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Wings of Thunder by Steven MulakWINGS OF THUNDERNew England Grouse Hunting Revisited
Among the things I seem to have been repeating all of my life are that there isn’t very much of anything worthwhile that I didn’t learn from a book. Wings of Thunder is a tip-of-the-hat to one such book; New England Grouse Shooting by William Harnden Foster, published in 1940. The book is a classic dissertation on bird hunting, replete with lovely pen & ink illustrations. Although Mr. Foster was dead before I was born, I learned a great deal from him, and as a homage to his classic I used his chapter titles as subtitles in my grouse shooting book, and filled it with Foster quotes. William Harnden Foster wrote of hunting locally, and in his book grouse hunters load their guns on their back steps. Today, there is not one place (that I could find) in William Harnden Foster’s hometown where I could not see a house or building in every direction I looked. New England has changed in the 60-odd years since Foster’s time, and yet, bird hunting has remained essentially the same: dogs still need to be trained, coverts need to be found and searched out, shots are taken and usually missed, and men become addicted to the thunder of grouse wings. That unchanging aspect of grouse hunting was my point of departure. It would be difficult to embellish the points already made by Foster (and others) so I didn’t try. Instead, I addressed the things that had changed about bird hunting in the past 60 years—plastic shotgun shells, Velcro and nylon, the universality of the automobile, modern conservation ideas, and (in the cooking chapter) refrigeration. As I do in all of my books, I mixed in everything that ever happened to me while grouse hunting—or at least, everything that I could remember. Stories are amusing, but I try to insure that each carries a nugget of information as well. The chapter on cooking (The Other Side of the Coin—the bird on the table) generated more fan mail than anything else I’ve ever written. The book was published in 1998 in an edition of 3000 copies. Wings of Thunder appeared in the publishers Christmas catalogue (their big sales pitch of each year) for its first year, then was gone from the inventory after completely selling out within months of publication. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, Country sport did not elect to reprint the book, and still won’t. As with all my books, if you’d like an autographed copy, please contact me—I still have a few copies. As often as not, people buy books for someone else, and I’ve been asked to write something nice about that person in the flyleaf. I’m always glad to do that sort of thing.
What appears below is an excerpt from the chapter on grouse hunting methods entitled Pursuit, Playing the Wind, and Paying Attention.
People who don’t know will look into the woods from the road and say, “Gee, it looks thick in there.” Underbrush grows thickest, of course, at the edges of the cover where the sunlight can get at it. Once inside the thick stuff thins out and the walking is easier. From a grouse hunting standpoint each cover is comparable to a loaf of rye bread: There is the inside, the outside, and, most importantly of all, the crust. The birds are the caraway seeds—they’re in the thick stuff that’s the crust. Walking a wood road, you are on the outside of the covert. Birds in the crust will flush to the inside, presenting you with long shots of the kind you might get on the trap range, except with trees. The crust is the place to be, but when it becomes too thick (and this has nothing to do with being macho, but rather with being able to flush and shoot at birds) you’re better off walking just to the inside so that you might get cross shots. Grouse hunting literature abounds with advice. Some of it even sounds good: "If you bag a grouse, check the contents of his crop, and hunt where that food grows." Now, on the surface, that sounds pretty good to me—They didn't catch Willie Sutton, the notorious bank robber, by staking out hardware stores, after all. But the species of ruffed grouse is as successful not because they're selective diners, but because they are not: They eat just about anything that grows or moves. An outdoor writer who perpetuates that sort of thinking is guilty of a slick generalization of the sort that makes me wonder if he has ever really tried it himself, or if he’s merely repeating something he’s heard elsewhere. You and I could start now and end up a week from Sunday and still not list all the things grouse eat. None of them would be found outside the grouse covert. Maybe that bears repeating, because it speaks to the “hunt for food” school of thought: Grouse don’t eat anything that is found outside a grouse covert. The whole reason they live in grouse coverts is because they don't have to think about food: The pantry is always full. You won’t find grouse in commercial apple orchards or vineyards, even though apples and grapes are famous grouse foods. There’s no cover there. My advice to the hunter is to search not for grouse food, but for grouse cover—that's where the birds are. There are some “grouse specific” things we all do that, for the most part, we’re unaware of. In Kansas quail country the brush lines contain Osage-Orange trees. (I’ve never heard a anyone from Kansas refer to them as anything but “hedge trees”, and more often it’s “those damn hedge trees” since they tend to invade pastures.) Osage-Orange is only remotely connected to the presence of quail, but because they have the same growth pattern as do wild apple trees, I find I hunt to them. I’m sure a genuine quail hunter would fault me for what I’m doing, but I can’t help myself: The grouse hunter in me is addicted to apple trees, and it somehow unconsciously applies itself to anything that looks like an apple. My father is knowledgeable about the ways of pheasants: “Early on they move out of roost cover and take grit, so look for them here; Then they do such-and-such, so hunting won’t be productive unless you do so-and-so…” When Dad and I hunted together we regularly shared the profits of his insight. After 30 years of chasing the thunderbird I hoped I’d be able to offer up some similar chestnuts of wisdom regarding his habits as they pertain to the time of day, but if there’s any consistency to them they’re still a mystery to me. Supposedly they feed heavily just before they go to roost, but I’ve taken birds with full crops at nine in the morning and empty crops a half hour before sunset. I’ve taken feeding birds in a heavy rain and roosting birds in the middle of a lovely day. Other men write about feeding patterns, and I’ve made a lifelong effort to identify them, but if grouse feed according to a pattern it’s one with a lot of exceptions to it. It seems that they do what they feel like doing when they fell like doing it. Excerpt from chapter 9: Do we Really Need All This Stuff? Grouse Shooting Outfits:
In the Smithsonian—at least on the day I visited—they had the open briefcase of Adli Stevenson. It was from the period when he was our ambassador to the United Nations. All his stuff was on display, and right in there with documents stamped “classified” and his UN identification badge was an ordinary Papermate pen, a pair of reading glasses from Woolworth’s, and a roll of Tums. I remember thinking that this man—this hero—was a practical and efficient person, at least so far as any conclusion could be drawn by the spilled contents of something as personal as a working briefcase. I would hope that someone would be able to draw a similar conclusion about you and I if he examined our hunting stuff: These grouse hunters may have been a strange bunch, but they weren’t fussy because all their stuff seems function-specific. Back when I went to sea the fellows who worked out on deck wanted no part of trendy outdoor clothes. To a man, they all had raingear that was so heavy it was nearly bulletproof and cold weather gear that meant business, but it kept them warm and dry and lasted for years. They didn’t mind spending the money for good stuff, just so long as the gear worked. Every bird hunter walks a similar line: Is this too much money for this vest or that pair of boots? You and I don’t want cheap junk, but then again, we don’t want to pay extra just because of a famous name on the label. 60 years ago Foster wrote of the best stuff available for hunting clothes during his day: Good army duck and briar-turning facings of kangaroo leather. At this end of the 20th century we have Ambush cloth and polypro fleece and Worsterlon and Cordura nylon and Thinsulate and a dozen other synthetics that are tough enough to stand up to seasons of wear and have the advantage of being able to be thrown in the washing machine. There are classicists who still go afield wearing tweeds, but (with all apologies to the sheep ranchers of America) it is possible that I may never again buy anything made of wool. For a pragmatist who’s interested in performance and comfort, the new synthetics are superior in every way—and they don’t itch. I’m hardly on the cutting edge of innovation, but I like ‘em. When I look at all my stuff, there are a few luxury items here and there. Oh, I don’t mean something like a cashmere lined hunting vest. No. When it comes to hunting gear, a luxury item has a different definition: It is something that you don’t have to think about. Luxury is a second good knife so that you don’t need to keep switching your favorite between your duck hunting gear and your bird vest. I know for sure that a second pair of good boots is a luxury. I don’t mean a pair that are nearly worn out but are too good to throw away. No. Those are “emergency spares”. Luxury is a second pair, every bit as good as the first, but for wear on alternate days or days when the first pair is still a bit damp. In reality, you and I don't need two pair of boots, but they're a terrific insurance policy when tucked behind the seat of the truck—A guarantee that no matter what happens in the morning, the afternoon is going to be okay. There are really only two kinds of grouse hunting hats: Those that stay on your head (good hats) and those that won’t (bad hats). If you have to take your hand off your gun to hold your hat on your head in thick cover, you’ve got a bad hat. It doesn’t matter that it’s the one you were wearing on the day you went 5 for 5 or even that it’s a hand-me-down from Burton Spiller himself. If it won’t stay on your head it’s a bad hat. Get rid of it.
This site was last updated 07/21/06 |
