Hunting alone is good for the soul and better than working, but I'm the sociable sort and usually prefer hunting in company. The best company, of course, is a dog, so when selecting human companions I look for the same qualities found in retrievers and setters.
The people I hunt with don't necessarily roll on dead fish or eat disgusting things they find on the ground, but each is good-natured, has a sense of humor, is loyal to his friends, and has a terrific nose.
The best nose I've seen so far on a human belongs to Tom Carney. I hunt grouse and woodcock every October with Tom and a gang of other friends at a remote camp where we spend five days pampering our dogs, eating like princes, telling lies, and occasionally shooting at disappearing birds. I'm an abysmally unskilled hunter of grouse and woodcock, but my friends are usually too busy bragging about their dogs to notice when I miss easy going-away shots. That's one of the things I like about them.
Tom has been a generous friend. He has loaned me his Browning side-by-side the last three years, has kept me supplied with shells and sandwiches, has offered his extra jersey gloves when mine are wet, and is one of those people who always invites others to take the last serving of the venison stew. But no act of selfless generosity can match what happened one day a couple years ago when he, Randy Carrels, and I were hunting together.
We'd been working hard all morning to find woodcock, pushing through aspen thickets so dense that when we tried to call out to one another we could hardly squeeze a word through edgewise. In the afternoon Tom decided his setter needed a rest, so he kenneled him in the truck. He also put his gun away, since he long ago vowed never to hunt without his dog, and announced that he would now serve as bird dog for Randy and me.
I was skeptical. We humans have spent so many centuries indoors inhaling pine-scented air freshener that we've ruined our noses. We can smell the mushroomy, cheesy odor of a woodcock when we hold it to our nostrils, but I doubted anyone could scent a bird while it was still hunkered on the ground.
We walked a few feet into the aspens. Tom stopped, went into a classic point, and whispered, "There should be a bird right in front of us." I stepped forward and a woodcock flushed, rose to the top of the canopy, launched into its darting, ducking, diving flight (like a feathered knuckle ball, according to a number of experts), and was unfortunate enough to fly straight into a load of my No. 7 shot.
Tom accepted Randy's and my praise with modesty then pushed on into the woods a short distance, went on point again, and flushed another woodcock. By the end of the afternoon I was convinced Tom Carney has English-setter blood pumping through the veins of his nose.
A nose like Tom's is a real bonus in a hunting companion. None of the other guys I hunt with can match the trick, but I like them for other reasons. I like them particularly because they're patient with a lesser hunter's shortcomings. They're quick to forgive and slow to judge.
None of them said a word when I missed 10 shots in succession one year, yet when in a brief and inexplicable fit of genius I killed two grouse and two woodcock in a single afternoon they made a big deal out of it, calling me "Deadeye," and reenacting for the benefit of those who weren't there how I'd swung on the birds and dropped them with one shot each, just like I knew what I was doing.
I like my friends too because they listen politely to some complex scientific theories I've been working on. When I missed those 10 shots I explained to everyone that my poor performance was probably the fault of the Coriolis Effect, which is the name given to the way the earth's rotation influences surface activity. The Coriolis Effect explains why masses of wind spiral, why icebergs drift from the poles toward the equator, and why rivers veer more often to the right than the left.
It's the theory behind the contention that bathtub water drains in a counterclockwise direction in the northern hemisphere and a clockwise direction in the southern hemisphere. When the Nazis fired Big Bertha at Paris during World War Two, the Coriolis Effect caused the shells to always curve a mile to the west of where they were aimed. The curve was an illusion--each shell traveled a straight line, but in the time it took to reach the target the earth had rotated a mile beneath it.
The same thing happens to a bullet or load of shot. I explained to my friends that the Coriolis Effect causes my 20-gauge shotgun to fire consistently 10 inches to the west of my targets, thereby causing me to miss most flying targets. Why did I miss and not they? Because the Coriolis Effect varies according to latitude, and we were hunting at a latitude familiar to them but not to me. They had already made subconscious adjustments.
When I finished explaining the theory, Tom Carney went off to sniff the underbrush for birds, while the others thought carefully, nodded, and said it all sounded fairly reasonable to them. Somebody mentioned that the late Ed Zern once posited a similar theory, which added credibility to my argument. Everyone agreed that my dismal shooting was almost certainly due to factors outside my control.
You can't find better hunting companions than that.
Copyright (c) 1996 Jerry Dennis. All rights reserved.
Home | Library | Hunting | Wingshooting