Winter Wheat Upland Bird Hunting
By Tom Carroll
An old Allman Brothers tune came over the Great Falls station as the white Dodge bounced over the railroad tracks. He turned the volume up a notch, accelerating past the General Mills elevator, its imposing hulk a silent sentinel of good game country. A long, green snake of Burlington Northern grain cars lay in wait just outside of town, ready to hall another load of durum to the mills south and east. The Lab settled in and nuzzled its chin over his thigh, eyes closing in calm contentment as his owner sang along to the chorus of “Blue Sky.” They drove north out of the diminutive town, into the January wind, out to the fields for one last look and farewell to the survivors.
Gravel replaced pavement as the stark stubble fields rose and fell away to the west, running a checkerboard pattern seemingly right up to the Front: a dramatic juxtaposition of Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. A cock pheasant appeared out of the ditch and scurried in front of the truck, forcing the driver to brake hard and swerve, waking the Labrador. The dog sat up and whined softly, ears forward, brown eyes alert, his intent gaze following the rooster as it crossed the highway and disappeared into the roadside grass. He smiled and wished the bird an easy winter and then calmed the dog, wondering how it must be for him, having hunted almost every day for the past three months, to suddenly be denied. His look of empathy did little to improve the dog’s incomprehension of closed seasons.
This post-season benevolence toward the game he had pursued with relentless fervor only a few weeks past was not enigmatic; in fact it made perfect sense. The previous spring a similar, albeit more vigorous, brake-and-swerve episode involving another gaudy rooster and his harem of hens had prompted a rather emphatic reaction from the girl in the passenger seat.
“I swear I’ll never understand it,” she had shrieked, both hands clenched tightly on the dashboard, long dark hair screening her contrastingly pale face.
“In November you’re crazy to shoot those damn things, but in April you’d rather kill us so as not to ruffle a feather…. For Christ’s sake!”
His reaction to this rather hysterical rebuke had been a disdainful glance and a clipped, one-word reply: “Exactly.”
She had left last October, unwilling, like all of the others, to play second mistress to birds and dogs. Sometimes he missed her.
They continued driving west toward the mountains, picking up a wide cottonwood creek bottom on the right and grass and grain fields to the left. This was transition country.
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