Written By: Mathew Pankratz. Wisconsin Rapids, WI
I’ve always been a believer that things will work out in the end, but when you’re
struggling through, as I often am, making it to the end can feel daunting. To start the 2023
grouse hunting season, I had three weeks off and was looking to make the most of them. Birds
were plentiful and the weather good. Camping in a tent with just my setter, Cider, was
enjoyable, and we were finding plenty of young and fairly dumb birds. I was connecting with the
easy shots when I should and even the difficult ones were landing with way above average
consistency.
Then the third week came and the weather changed, and I started missing the hard
shots. We were still finding plenty of birds despite the orange army descending on the northern
third of the state and educating the birds. The easy shots started coming fewer and further
between. They were getting fewer in number and more wary, smarter. Good dog work wasn’t
enough to compensate and suddenly I was in a full blown slump. To add insult to the injury, I
got sick and the perfect dry weather was replaced with wet windy days.
My vacation ended with me spending a full day in some new covers and not finding very
many birds, only to blow the few shots I got. There is absolutely nothing more frustrating than
working an entire day, hiking fifteen miles, getting whipped in the face with branches, soaked
and cold all to pursue a bird that isn’t quite a meal, and then missing stupid simple shots. First
it’s forgetting to take the safety off, then it’s emptying the first barrel a little behind the bird, only
to due to a little ad hoc forestry clearing with the second barrel. Cider is a young dog, well bred,
with the kind of boundless energy only seen in small children and dogs, an ability to seemingly
go all day every day, but I could see the defeat in her eyes as we packed up and drove home.
The next couple chances I had to head back north were met with the same lack of
success. While we were seeing okay numbers of birds, I sure as hell wasn’t shooting any.
Cider was probably posting classifieds looking for someone who could hit the broad side of a
barn. After starting the season, rarely ending a day without at least one bird bagged and usually
two or three, to go on a two week streak of skunks was unnerving.
Something had to change or maybe fly tying season was going to start early this year.
I read some Spiller and Evans, and the always enjoyable Ford (Cider is named after one
of his dogs, actually), looked at old photos and did my best to avoid seeing the success
everyone else was having on Facebook. Envy Green is a bad color on a bird hunter. I had to
pause and reflect on whether this was karmic punishment for bragging about the crazy shots I’d
managed to pull off earlier in the season, I always suspected that would bite me in the ass. I
even spent fifteen minutes each day practicing shouldering my shotgun as quick as I could,
something I always do pre-season to refresh that muscle memory, but have never felt the need
to do mid-season.
When I finally had a day off and the chance to get up to an area I knew had birds I
dragged myself from bed at eight am, questioning my choices as I did. The weather looked
good as I drove north on I39, but after turning onto HWY 8, the unofficial mason-dixon line of
good grouse hunting in the state, it looked a little dreary. We made our way back to the first
spot to try and it started raining in earnest as I got my boots on and let Cider down. Within
minutes of letting her go she went on point on the trail I was walking in on. Five grouse went up,
on the other side of some thick pines. I let one shot go with little hope of connecting, and I
wasn’t surprised when I didn’t. She bumped a couple birds in the rain and I was annoyed, so
we headed back to the truck to wait it out.
We fortunately didn’t have to wait long, the rain turned to mist and then into a dreary
overcast in the course of the next twenty minutes as we warmed up and made our way to the
next spot I thought looked good on the map.
This spot didn’t yield better results. Cider missed two birds along the trail just as we
were walking in, but they presented decent shots, but from my left side heading to the left. I still
took a shot at the second bird to rise and watched it keep flying up and away. Further into the
woods Cider went on point real near a nice big pine and the bird flushed before I got too close.
It was a decently open, if a bit long, shot, but it kept on flying again. We made our way back
through a loop that included a long walk through some mature oaks where I had plenty of time
to reflect on my mistakes, not having to worry about a bird getting up in front of me.
I typically hunt to get out of my head and just enjoy being outside. Now I was more
locked into my thoughts than ever, second guessing everything I know, and enjoying absolutely
nothing.
Our third stop of the day produced the best dog work, but similarly abysmal shooting.
We moved a few birds as we moved deep into the woods along a very overgrown old logging
road, but nothing I could even shoot at. When the road went from overgrown to nonexistent we
made a big loop back through some aspens that seemed probably a little too young to hold
anything but woodcock, so I was a little surprised when the bell stopped ringing and the GPS
said she was on point about 80 yards away.
When I got there she was holding steady, but when I moved in to flush the bird popped
up about thirty yards ahead of where she was holding, on the other side of a depression. The
bird rose in front of me nicely, but the distance and my surprise, and my sudden lack of skill
prevented me from connecting, again. We followed up on it, hoping I had maybe connected, but
found a trail at the top of the hillside it had been sitting on. On the other side of that hill was an
impressively steep drop off, steep enough that I had zero chance of making it down, and steep
enough that even Cider struggled to get back up it. We followed this ridge line back in the
direction of the truck. At one point Cider went on point just off the side of the trail but when I
moved in no bird flushed. Cider went to relocate and I dropped my guard, just in time for the
bird- a beautiful red phase bird, flushed practically underfoot from beside a jack pine. The bird
crossed right to left again, and should have been the easiest shot all day. I took one shot and
missed, and let it go, admiring it as it sailed down into the valley off the left side of the trail.
Cider doesn’t retrieve, but will happily point dead all day, but there was no world where I was
going to manage to climb down that hillside to retrieve anything and not have a heart attack
trying to climb back up.
The trail ended up coming out to the road I was parked along, so I had Cider working
both sides of it as I walked back to my truck, lamenting the consistency of my poor shooting. At
this point I think I’d moved onto the acceptance phase of my grieving. It was late afternoon now
and I knew I had just blown my best chance at shooting a bird all day, so I should probably
accept that it just wasn’t going to happen. She had a couple more points in the woods lining the
road, but despite a few more shots, things were looking really grim, but at least I wasn’t feeling
awful about it anymore.
It was already four o’clock when I got back to my truck and I’d walked eleven miles
already. It was time to go home
We followed the dirt road back to pavement and were almost back to Hwy 8 when I
spotted a small bit of “prime” aspen with what looked like a snowmobile trail running through it.
One last shot, I decided.
The trail started about a mile down the paved road, and came out on a side road a
hundred yards from the main road, so I figured we’d work our way back up to the other road and
then walk out on the pavement back to the truck, making for a short loop we could work in under
forty minutes, because with the overcast sky it was already getting noticeably darker, and I
really didn’t want to get too far from the trail and get lost in the dark. Done that once, not
recommended.
I let Cider go and started following the trail while she quartered back in forth in front of
me, working about seventy to a hundred yards into the woods on either side. She had one false
point that never resulted in anything, a rarity this season, but as we worked along the trail it
became clear that this wasn’t great cover. More marsh grass than anything, despite the proper
aged aspen and requisite stem density, there just didn’t seem like anything in the way of food
sources. Oh well, today wasn’t meant to be I decided.
As we came out to the road I was beat. Damp, cold, exhausted, and completely
disappointed. Then I realized that the bell stopped. Cider was on point. She’d looped back into
the woods a little further up the road, in some older aspen. I walked along the road, checking
the GPS to figure out exactly where she was.
I could see her about thirty yards into the woods, pointing parallel to the road, her tail
straight back, in a surprisingly open area. I could see her gums kind of ripple as she took scent
in through her nose and blew back out through her mouth. I’ve seen her do this many times and
there’s always a bird close when she does. Since it was so open I was able to loop around and
come at her face on.
Knowing this was absolutely my last chance I moved quickly and quietly until I got to
within ten yards and no bird had flushed, but I could see the energy rippling through her frozen
body as I stopped to glance around. No ground cover to speak of, just a little low grass
between me and her, but a mature oak and a rotted tree stump right next to it, and the dog
frozen just beyond that. I was questioning if this wasn’t going to be another false point, there
wasn’t anywhere for a bird to hide, but when I looked at her and how absolutely certain
something was there, I knew she couldn’t be wrong.
Before I could take another step the bird materialized from under the stump and flew
straight up and back over the dog. I snapped one shot off and missed. Too rushed, damnit. I
quickly collected myself and took a little more time with the second, and it connected. The bird
fell and Cider ran in to catch it. She picked it up once, dropped it and stood there sniffing it
while I moved in to collect our prize. After two weeks, probably more than a half dozen hunts,
two boxes of shells, over fifty miles on my boots and probably close to a hundred and fifty dog
miles, I’d finally connected, and over one of the best points I’ve gotten to witness the entire
season.
Suddenly I was ecstatic. Absolutely everything I’d been worried about and beating
myself up over didn’t matter. The saying is a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but I’d
watched dozens of birds fly happily back to the bush and a thousand more wouldn’t have been
worth that one in the hand on that particular day. Since that day I’ve gone back to shooting
normally, hitting and missing at normal levels. Maybe it was just an impressively long string of
bad luck and bad shooting, maybe it was fate. Who knows. Things do have a way of working
out in the end, you just have to persist long enough to find that end.
