It had been four long months since I’d rolled off my roof, breaking my femur, doing damage to my knee on the same side, and dislocating my right elbow with nearby fractures. I knew that what I was doing wasn’t smart, but I couldn’t not go.
Pheasants would be stocked on the game land nearest my house.
I took my oldest dog, Jamie, my shotgun and ammo, and set off resolutely from the parking area. I hoped to get through the upper fields and into back areas where there would be fewer hunters.
I had to stop and rest a couple times, under pines, as it had started to sleet and then snow. Jamie, his 12-year-old eyebrows gray, gamboled like a puppy once he realized where we were. Steadily we made progress, and I didn’t let myself think about the long walk back.
Then the stocking truck, followed by a game warden, passed us. We waited for the vehicles to come back past us, then I limped forward again.
It wasn’t long before Jamie was on point to my right. I inched through the cover, but the pheasant took off running, stopping in cover. I tapped Jamie forward and he carefully moved up, morphing again in a point. The bird ran again, but didn’t go far before flying.
Shouldering my gun and firing felt, well, wonderful. Seeing the bird tumble, rewarding. Seeing the years fall away as my old dog ran like a happy puppy to get the retrieve….magical. He delivered the bird, spun away and went back to hunting.
His second find was a hen, she ran then flew, we let her go. On his next point as I approached the cock bird volunteered up and flew right at me. I had to let it go over me, turn and fire. Luckily, it also dropped but was flapping a bit, making it easy for Jamie to find.
I unloaded my gun, jammed the two dead birds into my vest, gathered up Jamie and started the long walk. The birds steadily got heavier, and rests were more frequent. I know I was limping badly by the time we neared the parking lot.
We ran into another hunter, who was just starting out, and I asked him to take our picture. In many ways it had been a long journey to that moment, I journey that had started maybe two decades prior with my first German shorthaired pointer, the late Josey Wales. Jamie is his son.
We were hunting stocked birds, but as I drove home, I remembered the first pheasant Josey Wales and I got. We were hunting wild pheasants in South Dakota. I’d been an archery hunter for many years, loved dogs for longer – learning to hunt with dogs had taken the thrill of hunting to a new level.
Of all the game I’d hunted, what memories stood out the most? As I drove, my mind shot through images. Bumping up a rough road in a beat-up truck to a dark mountaintop in Montana, to hear my first elk bugle – the hair standing up on my neck. Watching moose locked in combat, lurching and branch-busting like tanks staggering through the Maine woods.
Watching through binoculars as one of a group of running pronghorns gracefully sat and tipped into the soft dirt of the Colorado desert, the fletching of my arrow still visible. The awesome heart-shape to the antlers of my first big buck, lying on his side on a bed of needles in a young forest of planted pines in Alabama.
Then another image came to mind – Josey’s first wild pheasant. For a full day we’d hunted fruitlessly, helplessly, as he bumped the wild birds again and again.
On the third morning, we had fixed it, learning to work into the wind. One morning, in the brush along the edges of a standing sorghum field, both of us realized there were birds moving between us. Our eyes met, and that knowledge passed between us. Without sound, we moved in an ancient dance, sneaking and blocking, working together, until Josey pinned the point.
I’ll always see those pheasants, rising, left to right out, bursting out of the cover like thrown paint. Yes, the birds I was taking home today weren’t wild birds, but that didn’t matter to Jamie or me. I’d let him ride in the front seat, so I could pet him from time to time.
Before I took my first shorthair puppy home, I used to sit and watch Josey and his littermates sleeping. Before they could walk, before they could see, they ran in their sleep, their little brows furrowing, their noses twitching. I used to watch them and wonder – what could they be dreaming?
For generations, we hunters have pursued game with dogs. Like us, many of those dogs are heirs to a long ago past, born already sharing our best dreams.
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