Thunderbird

Mulak Reader - Thunderbird

I may have started something with this essay: There are probably more lines written about grouse and grouse hunting than all the other upland game birds put together, and this was just another such essay in praise of New England’s native game bird, the ruffed grouse. But when I wrote this, “thunderbird” was the name of a car and a cheap wine, and an art motif in Native American culture, but it had never (as far as I know) been applied to the ruffed grouse. The bird’s flush, of course, creates a roll of thunder-like noise. I followed up on the nickname, and later called my grouse-hunting book Wings of Thunder. It tickles me to now and then see the nickname used by other outdoor writers—hardly Thomas Edison and the light bulb, but something I invented nonetheless.

THUNDERBIRD

          The dog seemed as surprised as I when the bird flushed: 70 yards in front of us a grouse with a steel gray tail took off and flew straight away before setting his wings in a long glide that carried him behind a distant pine tree. The slope we were crossing was more a field than grouse cover; just a few thorn bushes among some shoulder-high popple sprouts. The grouse had headed not for the thick stuff farther up the valley but for the steep bank of a raised railroad bed where the cover was similarly unbirdy. Direct pursuit would only push him farther away, especially a skittish bird like this one obviously was. A good tactic is the flank approach, but the railroad embankment made that maneuver all but impossible. It took a moment to figure out just how it could be done, but it was going to be possible to get an open shot at that bird by sneaking around and coming up on the grouse from the opposite direction. When it works right the bird thinks he's caught between two hunters and holds tight, then presents a crossing shot when he goes out.
          Ahem... that is, when it works right.
          I whistled the dog in and put her bell in my pocket. Then we backtracked and crossed the rails to the far side of the embankment. The tracks crossed a little valley, and where a culvert permitted a brook to pass under, the embankment was about 150 feet high. In my mind's eye, I could see the grouse on the opposite side, taking it easy and sure that I was still back on the popple slope with my dog. He was in for a surprise. Stooped as low as any six footer must to get through a four foot tunnel, I duck-walked through the culvert. Claustrophobia? Let me skip over that and say that it felt good to stand up straight once again at the other end. I climbed halfway up the embankment and started hunting my way back. There was a veritable obstacle course of small boulders and discarded railroad ties littering the 45 degree grade, but I was sure the grouse was just in front of me. What a strategist! I felt like Hannibal, only without the elephants.
          Then the dog pointed.
          Now I want you to understand that I was really feeling smug at this point. I worked my way forward from one sapling to the next, keeping the gun elevated and ready. As predicted, the grouse flushed off the embankment offering an unobstructed left to right crossing shot that I had hoped for. Just the grouse and the clear October sky—It was as beautiful as I had imagined it, and as the bird took off I could envision him roasted and served with cornbread stuffing with cranberry sauce on the side, maybe a bottle of Johannesburg Reisling ... No, a brilliantly orchestrated shot like this calls for something really special: Hell, break out the champagne.
          Ah, but the shot. I was still using my old pumpgun then, and I somehow miscalculated the Coriolis effect on the ballistics of that shot. I knew I was in trouble when the third empty hit the ground and the bird hadn't even been bothered by the noise.
          Looking back, I suppose that if I had made a clean, quick shot, the event wouldn't be as memorable as it is here nine years later. But sitting on a railroad tie that day, staring out at the spot where no brown feathers floated in the sunlight, it was difficult to see things quite that way. I contemplated some of the unanswerable questions of grouse hunting, chief among them how I could go about kicking myself in the pants.
          Overconfidence.
          I shook my head. Maybe it was the cranberry sauce.

          There are some unfortunate people who go through their whole lives without ever seeing a ruffed grouse. I can understand that. What I cannot fathom is that of the folks who never see one, most could care less. This, after all, is the undisputed king of gamebirds, the thunderbird of the Northeast, the bird who has inspired more outdoor literature than any other topic you might name. This is what Hal Borland called "...a kind of embodied spirit of the open woodlands..." He lives among yet apart from men, unthreatened by progress and civilization, actively thumbing his nose at man and man's attempts to tame, manage, or (and I can personally vouch for this one) hunt him.
          The grouse is thought to be intelligent. Actually, his I.Q. is only a bit higher than that of a barnyard chicken. But what brains he has are those of a burglar alarm—He is wary, and survives not by wits but by the hair trigger that releases the thunderous burst of speed. The grouse is as quick and as smart as he needs to be to survive nature's woodland predators, but what gets him past the load of chilled number eights of his unnatural enemy is, as often as not, the unexpected and unnerving sound of his take off. Felt as much as heard, the extravaganza that is a grouse's flush invites comparison to a clap of thunder. If it had been the woodland Indians rather than the tribes of the Southwest that had given our language the term "thunderbird", I believe it would now be synonymous with the ruffed grouse rather than the eagle.
          Think about it: The grouse accelerates with a jackrabbit quickness, but so do many other gamebirds. His speed, while nothing to scoff at, is an illusion of limited space and distance, not unlike the scampering mouse that has only to cover the three feet between the refrigerator and the stove. Viewed objectively, then, a flushing grouse seems a quick though not terribly difficult mark. Ah, but grouse survive, since there is no such thing as a hunter viewing a grouse flush objectively—Everybody goes berserk at that never-quite-expected roll of thunder. The sudden clatter breaks the quiet and seems to scream to the hunter, "Shoot fast! I'm outta here!"
          It works. There can be no other reason why a hunter why shoots well enough to take nearly every pheasant that flushes and two of every three decoying ducks should end up three for 37 on grouse. Why else does a man who has hunted grouse all his life sometimes fire his gun before it gets to his shoulder? What other reason could there be for the statistic that most grouse taken fall less than fifteen yards from the hunter? The sound of a grouse's take off by-passes the hunter's ears and goes straight to the part of his mind where his primordial instincts and knee-jerk reactions dwell. After twenty years, I still haven't figured a way to get it under control. If I ever do, I'll switch to something more exciting, like catching live wolverines with a pasta fork, or maybe cliff diving in Acapulco.

          It's popular to build-up whatever it might be that you're expounding upon by running down things that rival the subject. That's easy. But to distill something down and label and properly classify the very essence of it all without knocking something else takes some doing. In the case of grouse hunting, somebody did it for me:
          I take George out once each season. Now, understand that George actually reads Scientific American, (As opposed to me who can't even understand the cartoons or the captions under the pictures.) but it has never helped his shooting. We were in the Granby Cafe, pretending our feet didn't feel like lead. George was on his third Ballentine Ale label, the previous two having been forced up under his thumbnail. He was mumbling just above the incoherency level: "Seven...eight if you count the one that flew behind the gas station."
          "Wuzzat?" I wasn't doing much better.
          "Seven shots. We had seven clean shots today. How come we got skata?" (George is Greek. If he was Mexican, what we'd have gotten would have been zanga. If he was Polish, it would have been guvna. French; merde. I think you've got the picture.)
          "We're getting better, George. Hell, last year when I took you out, we went oh-for-eleven."
          He refused to take any comfort from that fact. "There were plenty of birds—there always are. We hunted hard. We had chances—points, even. If I had just shot a little better, I could have had a limit." He shook his head. "I'm a good shot. How can it be that every situation is so easy to screw up?"
          I smiled. He was seeing things much more clearly than I had given him credit for. "It's always that way—you'll get shots just about every time out. It's easy to get addicted to it."
          "Is it catchy? I mean, I don't like to like something as much as I'm liking grouse hunting."
          What George was trying to say, although he didn't realize it at the time, was that the birds will be there—You'll get shots. Nobody sets them up shooting gallery fashion for you, of course, but the shots will be there. Each will challenge your shooting skills and your nerves, and success is entirely up to you. Always. And at the end of the day, there is always that nagging little voice that some call hunter's pride that reminds you that if you had shot just a little better...

Thunderbird hunting is serious fun. Serious, as opposed to woodcock shooting, which is fun fun, or popping away at crows, which is incidental fun. All are good times, but some require more concentration than others. Grouse hunters, the earnest ones, take their fun seriously enough to learn from their mistakes, and the mistakes aren't always the kind that hit you in the face: It can be a matter of nothing happening when something should. Learning the bird's habits and knowing the coverts pays rewards, but there are maddening, almost superstitious elements involved in grouse hunting that are facts without scientific explanation: There are streaks of hit birds that fly on, streaks of just plain lousy shooting, and (thankfully) occasional streaks of spectacular hits and "can't miss" days. Some days all the birds will hold close, (Usually when you're in the middle of one of the above mentioned lousy shooting streaks.) and on others, although you move a bunch, you only hear them. Some days all the birds will run, on others they'll all be in trees, on still others they'll all be in Patagonia. And chiseled in stone somewhere is the greatest grouse hunting mystery of all: If a hunter has taken one grouse less than a limit, he will most assuredly get an easy shot at one more bird. But, if he permits himself to think the term "limit" just once, he shall unequivocally blow the shot. Serious fun, but not the sort of sport that appeals to a man who insists upon tangible problems with tangible solutions.

Grouse hunting is different. It's more than just bird shooting with trees. It's a sport steeped in tradition, one where the most important rules are those the participants make for themselves. It's becoming intimate with the topography of the places you hunt, and the reward, once in a while, of knowing exactly where a bird is heading when he flushes that-a-way. It's steeling yourself for the surprise of a flush, then kicking yourself when your nerves aren't equal to the challenge. It's pursuit, and putting into practice the theories you've devised, and then the satisfaction, no matter how elementary, of proving yourself right. Grouse hunting is a sport where bag limits are all but unknown ideals, and the thrill of a single grouse in the game pocket of a shooting vest is a singular thrill few men ever get used to. And mostly, it's fun.
But serious fun.

          I wasn't really having a good time. The rain had stopped, but in the woods it didn't really matter—you're going to get soaked anyway. Under my rainshirt I had already sweated myself wet, and the rain had begun to make inroads into my boots. The day had gone about as you'd expect.
          At the edge of an old pasture I stood catching my breath after a tedious climb out of a valley where I had found woodcock on other days. Today, unlike me, they had enough sense to get out of the rain. At that point, I was looking forward to getting back to the truck: In the words of Flip Wilson, "When you're not having any fun, it ain't no fun." There were a few old apple trees edging the pasture. The one directly in front of me still clung to most of its leaves, blackened and withered though they were. After I had stood there for a few moments, a grouse roared out of the tree, heading past me and downhill, and although I swung on him he was gone before I could pull the trigger. Another followed two seconds behind the first, and though I pulled on him, I was distracted as I shot by the thunder of yet a third bird passing barely five feet over my left shoulder. A moment later a fourth bird elected to follow the edge of the pasture, going out on the far side of the tree—No chance. After a long two seconds, a fifth grouse followed the path of the first, dodging behind a cedar as he left the apple tree and just plain out-flying my ability to swing the gun quickly enough to get in front of him.
          Early in the season, especially on miserable days like this one was, grouse sometimes flock-up in what might be family groups. Caught in a tree, they flush like a string of Chinese firecrackers, and are just about as unstoppable once the first one is "lit off". Under ordinary circumstances, the odds at their best don't come close to favoring the grouse hunter: Flush three birds and the first will only be heard, the second will offer no chance at a shot, and the opportunity at the third is rarely easy. One out of four is fair shooting, which figures to roughly one bird taken for every dozen moved, and even that seems a liberal estimate. Unquestionably, there isn't enough "hunt" in grouse hunting to go out solely for the sake of the birds you might bring home.
          Why, then? What words might a man use to explain to someone how the hunt can become more meaningful than the kill? There's a proverb that says some things in life are destinations, others are journeys. If you know that, you need no explanation, and if you doubt, none will do. There are thrills along the way in hunting this violent and elusive bird, genuine thrills that stem from using hard gained knowledge to make something happen exactly the way you'd planned it. Thrills, too, that come of the realization that on some days you happen to the grouse, and on other days the grouse happen to you.
          Go back for a moment to that waterlogged hunter standing by the pasture apple tree with one shell left in his gun. Stop the clock. Ask him, "What will you take for the chance that there isn't a sixth bird in that tree, ready to blast out of there in the next couple of seconds?" His answer? "Have all the tea in China bailed and ready on the dock... Naw, never mind—Just get out of the way when that bird flies. My gun's been half way to my shoulder for the past ten heartbeats."
          Thrills. There were only five grouse in that tree in Bondsville. They were the only five birds I saw all day. But when I sat down to supper two hours later, those glorious ten seconds filled my conversation and my thoughts, and the previous six uneventful hours might never have happened. It's a strange and unfortunate commentary on our lives, but it usually takes the passage of time for us to realize how happy we were at a particular time. If you're a grouse hunter, you know that that's not the case in the fall when you're hunting the thunderbird: You and I are addicted, and, unlike George, we like to like something this much.

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This site was last updated 09/22/06