Looking for the MotherLode…

The end of October had arrived and the gang had left. It was prospecting time, which means searching for new grouse cover. It’s done every year, usually after all the friends have left. There’s no use dragging them around the wilds to places that may or may not hold birds. Sometimes the terrain gets mighty rough in our rugged neck of the woods and exploring what might be birdless cover isn’t always appreciated. Good grouse cover can go from prime to thin-pickens in about ten years, so it is always necessary to be prospecting for new coverts.

      The clear cut showed up on Google Earth and was back in a section of country that’s been full of grouse the last few years. The cut covered probably two hundred acres, but hid behind a stand of thick softwood trees, so it wasn’t readily visible from the logging road. All that, and fourteen miles from the nearest asphalt in some mighty rugged terrain made it seem promising and maybe even un-hunted.

      It would be one of the last hunts of the year, so I let all three dogs out for the hunt. Pandemonium can be fun. From where we parked a skid trail turned into snowmobile road, wide as a thruway, that seemed to run upward forever. It passed softwoods to the left while a stream gurgled in a gully filled with hardwoods to the right. When the softwoods gave way the cutting looked enormous. We trekked to the top and an old road continued into the shade of mature hardwoods.  The view back across the forested valley was stunning.

The nearest paved road is over those hills.

      The cutting probably was two years old with relatively easy walking between the poplar and maple sprouts. The loggers had taken away all of the tree tops, leaving the ground relatively clean. Wet spots were covered with grass and moose tracks. Sprouts crowned the hardwood stumps, but most weren’t shoulder height. Wild raspberries grew everywhere. It really wasn’t good grouse cover yet.

      The dogs and I hunted along the top of the cutting and then down the west side.  It didn’t look too encouraging, with no softwoods to offer shelter for the birds, but ahead and about halfway down the slope I could see softwoods left behind by the logging operation.

      Approaching, I noticed a small knoll covered with softwoods.

      Now I love knolls, because grouse love knolls. What better place to sit and collect morning sunshine and survey the surroundings. No matter which way danger approaches, the grouse has a downhill escape route that leaves them out of sight in the blink of an eye.

 

Chara on a bird.

    About then I wished my friends hadn’t all left for those flat lands to the south. Approaching the hump the dogs’ bells eagerly rang. And then I could hear the birds accelerating off the far side. There were at least four. If only someone could have been standing on the far side, it would have been like one of those European driven hunts.

      On the other side of that little hill the cutting opened up again with scattered softwood clumps further down the slope. Stopping for a moment, I tried to guess where I would go if I were a grouse and picked an open alley that led downhill into a softwood swamp.

      At the edge of the spruce and fir thicket my oldest German wirehair, Chara, locked up on point, almost completely hidden by young waist-high fir trees.

      A bird busted out wild.  Missed. Opening the gun to reload, a second bird rocketed after the first.

      Encouraging the dogs on, Colby, my youngest wirehair, pointed a grouse sitting about twelve feet off the ground in a yellow birch.  It flew on my approach, sailing away ahead of a swarm of shot…those birds coming out of trees are devilishly hard to hit.

      The woods got thicker, with blown down fir trees and nearly impenetrable clusters of young ones. Pushing through, it was impossible to see my feet. All three dogs became birdy, pressing under the tangles that I was forced to climb over.  Each dog wanted to find the birds first.

Colby coming out of the
thicket with the bird
Georgia pointed.

      I couldn’t locate Georgia, the young German shorthair, but then spotted her frozen about eight feet in front of Colby, who was honoring. The thick green fir boughs almost buried both of them. Before I could get within twenty yards of the dogs the grouse rumbled upward and a reflex made my gun fire. It was a prayer shot, but I saw a bird’s wing flutter…maybe. With the softwoods so thick a dead bird might get caught up in a branch and never hit the grouse. The dogs had disappeared.

      And then Colby came pushing through the brush with the bird in her mouth. What a great sight.

Georgia checking out the
grouse she pointed.

      We hunted down the hill, moving three more grouse, but killing none. Coming out of the swamp into the more open clearcut Chara pointed and a woodcock flew up on my approach. Twisting among the branches of two fir trees, it quickly escaped.

      We went back the next year and I brought my friends. I wish all my prospecting trips turned out that successful.

The gang, Georgia, Colby, and Chara, taking a break
beside a logging road.

My Boss

At first I just knew Jim as the boss, or officially as the Director of Operations, in charge of all the logging on Brown Company’s 600,000 acres. After a couple of years I’d worked my way up the ladder until he was my direct supervisor.

Don’t ask dumb questions, work hard, work long, and run the job as if it were your own, that’s how I’d been brought up. I knew little about Jim and tried to do my best, running the first mechanical tree harvesting operation in New Hampshire.

Our feller-buncher cut two stems a minute, all day long, and the whole tree chipper roared through a hundred cords of hardwoods a day, turning trees into woodchips to make paper. What grouse cover we created! Poplar would regenerate from the roots to be six feet tall or more in two seasons.

A young Brittany spaniel named Zac waited at home for me every night. That dog knew more about bird hunting than me and had little patience for my lack of experience. Feeling bad for the dog, and to stop him from eating the house, I started to take him to work with me. Eventually, I learned Jim had a German shorthair at home and liked to do a little bird hunting too.

When he would stop by the jobsite, he’d pat the dog’s head and ask how Zac was doing that day. After a year or two, the company gave me a truck to use. Anyone who’s visited a logging site can tell you what serious mud is and we’d make the kind that sucks your boots off your feet. A four-wheel-drive truck barely could waddle through.

Zac always managed to keep a healthy layer of this mud inside that truck. When Jim visited the job site he often would slide into the truck, unfazed by the mud, to ask about production. Any other boss would have told me to leave Zac at home.

I left the company after a few years, searching for whatever young men search for. A couple of decades later I found Jim’s home and went to knock on the door. He was inside on his knees with his back to the entry, fixing a screen door that lay on the floor. When I knocked, he yelled without turning, “Come in.”

I stepped in and said, “Jerry Allen here.”

He got up and said, “Jesus Christ, just last week I was trying to remember what the hell you last name was.”

We caught up on our lives, and then talked of dogs and guns. The following fall he came hunting with me, not carrying a gun, but just to see the dogs work. A year later we shot together at the Groveton Rod and Gun Club and he followed the dogs through the woods again. On almost every trip north, no matter what the season was, I’d stop in to talk dogs and guns, and every fall he’d ask about the birds. But time works against all of us.

It got harder for him to move about. During a tumble at the club, he broke the stock of a beloved old Ithaca. He got a price from a gunsmith to have it repaired, but the cost was way too steep. I took the gun back to my shop and did a less than cosmetically perfect mend, but at least the gun was useable.

His shooting ultimately stopped, as did the trips to watch the dogs work. He kept talking about going again, but the body was tired. We’d still talk dogs and guns, and I’d learn a thing or two and we’d share a laugh.

The last time I visited he said little, and sometimes forgot where a sentence was headed before he got half way through. When about to leave, I said something about us old bird hunters having to stick together, and that brought a smile to his face.

Now he gets confused and often doesn’t know where he is. Hell, that happens to me all the time bird hunting. But he may not be with us much longer, so that is sad. He’s a tough old coot though and the body doesn’t give up.

I hope that lifetime of memories he collected is still going around in his head.

*

I wrote this several years ago not long before Jim passed. I learned a lot from the man and miss his stories.

A January Thaw

January is a bit confused. The temperatures have been in the forties and low fifties the last few days and dipped to the upper thirties at night. That certainly isn’t the usual January weather, but it has happened before.

     The snow in the woods has settled and firmed up to the point where grouse won’t leave tracks. Down under the softwood trees, in the flat along the stream, we still see deer tracks and squirrel tracks. Usually there are snowshoe hare tracks, but apparently their big feet don’t leave impressions in the dense snow. Last week, when the snow wasn’t so solid, fisher tracks wound along the edge of the flat where the land starts to climb.

     Rain fell all last night and much of yesterday. During a break in the precipitation our young dog and I walked down to look at the stream, but it was out of its banks and the entire forest floor was flooded, making it impossible to walk anywhere near the stream bed.

     I am certain the grouse were safely up in the trees watching the water flow beneath them. The day before a grouse flushed from the edge of the softwoods when we walked down the hill. Our youngest wirehair, Maggie, always seems to find one somewhere, so they are around.

These green ferns were buried in the snow before the
January thaw. In winter grouse seem to love green anything.

     This afternoon the dogs and I walked up the hill and made a circle around the east end of our property where the forest crowds the driveway. Under a canopy of softwoods, Maggie locked up on point, much to my surprise. The thick boughs of the spruce and fir trees had thinned the snow enough so green ferns covered the nearly bare ground. When I took a step ahead a grouse exploded from a blown down fir tree, heading southward to cross our driveway. Great fun.

     Tomorrow will be colder and the long range forecast is for bitter weather again. Let’s hope deep roosting snow comes with the cold weather.

     New England weather is never dull.