A Grouse Hunter’s Almanac: The Other Kind of Hunting

Empty Hulls

90 Empty Hulls My English setter hopped out of the woods and onto the trail in front of me. His nose halfway to the ground, the dog turned and retreated back into the popple. I tensed my fingers around the fore end and trigger guard of my shotgun. Seconds passed, no bird flushed, and the dog reappeared, covering ground quickly. I loosened my grip and continued forward down the trail. Every autumn, I return to this cover, even though it has matured well past its bird-holding prime and some of the aspens are now as thick as my waist. Still the place has special meaning for me, so I return every October for at least one annual visit. I shot one of my first grouse here with a singleshot 12-gauge the year Susan and I were married—at the time it was the only gun we owned and could afford. With its thirty-inch barrel and modified choke, it was decidedly not a classic grouse or woodcock gun. I bought it in high school with paper route money, and occasionally down through the years I hit a bird with it. Even though I shot that grouse almost twenty years ago 91 and can still see it fall, to this day I’m shocked that I actually hit it and it fell. Walking the same road years later, I carried a sleek gun, an Englishstocked over-and-under, the kind of gun I dreamed about as a kid. It was a birthday gift from my wife, and, although I dearly love the gun and the thought behind the gun, I can’t say that I enjoy the hunting any more now than when I was a kid shooting a used singleshot. Back on the trail I reminisced about old guns and long-dead dogs and birds. A shotgun blasted behind us, down the trail back toward our truck parked at the gate, bringing me back to the world at hand. It sounded like a hunter was following us in. There was only one way into the woods, the logging road we were on, so whoever was behind us was coming in over our tracks. He or she had to know I was another hunter—the kennel in my truck, the Ruffed Grouse Society stickers, the half-empty box of shells on the dash. I was a bit peeved, an unjustified selfishness on my part. Even though we were on public land, I wanted the place to myself. I picked up my pace, hoping to put some distance between us. Five minutes after that first shot, a barrage erupted behind us. It began with two shots, then the semiautomatic salute—one, two, three, four, five shots in rapid succession , the first shell still in the air before the final is fired. I couldn’t help but recite the five Ms: one shot meat, two shots maybe, three shots miss, four shots moron, five shots might as well go home. I stepped up my pace again until we arrived at a large cutting, which we slipped into and headed due north bushwhacking toward the river a half mile distant. Empty Hulls 92 We eventually outdistanced these hunters (I figured they had to be plural with all of the shooting), but now and again throughout the morning we heard them blazing away. Perhaps they were just target shooting, but the shots kept moving around, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away. With all the firing, they must have carried a couple of boxes of shells each into the woods. At one point I thought we had rid ourselves of their presence, and then they let go another barrage, sounding like it was a quarter mile away as the grouse flies. Despite their nagging presence, we had a good hunt that day. My notes about that day say we came home with a pair of grouse and three woodcock in a little over three hours of hunting. A few hundred yards from my truck on the walk out, we came across five red shell casings scattered across the logging road, still smelling sweetly of gunpowder. The evidence of that first barrage, the semiautomatic salute. The 12-gauge shells were cheap game loads. They were loaded with #8 shot—not a bad choice for woodcock and grouse. I picked them up—a habit—and pocketed them. They weren’t worth reloading...