March is possibly my least favorite month. The worst of winter is usually over, but that doesn’t mean it’s socks-with-sandals weather just yet.
I needed a little reset and a reminder that winter is nearly done. I’ve recently been writing about my English setter Jack, who died more than a decade ago and thought maybe a hunting story is what I needed this time of year.
We lived in Idaho during Jack’s first two hunting seasons, and he cut his teeth on Columbian sharptails at Curlew National Grassland.
One fall day we started out across a broad field that was a mixture of waist-high grain and weeds that gave way to native grassland and sagebrush steppe. The southeasterly diagonal path we followed led toward an unnamed peak in the North Hansel Mountains. Curlew is a bit of an oddity. The valley floor is managed by the Forest Service but the high ground in the North Hansels is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Curlew was upside down that way.
As we worked up the foot of the mountain Jack grew increasingly birdy. The grouse were moving, pretty hard based on Jack’s pace.
As we walked a covey of six or eight birds flushed long, flying beyond the foot of the mountain. Jack worked the uphill diagonal another 100 yards, then turned hard right and went on point. I hustled to catch up with my dog. I got close, but as I walked up behind Jack the covey flushed long.
This wasn’t a covey, however, but rather an alliance of four or five. There might have been 50 birds, flushing in one broad rise, beyond gun range. It was all rather unsporting of them.
Jack broke with the birds and who could blame him with all those flushing sharpies right out in front of his nose? He didn’t just break, he launched out of his point like Usain Bolt on the blocks.
He sprinted about 30 yards, right into a second covey, this one even bigger. Maybe 100 birds.
That flush broke Jack’s focus on the escaping birds. He stopped, quartered around, then looked back at me with the head-cocked, confused expression he often flashed when he was young.
Having stirred up every sharptail from here to Utah, my wild child finally returned to my side. I sat him down, urged him to drink, and made him stay, for a spell, so he could gather himself and think about all the bad things he’d done.
Rested and settled, Jack rose as we prepared to move back into the wind.
He was birdy again. Jack put his nose on the ground and plowed a zig-zagged furrow through the dried grass.
I pushed to keep up with him in what was feeling more and more like a pheasant hunt. But the more I began to doubt there could possibly be a running sharpie out in front of us, the more insistent Jack became. His nose never left the ground as his slicing turns on the scent trail got sharper, more direct. He was moving like a seismograph recording the big one just as California meets its inevitable end and slides into the sea.
We’d worked through maybe a quarter mile, edging along a fence line that marked the end of the plain and the beginning of the North Hansel escarpment. Jack’s nose whirred sharply, left then right, and the rest of his body followed.
Maybe it was a draw we crossed, maybe it was the fence line, though that’s a boundary humans recognize, not sharpies. Jack turned to our right and down the draw and without a point, the bird flushed.
It was far, but not too far. I swung with the bird’s flight and pulled the trigger. A clean shot knocked it down. That was our lone bird that day.
It will be fall before you know it.