DH STEINOUR
Bird Hunting with the Best
PA Pheasants over the Holidays
DH Steinour
‘It’ll be like old times’ read the text. I wasn’t so sure, but it felt alright to be back in Pennsylvania, drumming the dash of my soulless commuter sedan as I pulled into my folks’ driveway. I was thirty, a year when life can start to solidify like Jell-O setting up in a pan. I’d been blessed with a wife and a son with another on the way. Work was fine, I’d settled into a steady grind. Same for my friends, I’m assuming. My college buddies had scattered to the four winds, building families and careers of their own. Other than a sporadic reunion at a wedding or an update via email blurb or Christmas card, we weren’t great at keeping up. Today we would remedy that over blued steel and smoke.
Upon entering the house I saw my dad in long johns at the dining table, his over/under in his hands. ‘Beware the man with only one gun’, the saying goes, but I’ll up the ante: ‘beware the man with only one gun who lounges in thermal underwear’. We commented on the cold and the fact that it’d be even colder in the mountains. He was happy to be a grandpa, smiling as he asked about the boy back home. We loaded my car and set out for the western hills caped in snow.
The turnpike led us past decrepit towns and empty truck stops pockmarking folds in the Appalachians. The drive didn’t get dicey until the final half mile, with my car’s lawnmower engine whirring as we slid up the last snow-packed hill. Dave had just parked and he winked and fiddled with his camo Mossberg. It looked better suited for spring turkeys than ringnecks. I hadn’t seen him in four years, and he was in the middle of swapping careers and moving his family of five from Virginia to Ohio. You’d never know it from his subtle smile.
Inside, the farmhouse was warm with fogged-up windows and boisterous clamor. Mark and I had been roommates a decade ago in State College, but now he was married and had two babies and a career in Philly. He and the family were back at his folks’ farm for the holidays and I treated the occasion as a hunting opportunity. Mark’s big brother, Nate, started an upland hunting outfit years ago and I was eager to give him some business.
The hunters, Dad, Dave, Mark, and I, piled on layers and stashed chemical hand warmers and shotshells strategically like soldiers in a nuclear winter. We went out and convened in a milking parlor-turned storage barn to wait on big brother Nate. The idle moment let the group fall to ribbing and kidding like we met there every afternoon for the past year, with nary a whiff of reticence or distance. After 10 minutes, Mark jolted against the plastic crate he’d been leaning on, saying, “There’s a dog in there!” Sure enough, a gray-muzzled gundog sighed and stepped out and stretched, her spine crackling with age. Just then, Nate barged in and the dog flipped a switch, wagging, jumping, and whimpering at the sight of her master.
“Hey, Cindy! How you doin’ girl?” Nate crowed. “Yinz about ready?”
Big brother Nate was framed like a linebacker who did lumberjacking on the side, whereas Mark had a more bookish build. Nate was in guide mode, outlining instructions and plans, but the assembly of Little Brother & Co. drew out his mischievous smile and winking jabs. “We’ll start right out here by the pond, and if you can stand it we’ll hit the fields across the drive. Birds are everywhere. We’ll just see if you can hit ‘em.”
Cindy, the 12-year old pointer/poodle mix, catapulted outside when Nate opened the door. An icy blast met us and I cinched my balaclava up over my nose. The radio said the day’s high would be 14 degrees with a wind chill of three. Nate sent Mark and me around the frozen pond studded with broken cattails and took Dad and Dave the other way. It felt good to be moving, crunching crusty snow underfoot. We saw a pair of pheasants scurrying away through the field but Nate planned to drive to us so we stayed put. Minutes later they kicked up a rooster and it sprang loud and rising over the white pond. We were all slow to swing at the dark bird hurtling away in the wind with clouds of lead trailing behind. But the misses didn’t sting, they were more an opening bell for the hunt. We were finally out there together.
I suppose I should call my second shot more luck than anything. I had been circulating the wingshooting adage ‘butt, belly, beak, bang’ around my mind when we first stepped out, but when a rooster sailed down behind us unannounced and I pivoted and sent it tumbling, my brain was blank. Nothing more than instinct and luck. It sure felt good to drop the first bird of the day though.
Photo Credit: Nate McNutt
We crossed the gravel drive and worked a field of dead goldenrods leaning chest high. Nate bored through the middle of them with two guns on either side, whistling and chatting with Cindy all the while. He had gotten her free from a local kennel that no longer wanted the aging birddog and he was happy to have a trained and experienced hand. “I always seem to get dogs with ex-wife-sounding names,” he laughed. “Cindy! Where’d you get off to?” The brown dog was stiff as a rod up ahead, pointing at a tussock. “Alright now, get ready,” he crept. The pheasant shot up in a blur and Nate dropped to a knee and the bird fell heavy on the straw. Cindy pranced to retrieve it.
Dad and I were paired on the right side as we trudged the sloping field. He hadn’t hunted pheasants since he was a teenager. He recalled once that Grandpa and he met a friend across the creek who had a dog, and they hunted the fields one day. The sole flush they had, the pheasant went screeching down the creek, gone in a blink. That was the extent of his experience. Grandpa had just passed earlier in the year. It was tough to talk about him yet.
We dropped a few more pheasants on that pass. The birds were cold and didn’t want to fly. They’d double back on Cindy, scampering into the deepest knots of straw. It seemed they would rather be snatched up than take off flying in the frigid air. Keeping our hands alive and working was a full-time chore and the edges of my eyes stung and watered in the keen breeze. My gun, an Ithaca 37 from 1953, started giving me issues, which is to say my overzealous lubricating must have caused the firing pin to gum up and freeze. There was a huge rooster, red-eyed and ringnecked, that hung over me for several minutes as I shucked three shells that didn’t go ‘boom’ when I squeezed the trigger. That was it for the Ithaca. It pained me because I have an affinity for old shotguns, but I hobbled back to the barn stiff as the Tin Man to swap in my over/under, a youthful Beretta BL-3 from 1968.
Nate was surprised we hadn’t run into any chukars yet and he brought us down into a brushy swale that funneled gusts with frosty efficiency. Cindy worked the tangle diligently to no avail and we climbed back up to a fresh field. Sure enough, the next flush was a pair of chukar partridges that fluttered right into Dad. He shot the near bird and I skipped out from behind and hit the lead one lightly. It glided back down towards the swale. Cindy was way up the hill and I thought I saw roughly where it landed, so I set out after it. Eighty yards later I lucked into the bird; a fluffy, warm softball.
I made it back to the crew and we started a pretty good run of dropping roosters. We had been out in the near zero degree tundra for about four hours by then and I was feeling the perfect balance of numbness and contentedness where every flush and shot was gravy. Nate interrupted me humming a Turnpike Troubadours song to myself and said there were a couple golden pheasants, or albinos, planted around the farm. “Five bucks on a golden pheasant!” I said.
“It’s a bet,” said Dad.
“I’m in,” chimed Dave and Mark simultaneously. Dave was having a good day of shooting with that turkey gun.
We crossed back over the driveway and felt the hunt coming to a close. The group drew nearer now, bantering with shotguns shouldered. Cindy was indefatigable, snuffling and roving like we had just begun even as the sky’s curtain was falling, slow purple blushing on the surrounding blue hills. “Hey,” whispered Nate, “last flush of the day.”
Cindy waited on us at a snowy knot and we all got on line. Nate shuffled in and a bird lifted to the left, uncomfortably pale and fat as a chicken. A pair of guns boomed and the golden pheasant fell. “Wooo!” shouted Mark. “Got him.”
“Hmm, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I fired and he fell. I think I hit him pretty good.”
“Who hit him first, Nate?” asked Mark.
“Not sure,” he smiled.
“Boy, I thought I got him,” admitted Mark, clutching his sister-in-law’s 20 gauge SKB. With no clear winner, no money was exchanged. I was using 5 shot and Mark was shooting 7 and the idea to dig the shot out of the bird was floated but didn’t gain traction. It didn’t matter.
Photo Credit: Nate McNutt
Photo Credit: Nate McNutt
We collected the bird and walked back toward the pond. I tried digging cockleburs out of Cindy’s wiry coat. Dave wiped his nose and said, “Dude, we have to do this again next year. Maybe a month or so earlier though.” I agreed on both counts.
After cleaning the birds with tingling, half-frozen hands, we steamed into the house and sat down to dinner. I was quiet, enjoying the last bits of a long hoped-for day. The next hunt with these guys seemed a ways off. We all traded good-byes and hugs and Dad and I swerved back over the icy hill as snowflakes flashed in the headlights.
We were silent for some time as we spilled out of the hills of western Pennsylvania. After an hour there in the dark, Dad cleared his throat and said, “Today was a good day. It was good to see you in your natural habitat.”
~
Nate is the owner of Wood Crest Point
