could go at any moment. I stopped when a grouse took wing from the far end of the run, then, in the moment before I could let my guard down, a second bird jumped out much closer to me. For once I held above a rising bird and put him down—another male, this one with a tail edged in chocolate rather than black, but smaller than either of Monday's birds.
          His far-flushing partner had appeared to slant behind the old potato storage barn beyond the finger of popples. Boarded up and weather beaten, the barn squatted in the tall weeds with its back to the woods, looking like something from a child's nightmare. I sat for five minutes beneath its overhang, giving the flown grouse time to settle down and forget about the hunter that was after him. Once, I would have timed myself by smoking a cigarette, but Camels and I have long since parted company. Instead, I dressed out the bird in my gamebag.
          When we started off again, Hazel slashed through the cover behind the barn, unaware that the grouse was near. She was accelerating out of a turn when the scent hit her, and the beautiful clumsiness of her skidding point resembled the unfolding of an uncooperative deck chair. In that instant she had the bird pinned. It was the sort of point I wait all year to see, and I was still smiling when I made the flush. The shot was quick and clean, and Hazel almost danced as she brought the bird to me. It's a glorious occasion each time I take a grouse, but some are more so than others. Hazel's point made this one extra special.
          "Not bad—two for two." I muttered. It was at this juncture that I realized I had a streak going. Listening to my own thoughts, I counted back: There was the double on Monday, and the bird at Indian Oven before that—All unpunctuated by any misses in between. Unquestionably, there is an element of luck involved in every grouse shot, or in hitting anything with a shotgun, for that matter. But this seemed uncanny: I'm just not that consistent a wingshot: Five in a row was way over my head. My kid brother once went an entire season in Pennsylvania without missing a pheasant—He was something like 14 for 14—But grouse shooting is altogether different: It's more than just bird shooting with trees thrown in. Like baseball, most of us bat around .250, and three out of ten will get you into the majors. And 5 for 5 is just plain lucky.

When I got back home there was a note waiting for me: Susan was shopping and would I please remember to turn on the oven at four o'clock, and p.s., John had called to say there was a flight of woodcock in Compass covert. Great—Here was a chance to give the puppy some work on birds. Zelda was five months old then, and just beginning to suspect that there was more to going afield than running amuck and chasing sparrows around the woods. I left Hazel at home and put the puppy in the truck and even remembered to leave a note for my daughters, reminding them to turn the oven on when they came in from soccer practice.
          Whether or not the puppy appreciated her lessons, I certainly got some mileage out of the opportunity. She got hauled-in by her check cord when she ran up the first three or four woodcock, and I managed to steady her up on several others. I actually shot at a couple, although hitting woodcock using just one hand while holding a straining puppy's collar in the other is a low percentage endeavor.
          I was watching my steps, trying to avoid accidentally stepping on Zelda's check cord when a grouse flushed 25 yards away from the end of a viburnum run. The bird quartered uphill just above the tops of the bushes—An easy shot, but there was a moment's hesitation until I was sure of the puppy's location. That little hitch, and the fact that I was using light woodcock loads added up to a down-but-not-out bird. He fell just beyond a little oak tree that still clung to its leaves.
          Puppy or not, Zelda was all I had, and I brought her to the leafy oak and told her to 'Find dead!' I stepped as I waved her ahead, and as I did my foot came down on the grouse. Not near it—on it. It is often difficult to do something and then not write down a better version, but there can be no exaggeration to that event—I stepped on that bird. Simple pleasures can be ruined by examining them too closely. I put the grouse into may gamebag and tried not to think of what the odds were of my finding a crippled bird in the thick stuff without a trained dog—let alone actually stepping on his back. A million to one seems like a conservative estimate. The bird was yet another cock, and his turned out to be the biggest tail of the season. A simple pleasure—and an amazing piece of luck.
          As I drove home along School Street, the road curved and headed due west. The day had cleared off, and the lavender afterglow of the cloudless sunset illuminated all I saw through the windshield. At the top of my field of vision something caught my eye as it flew past: It was a woodcock, buzzing along in the dusk toward the woods looming darkly beyond the field to the left. I pulled the truck to the roadside and watched until the dusk swallowed him. With my hand on the gearshift, I sat for a long moment, looking out after the bird. The evening star winked in the twilight just above the thin sickle of the moon. In autumn, I don't bother making wishes—On days like this I know I'm living out what I'd be wishing for, although I often allow my sense of time to spoil my pleasure: Too often think in terms of "just eleven days of the season left." I wish I could be more like my dogs and believe that autumn would last forever—Or at least not worry about the fact that it won't.

          On Thursday night my friend Mike drove down from Vermont. I sometimes do some early season woodcock hunting with him in the Northeast Kingdom, and in return he comes to Massachusetts to shoot pheasants. My dogs like Mike, and always seem to do a superior job when he's around. I wish he'd visit more often.
          The next day was the first wool shirt day of the autumn. Win was in her last season, but showed off her years of experience when she outwitted a rooster behind an old farm in Monson. I flushed the bird for Mike. In all of bird hunting there is only one thing more glorious than a cock pheasant's rise into the blue November sky over a good dog's point, and that one thing is to be able to produce that event for someone who appreciates it. Mike did, and wasn't afraid to say so.
          The old pasture in Monson is a tangle of juniper and low bush blueberries growing among a typical New England boulder collection. Bovineittes of dairy cows appeared unexpectedly in odd places. With the rooster riding in the game pocket of Mike's vest, we looked for woodcock along a brook valley where I had found a flight a week before.
          Instead, we found a continuation of my streak. Win worked up a little side valley and back out again but could locate only the bird's scent. I believe some birds, when they realize a scenting animal is following them, will fly a short distance to break their trail and then wait in hiding near-by so they can resume feeding when the danger has passed. I've witnessed it a few times, and I feel sure it must happen to bird dogs more frequently than we non-scenting predators will ever realize. The grouse that gave Win the slip made the unlucky decision to hide in a clump of sorrel overlooking the valley. I, in turn, made the lucky decision to walk through that same sorrel clump as I hurried to catch- up with Win. The bird flushed and headed downhill, catching me off-guard for a moment, and although I don't recall it, Mike reports he heard me say a discouraging word just before I shot. His version is that he didn't hear the bird fly, but from across the brook saw me fire my gun downhill and thought perhaps I had stepped in one cow flop too many and was opening hostilities against them.
          I had mentioned the streak to him, and as Win brought the brown-phase bird in he asked, "Another male?"
          It was.
          "You'd better miss one pretty soon, or you'll be getting so caught up in this 'not missing' thing that you'll be afraid to shoot—Afraid you'll miss, and afraid you won't." Mike was joking, but his statement came very close to the truth.

          Woodcock charm me—There's no other term for it. And in my end of the country, the two weeks that include the first ten days of November are what woodcock hunters spend the other 350 days of the year waiting for. All but one of the grouse I've written about here were taken with one ounce loads of 9s—woodcock loads. That should say something about what I was doing in the woods while all this was taking place. It was raining on the 11th, but I was out, sweating myself wet inside my waterproofs, trying to find "just one more big flight." I once heard an articulate person describe woodcock hunting as a 'disproportionate pleasure'. When the water starts to work its way down the tops of my boots, (A process called "reverse hydropercolation") I try to focus my attention on that term rather than my empty gamebag.
          I was just beginning to get wet when Hazel pointed in some birch scrub. Someday I'm going to discover a way to train a dog to signal to me when she's on point; one wink will mean woodcock, two for a pheasant, and three for a grouse. Hazel has never mastered my signaling technique, and I approached her point thinking 'woodcock'. It turned out to be a three-winker, and as the grouse thundered through the wet branches the in-flight impression was that she was a she—its a matter of proportions: tail to body size. I also observed that I'd used up whatever allotment of luck had been assigned to me and my shooting had returned to normal: I committed my own personal classic error and failed to hold above the rising bird.
          The streak was over. I'm not going to say I was glad, but if you've ever seen that black & white press photo of Joe Dimaggio, looking emotionally drained and physically exhausted as he sat in the clubhouse with reporters clustered around him on the day his record batting streak ended, you'll understand what I was thinking. Don't get me wrong: I didn't feel like Joltin' Joe—I was only glad I didn't. Streaks and records and such can easily become so important they distract from the business of enjoying the sport of hunting—the non-competitive sport of hunting. I like hitting birds, but there is a certain laugh-at-yourself sort of enjoyment to be derived from missing, too. It's something you have to permit yourself to do.
          I reloaded and started off through the rain toward a spot where I hoped to relocate the hen grouse. I could have had eight in row if I had just blotted out that bird... I shouldered my gun and swung through an imaginary riser. But then I laughed out loud—Who's kidding who? I know a .250 hitter when I see one!

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