A Hunter's Book of Days by Charles Fergus

Author:Charles Fergus [Fergus, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608930265
Publisher: Down East Books

We eat lunch sitting in the truck, parked in a turnaround next to the crumbling concrete abutment of a now-vanished bridge that once crossed Bald Eagle Creek. A thin mist hangs above the slow-moving water. On the other side of the creek are the shabby backs of houses. A dog barks monotonously. Around us, the ground is littered with broken bottles, crumpled cans, wads of tinfoil, plastic jugs, rusting pipes, and a mattress with its stuffing hanging out. What kind of idiots—the local term is “hoofties”—would rather dump their trash here instead of carrying it to a landfill and shelling out a few bucks to dispose of it properly? We should have found a nicer place to eat lunch. I don’t mind it when the mist thickens, obscuring the view.

Over sandwiches, one of us makes the observation that we have killed every bird that got up in front of us this morning. We finish our respite, get out of the truck, and start hunting. Soon the author of that earlier ill-advised remark is rewarded for his hubris when his spaniel rousts a hen pheasant, which towers up from a clump of honeysuckle, about as easy a shot as one can expect. I’m thinking woodcock and am taken completely off-balance by the pheasant. I miss the bird with the right barrel. Then I prick it with the left.

I mark the bird down near the edge of the cover, in brush that fades out into open woods. I reload my gun and take Caillie to where the bird glided in. She nearly catches the hen beneath a low shrub. The bird flaps up about four feet above the ground. It flies on for maybe thirty yards, with Caillie in hot pursuit, then drops down again. If I had steadied my spaniel, I might have been able to shoot. But I couldn’t drop the hammer since the dog was running along just behind the bird. Carl sees the hen land and start legging it off through the briars, but he can’t get off a shot either, since he doesn’t know exactly where the dog is. Despite being right on the pheasant’s tail, and even with the excellent scenting conditions, Caillie fails to work out the line. We look for the hen for a long time. We beat all through the cover. Time and again I tell Caillie “Dead bird!”, hoping she’ll concentrate on matters at hand and work the trail out. Finally I decide that the bird just put its head down and ran: I doubt if it’s within several hundred yards by now. Even though this is a stocked bird, and even though such things happen in hunting, I feel terrible. I don’t know if I should be angrier at myself, for missing the easy shot, or at Caillie, for failing to stick to the trail and recover the cripple. A black mark against both of us—but mainly against me, for doing a slipshod job of training my dog. Those little piles

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