They're graying and gimpy, grizzled and as familiar as your hunting britches or the suspenders that hold them up.
They groan a lot in the mornings, but they go all day.
Hunting buddies. Like good wine or maybe slightly smelly cheese, they age well.
Back in 1954, pop singer Kitty Kallen sang "Little Things Mean a Lot." The song is hokey and dated, but it could be the anthem of bird hunters on how to treat hunting buddies. It's not the big things you do for each other; it's the little things.
There should be a bumper sticker: "If you ain't got hunting buddies, you ain't got..." well, never mind the rest of it.
No bird hunter is complete without someone to share the rips and tears. If you endure cold and sleet and come in tired and beat, with the world in shreds around your shoulders, who can you really share it with except your hunting buddies who were there with you. No one else understands.
Some few bird hunters are solitary, rarely going afield with others. They must either have psychological strength or the lack of it. It isn't natural to hunt alone all the time.
Everybody enjoys the occasional lone hunt, like a rogue wolf on the prowl. When you hunt alone, you owe allegiance to no one, need follow no one else's direction. It's just you and the dogs.
But that's not the same as sharing a good hunt with a friend. If you spend too much time alone you'll congeal, scum on a pond. People need cross pollination, like good plant stock, to thrive and grow. I've been blessed with good hunting buddies--and cursed with one bad one.
Foster Sadler was the best of them. He taught me just about all I know.
He was my friend through the last couple of years of grade school, all through high school, and for many years thereafter. Foster should have been a bird dog. He hunted like one, ranging far, like a bony old pointer, on long legs and indefatigable energy. I would come to the hunting shack at day's end tottering with crotch grab and knee sprain and Foster would be as fresh as he had been at sunrise.
We roamed many hills together shooting at little brown birds. Then he took a dark road that I wasn't ready for.
Spence Turner, who is thrashing about the kitchen of our hunting cabin in the ecstasy of cooking a woodcock dinner as I write, has been my deep friend for more than 25 years.
Spence is Monty Python by way of Red Green. He and his setters have created bird dog stories told by people who don't even know him. One setter escaped from a portable kennel into Spence's station wagon, ate two pounds of chocolate-covered raisins, then suffered an unbelievable digestive upset all over Spence's unzipped duffel bag which contained his clean clothing for three days on the road. Yes, THAT Spence Turner....
Dave Mackey first took me along on a quail hunt behind his setter when we were virtual youngsters, new in our professions. That was more than 25 years ago. We've stumbled through the predawn turkey woods together, shivered in a sleet-stained deer blind...and walked countless miles after quail. Dave, a district soil conservationist, is my reality check on the problems and possibilities of agriculture.
Ted Lundrigan threatens me with lutefisk dinners as the price of sharing his Minnesota grouse and woodcock coverts, but as dreadful as lutefisk is, it's worth having to eat it just to hang around with him. I once saw a bumper sticker on an auto that said, "Legalize Lutefisk" and have been looking for one to buy ever since so I can present it to Ted at our annual grouse banquet in Pine River. On the final night of our hunt, we celebrate the completion of a week of hard going, mourn the end of that week, and eat the way royalty would if it shot its own dinner.
Spence's son Mac is promising--a quiet smiler who appreciates (or seems to) our rowdy humor and who fits like worn clothing.
Mac shoots better than his old man and my son Andy shoots better than I do. Spence and I grumble that it's damn, dumb luck--but it's also a source of warm pride.
Andy, my youngest son, has been hanging around with me since he was five. He's pushing 25 now. He has his own double and bird dogs. He went with me to a duck camp, scarcely out of toddlerhood. The overheated old farmhouse sweated with outrageous stories and deliciously nasty language and I would see Andy's little synapses sparking and knew that he was storing information like a Pentium chip. That he still hangs around with me, knowing what he does about my flaws and faults, is the measure of his friendship.
You check hunting buddies out carefully, like used cars. They may have hidden faults--rust underneath or clanks in the transmission. It takes a bunch of driving to judge mules, used cars, and hunting buddies.
I made one mistake. Some years back, I courted a guy whom I thought would be a wonderful addition to my hunting buddies. He was charming, funny, intelligent, knew bird hunting, talked a tough game. He was a sham.
He threw away friends like Handiwipes. Once three of us were quail hunting. My Brittany, Chip, went on point, just as I happened over the hill. Mr. X was behind the point (he did have a facility for finding the action) and he didn't see me at the top of the hill. It's accepted that if a dog is on point, you holler "Point!" and wait for your buddies to share in the action. Mr. X carefully looked around, didn't see me watching him, decided he had the point all to himself (with my dog) and flushed the birds.
I showed myself and asked how come he hadn't let us know the dog was pointing. "Oh, I was going to," he said. "But the dog bumped the birds and I had to shoot."
On another hunt, Andy was a green kid with a new gun, out with the big guys for the first time. It was late afternoon and he hadn't shot. He'd been out of position on every flush. Now he was off to one side as my dog, Chip, pointed in front of my erstwhile friend. "Hang on," I said. "Let Andy get a shot." Andy trotted down the hill to the dog. Mr. X was just behind Chip and he very deliberately stepped forward, flushed the covey and shot.
"The dog was going to bump them," he said, though the dog hadn't moved.
Andy and I walked out of the field and went home. Today, many years later, Andy hunts with me and Mr. X has moved on to shed a couple of wives and a few more people who considered him a friend. People like him forget to pay their share of hunting trip expenses. I thought it was carelessness or absentmindedness, except it kept happening.
Somehow I always busted the brush while he walked the perimeter and picked off easy shots. I'd do the dishes and he'd be funny and charming to guests. But I was elbow-deep in soapsuds and I gritted my teeth.
Finally it sank in that he took advantage of everyone, really didn't care about anyone else. He didn't forget--he just figured friends were disposable, to be used up and discarded.
He was a textbook case of how not to treat your hunting buddies. I've developed a set of commandments. I didn't go to a mountaintop to get them, engraved on stone; I just walked a thousand miles over brush country, busted through swamps, and trudged the prairies with people who matter to me.
This is what you do:
1. Buy your buddy's lunch sometime for no good reason.
2. Remember his birthday and get him a scurrilous card that will make him laugh. Present it in front of your mutual friends. I'm saving one for Spence that reads, "When I get as old as you, I hope like hell I smell a lot better."
3. Praise his dogs.
4. If you double on a bird, it's his...and you say, "Nice shot!"
5. If you travel together, you pay 50 percent of the mutual costs...and it wouldn't hurt to volunteer a little extra. Buy a round in a cowboy bar and say, "You get the next one," even if there is no next one.
6. If you promise something, bankrupt yourself, sell your kids, whatever you have to do to make sure you fulfill the promise.
7. Ask his advice on things. He probably is smarter than you anyway.
8. Laugh at his stories and jokes, especially the ones you've heard five times before.
9. Don't talk about him behind his back. We all have faults and you are not God's chosen messenger to point them out.
10. If he screws up, forgive him. If he hurts your feelings, let him know--chances are he didn't realize it and will feel awful. Grudges are postcards from Hell.
These are 10 commandments only because 10 is a well-known number when it comes to commandments; there are many more. It boils down to: you accept your hunting partners like your mate--for better or worse.
Phonies like Mr. X are not creatures of human fault and failing; they are mean and self-centered and they should be no one's hunting buddy. They are the true lone wolves.
Meanwhile, I'll hang around with Spence and Ted and Dave and the kids, wearing the same old brush pants, the same old suspenders, shooting the same old gun...and hugely enjoying the same old friends.
Copyright (c) 1996 Joel M. Vance. All rights reserved.