Certainly there are hunting curses and mean-spirited, vindictive, petty gods to lay them.
How else to explain why I don't hit everything I shoot at and why things don't always work exactly the way I want them to. Blind chance or poor shooting skills is totally out of the question.
Apparently I've grievously offended the prairie chicken gods. It's like the joke about the guy who has an incredible string of bad luck, looks up and cries, "Why me?" and a great booming voice calls down, "I don't know--there's just something about you that ticks me off."
Cases in point:
It is 1970 and I am standing at the edge of a crop field near John Redmond Reservoir in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas, waiting for the morning greater prairie chicken flight. I have driven about 250 miles to be there.
There is a sudden whoosh, first from behind, then overhead, and a prairie chicken suddenly is 50 yards out and diminishing, like a launched rocket. I fire a salute which has as much hope of connecting as I do of dating Michelle Pfeiffer.
It is 1974 and I am in the Cimarron National Grassland of southwest Kansas, hunting lesser prairie chickens which are alleged to hold better for dogs than their Flint Hills cousins. I have driven 500 miles to be there.
A flock of chickens flushes 70 yards away, which is 40 yards beyond the effective range of the gun I am shooting. My hunting buddy, closer to the flush, scratches one with a full-choke, pull-it-out-of-his-hip-pocket shot. It is the only prairie chicken of the three-day hunt.
It is 1984 and I am in South Dakota. I now had been hunting prairie chickens, off and on (well, off and off) for 14 years. A prairie chicken flies across the road in front of the vehicle in which I am riding and lands in a tiny patch of uncut prairie grass. The wind is blowing perhaps 70 miles per hour (almost 20 miles per hour below the normal wind speed in South Dakota).
McGuffin, my noble and talented French Brittany, and I dismount and I lead him to the bird. He comes to attention and imitates a pointing spaniel.
I walk in ahead of the point as my peers watch with unseemly interest, the bird flushes straight up, a classic woodcock shot. It pauses at the peak of its rise, and I squeeze off the shot. And the South Dakota zephyr, that gentle breeze of 90 miles per hour, grabs that prairie chicken and throws it about 10 yards downwind and I bag yet another 30 inches of airspace. I have driven 800 miles to be there.
IT HAD BECOME 1992, two decades after I first tried to reduce a prairie chicken to bag. It wasn't a hunt anymore. It was like what they say about chukar partridge hunting: "The first time it's a hunt; after that, it's revenge."
As usual, I was filled with boundless optimism which sprang from the same pool that motivated Gen. Custer when he saw the campfire smoke rising over the Little Big Horn and said, "Okay, boys, let's go kick some ass."
I was standing at the fringe of the Sandhills Wildlife Area, a 4,500-acre chunk of native prairie, outside Pratt, Kansas. It was the state's third early prairie chicken season, September 15-October 15. There is a later season, from the first Saturday in November through January 31. Hunters combined in 1991 to kill 90,000 prairie chickens during the two seasons.
Is it too much to ask that I kill one young, dumb pinnated grouse?
I thought not and signaled the trusty French Brittany brothers Dacques (Doc to Yanks) and Chubby into the field.
I had driven only 404 miles this time.
Six states hunt prairie chickens: South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. Of them all, Kansas has the largest and most viable bird population.
Prairie chickens once were as numerous as their vanished soul mates, the bison and passenger pigeon. They were a staple in pioneer diets and later were brought to market by the wagon load. You could buy all you wanted in St. Louis for a dime apiece.
They were a bit more expensive in Kansas: in 1875, the newspaper at Cottonwood Falls advertised prairie chickens for $2/dozen or $.16 apiece.
THE COLDER IT GETS, the wilder prairie grouse become. So, September prairie chickens hold well for a dog and tend to flush one at a time, rather than as a covey (which usually is a family group). But first you have to find grouse to hold. There are no secrets.
"You find good habitat and start walking," said Mike Cox, chief of information for the Kansas Parks and Wildlife Dept. The Sandhills is his backyard. He'd hunted the area for other game for 10 years and for early chickens each of the preceding two seasons.
"Never had any trouble finding birds," he said confidently ("We'll whip those Sioux in a few minutes, Major Reno...") I didn't go into the business about the gods. No point in planting the seeds of doubt.
Mike, Bob Mathews ,and I set out on a north-south sweep, about 50 yards apart, the dogs filling the chinks, like canine mortar. It was at least a mile from fence to fence.
Prairie chickens routinely fly that far. If you're lucky, you'll see a flock fly and land and can pinpoint them. If you're not, the prairie chicken gods will hold an emergency meeting. "Say, isn't that Vance down there?" squinting.
"Well, I'll be...it sure is! Man, you'd think a guy would give it up after a while. Okay, let's put the hammer on him."
I felt the first twinges of muscular strain in the back and hips and knees and feet. Tallgrass prairie is thick with big and little bluestem, Indiangrass, and switchgrass, laced with intertwined forbs.
It's like wading through shin-deep water. You must be in good shape to hunt prairie chickens in the tallgrass. It also helps to have a compass on a cloudy day because the rolling hills look the same in all directions. Landmarks are a few windmills and a few trees. Key on the windmills for your dog. Each has a stock tank brimming with fresh-pumped well water.
MIKE WALKED INTO A NEST OF PHEASANTS, including a fat, vituperative rooster that would have been dead meat a month later. The dogs looked at me, wondering why we weren't playing you-shoot-I- get.
Chubby pointed in a plum thicket and a covey of quail erupted. I mock-shot a double. Easy pickings. "Any prairie chicken I see is dead meat," I thought.
"He's getting delusions of grandeur again," said one prairie chicken god to another. "Reckon I'll slap him down a notch." I fought into a plum tangle, caught my foot and fell face-forward into the spiky profusion.
Had the French planted wild plum rather than concrete and metal barriers along the Maginot Line, the Germans never would have gotten through. Good place for protective shooting glasses.
Kansas early prairie chicken hunting is open east of Highway 281, plus all of Pratt, Clark, and Morton counties. Morton County contains the 109,000 Cimarron National Grassland, which has a good population of lesser prairie chickens. The territory east of 281 is the domain of the greater prairie chicken, especially the Flint Hills.
Private land permission is easy to get if you can find the landowner, but many large ranches are absentee-owned. Chat up people in restaurants and watering holes, especially older people with faces like the seat of a saddle who are wearing cowboy hats. They're landowners. You may meet someone who owns a native prairie ranch where you can hunt.
THEY CALL THEM "PASTURES" IN KANSAS. My idea of a pasture is a fairly intimate chunk of landscape, bounded by fences, with a few placid cows grazing on short grass. The pasture we hunted stretched over the horizon, with only distant windmills for landmarks. These were classic sand hills, a billowing series of dunes kept in place only by the rank native prairie.
Sand burs are not a serious problem, but check your dog frequently, especially the armpits, because the burs will lacerate. There is some cactus, but not enough to require dog boots. Cultivated land is worse for sand burs than the prairie.
It had been a wet summer and Indiangrass towered above my head. The big bluestem was head-high and switchgrass reached to my chest. Indian blanket, a lovely maroon-and-yellow flower, nestled coyly amid her towering big brothers.
We trudged from windmill to windmill, a mile at least. The windmill water breaks were imperative for the dogs. If you think it's tough, consider the dog, wearing a fur coat on a humid 70-degree day, stuck in the thick grasses where even a faint breeze doesn't reach.
Prairie chickens existed in one form or another all the way from Martha's Vineyard to the Rocky Mountains. The heath hen of the East Coast vanished long ago, to be joined later by another subspecies, Attwater's prairie chicken of south Texas.
Today there are only greater and lesser pinnated grouse. Market hunting didn't help, but agriculture did more to whack the grouse than hunters did. Dry land farming (and, later, irrigated farming) ate huge hunks of native prairie.
As an example, prairie chickens once roamed 15 million acres of Missouri prairie and were the most common game bird in the state. A Harrison County historian wrote, "The veriest pothunter could take an indifferent gun and meal sack, go into the fields in the morning of a fall or winter day, and in a few hours return with a sack full of prairie chickens. Usually only the breasts of these birds were used for food."
Today, there are only a few thousand prairie chickens in Missouri on less than 75,000 remaining acres of native prairie, scattered in small chunks. The birds haven't been hunted since near the turn of the century, but they still have declined, especially since World War II.
A white-tailed deer can adapt to anything. Raccoons forage as eagerly in your garbage can as they do in the wild. But a poor, dumb prairie chicken only knows the prairie of his ancestors. Anything else and he curls up and blows away.
Even in Kansas, the best of what's left, the birds never again will thrive as they did in historic times. As late as 1928, two hunters from Garden City killed 128 grouse before 8:00 a.m. You couldn't do that today even if it were legal. The average for the early season is .75 birds per hunt (with a hunt averaging about four hours). The success ratio is slightly less in the regular season.
I WAS STILL LOOKING FOR MY .75 BIRD after four hours, but mostly I was looking for a drink of water and a place to sit.
Dacques and Chubbs were stepping on their tongues. The temperature was edging toward 80. "I think the road is just beyond that next windmill," Mike said. The prairie chicken gods snickered.
I drank cold water from the pipe at the last windmill, not caring if it was laced with every known intestinal parasite (it wasn't). The dogs didn't care--they drank endlessly from the spilled water on the ground, then leaped in the tank and swam in tired circles.
We sat for a while, cloaked in fatigue, then plodded up a hill to see where we were. "Hmmm," Mike said. "Hey, you know what? I'm turned around. The car is back there." He pointed to the horizon.
Some people think there is no such thing as justifiable homicide, but there is. I was just too weary to lift the gun.
"We'll get 'em tomorrow," Mike said.
The second morning was warm and humid. Getting out of bed was like having my fingernails pulled, all over my body. Everything hurt. The dogs were bleary-eyed and gimpy.
But what's a little agony when you're having fun?
WE STRUGGLED ABOUT A MILE or so through yet more thick stuff, came upon a fence beyond which was prairie that had been grazed a bit more heavily than what we'd been hunting. The buffalo once grazed the prairie enough that prairie chickens could see what was going on. We'd forgotten that and had been hunting in stuff that was too thick for the birds. There's a motto often seen in backwoods bars in somebody's imitation of Pennsylvania Dutch: "Too soon ve grow oldt und too late ve grow schmart."
We crossed the fence and within 100 yards, Chubby went on point. I was a step behind and a half-second slow when the bird went up and Mike left feathers drifting on the prairie breeze, a dead chicken on the ground.
That was the only shot of the hunt. Four more birds flushed out of range. Then the prairie chicken god in charge of environmental engineering turned up the thermostat and we headed home.
It was 404 miles home, too, with an empty 80-quart cooler (Gen. Custer's optimism couldn't hold a candle to mine).
Twenty years, a half-dozen hunts...and no prairie chickens. Obviously I need to do some tall atonement with the prairie chicken gods. Perhaps if I offer up a human sacrifice.
Like the next guy that asks me to go prairie chicken hunting...
Copyright (c) 1996 Joel Vance. All rights reserved.
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