Hunting pheasants to the left of that arbitrary definition of the West, the 100th meridian of longitude, is indeed different from hunting pheasants east of the line. For one, some of the country remains truly wild, and pilgrims still run into trouble along the fringes of the wilderness.

Fifteen autumns ago I was living in western Montana, about 40 miles from the Idaho border, a country of flat-bottomed trout valleys surrounded by thickly timbered mountains. Though it doesn't look anything like the Midwest we think of as the center of the pheasant universe, it does resemble a more feral and vertical version of the Willamette Valley of western Oregon, where ring-necked pheasants first multiplied in North America.

That November a friend and I had been assigned the pleasant task of hunting down and shooting a few mallards and pheasants for the Thanksgiving table. We planned to hunt a ranch we knew at the base of the Mission Mountains. The Missions are as steep and craggy as the Tetons, but they don't have a national park surrounding them, just a wilderness area inside the mountains. Since you can't drive through them, even many natives remain unaware that the Missions hold all sorts of wild stuff, right next to the grain farms, trailer parks, and tourist traps of the Flathead Valley.

We drove up there two days before Thanksgiving and talked cows and weather with the rancher for a while. Then he mentioned the grizzlies. "You know they been hanging out around here," he said. We nodded. There had been a newspaper story about how the berry crop had failed in the mountains that summer. Bears from the Missions had followed the alder-lined creeks out into the valley, looking for food before their long winter's nap.

"A big sow and two cubs were right out there early one morning last week." He pointed across the gravel road to an alfalfa field. "Everybody's been taking their kids to meet the school bus ever since, sitting in the cars until the bus comes to make sure it's safe. We haven't seen any bears since then, but they're around. They just stick to the thick stuff during the day." He paused, looking west to where the field ended a half mile away. We could see the tops of cottonwoods and alders where the field dropped off into the creek bottom. "I wouldn't hunt the creek if I were you."

WE THANKED HIM, then walked across the road. We had both spent enough time among grizzlies not to discount what he said, but we also knew that grizzlies leave plenty of sign. They eat a lot of grass and berries and excrete a lot of leftovers. Plus, 400-pound bears leave big tracks in soft, moist soil. We'd just keep an eye out around any thick cover.

This field was ideal for both roosters and mallards, the hay grown just enough since its last cutting in August to afford good pecking and grazing for the birds. Through the middle of the mile-long field ran a sinuous irrigation ditch, banks overgrown and a foot of water still flowing along the bottom. Pheasants liked to loaf in the wild roses along the banks, and mallards liked to rest in the bends of the ditch.

We split up, surrounding the big bend where we often found mallards. My partner circled to the right, crossing the ditch at an irrigation headgate, while I went left, my old black Lab Gillis at heel. When we were both a hundred yards from the bend, we moved in. The ducks were right where we expected to find them, about a dozen, and mostly drakes. I shot two, one on my side of the ditch and one that fell in the water, and my friend killed another on his side. Gillis jumped in the ditch for the floater while we picked up the field birds.

We walked back down the ditch toward the creek, my friend looping ahead and standing while I worked Gillis through the roses along the banks. I killed one young rooster that held too tightly, and my friend killed an old bird that ran and then flushed out across the field, not quite far enough away from a load of 5s. So we were one pheasant short of Thanksgiving when we reached the edge of the creek.

IT LOOKED BIRDY, and when we walked down the slick grassy hill to the edge of the alders we couldn't find any sign of a bear. There were lots of deer tracks, however, and we took that to mean no grizzlies. So I sent Gillis in.

We heard him patter through the downed leaves under the alders, a quiet, anticipatory sound under the gray sky. And then something big jumped in the brush, alder branches cracking for three seconds, and I immediately thought deer, until we heard a low woof, much too deep and chesty for a 70-pound dog. Gillis came loping out of the alders, hair ridged like the fin of a sailfish, looking back as he ran--so damn scared he was afraid to leave his rump unwatched. One experienced bear man from Alaska claims that even a rat terrier can chase a brown bear away. With salmon-mellowed coastal grizzlies, maybe so. It doesn't always work that way with hungrier mountain grizzlies.

So we backed up along the open base of the hill toward the road, shotguns halfway to our shoulders. Along the way we found where a big bear had walked across the moist creek bottom, could plainly see where the long claws had dug thimble-sized chunks of dirt in a rough line a couple of inches in front of the pad prints. Black bears don't leave those marks, even in soft soil. And so we made do with only five birds on Thanksgiving.

The next week two college students, new to the West and hunting without a dog, headed into the same creek's alders about a half mile upstream and surprised a grizzly in its day bed. They might have fared better if they hadn't tried to shoot the bear off with their pheasant guns. Then again, they might not have. One of the hunters spent most of a month in the hospital, and several experienced game wardens spent a very bad day tracking down the wounded grizzly and killing it. But no schoolchildren were eaten that fall, and soon the bears went back up into the mountains to den.

IN THE YEARS SINCE, I have assiduously avoided hunting anything in grizzly country except game that provides an excuse for carrying a .338, animals like mule deer and elk. But sending a dog into the thick stuff still startles both of us occasionally. I now live in the open, semidesert mountains along the upper reaches of the Missouri River. Where the river enters a big reservoir there's a public hunting area, full of cottonwoods and willows and alders, covering six square miles of the Missouri delta where it enters the lake. It's full of whitetails and pheasants--and other things.

One early December day two seasons ago I took my present Labrador, a much larger chocolate dog named Keith, down there for the year's last pheasant hunt. During the first hour he put up a few hen pheasants and even more deer, so I thought it was another deer when the alders crackled 20 yards in front of us. Then I thought it was somebody's stray horse until it stepped into a break in the alders and looked at me, a cow moose. Her spring calf stood up, on the other side of Keith, and we were suddenly standing between a mama moose and her 500-pound darling. Something deep inside Keith told him it wouldn't be wise to make a false start at these deer--as he often did with whitetails, just to see them run. He stood still until I whistled softly. He trotted carefully back to heel and the two moose trotted carefully away.

Our pheasants live not only in grizzly and moose country, but out where the deer and the antelope play. I have hunted them in places where even jackrabbits barely make a comfortable living, where you can sit up on a hilltop and glass for pheasants as you would for mule deer. One of my favorite pheasant places is not exactly crawling with birds, but I like it because it so little resembles traditional pheasant cover that nobody else hunts it.

It lies along a "crick" in eastern Montana. What passes for a stream out there is usually the seasonal wash where spring snowmelt and summer rain drain into the Musselshell River. This crick, however, has what pheasants always need, permanent water. During the fall it doesn't flow, instead seeping underground through sand and gravel left by the last glacier, welling up every few hundred yards in little pools. Like all desert ponds, they hold surprising numbers of wild things. Mice and voles and rabbits and other small mammals are attracted to the lusher vegetation around the shores, and in the water live Great Plains toads and leopard frogs and painted turtles and even a few small fish, mostly varieties of dace. Bull snakes often hunt the margins, and occasionally even prairie rattlers can be found, though for some reason I rarely run into Brother Rattlesnake unless I'm looking for him, which isn't often.

THE PHEASANTS RUN UP AND DOWN the four miles of pools. I knew there were a few roosters around, but never tried hunting them specifically until one evening when I was sitting on a hillside, Keith beside me, glassing for sage grouse (a not uncommon method out here), when I saw two roosters skulking through the sagebrush. They were trotting up a dry coulee, just above one of the crick's pools, along the taller sage that grew along the bottom of the draw, just like a couple of sage birds except faster and more nervous.

So we made a big circle around the back side of their hill and worked down the draw. Halfway down Keith started acting birdy but nothing happened. Then I chanced to look into the crick bottom and saw both birds run right by the pool and up the opposite hill into the tall sage 300 yards away. It was obvious that a man and a dog weren't going to surround those boys.

In the years since, I have figured out how to get an occasional shot at sagebrush pheasants. The inspiration came from Ben Burshia, the old Dakota-Assiniboine Indian I hunted with in northeastern Montana for most of a decade. That country more closely resembles the Midwest, but still possesses little enough water to qualify as western. One day we were out bird hunting, bouncing from one deep draw to another in Ben's pickup, when my bladder could stand it no longer and I told him to stop the damn truck. It was a little after noon and Ben didn't brake right away. Instead he drove down into the draw and parked next to one of the those prairie-crick pools surrounded by tall grass and cattails. I leapt out and while standing with my Levis unbuttoned next to the cattails could vaguely hear Ben clacking the action on his pumpgun. Ten seconds later the cattails in front of me began to move. Whatever was moving them headed for the water and I thought muskrat or maybe skunk until a big rooster climbed out of the cattails and then folded into the water when Ben's 20-gauge went off behind me and to the left.

I turned and looked at him. He was already tamping fresh tobacco into his pipe and lighting it. Around the smoke he said, "You'll always find pheasants around water in the middle of the day." Then he smiled slightly and shrugged, as if there was nothing to it: water and noon equals rooster.

SO THAT'S HOW I HUNT the dry cricks now, not waiting for the cool of December but instead hunting the warm days of late October. It is very pleasant to lie in bed until absolutely awake on some sunny October morning, then have a leisurely breakfast (none of that in-the-dark burnt-toast duck-hunter stuff), and drive across the high plains. The distant islands of the Snowies or Bear Paws or Bighorns will already have that dead-level cap of first snow, as if their ridgelines rise into an invisible Arctic floating in the thin cirrus clouds; and the sagebrush will have a yellow tinge, the remains of the late-summer bloom, almost matching the breast feathers of the last male meadowlarks resting in the elastic branches of rabbit brush and sage. On the farthest ridge between you and the pale mountains, on the upper edge of the olive-yellow sea, six points as white as the mountain snow turn and run across the ridge--six pronghorns not trusting any pickup truck, no matter how distant, with opening day such a recent memory.

If you have chosen the day perfectly it will occur in that peculiar balanced week we call Indian summer, with the heat and dust of summer held pinned lightly to the earth by the first frosts. You can still smell the dust, an underlying scent like fresh-rinsed soap, but it doesn't dry the nostrils and the air shimmers absolutely clear above the sage, as if filtered through the yellow flowers themselves. The dog snorts under the sagebrush like a vacuum cleaner with circulatory problems, as if the autumnal equinox has cleaned out his sinuses and made the high plains the bird-dog equivalent of a Fellini movie--strange and yet so compelling you have to stick your nose in it and snort.

Along the crick there are a few cottonwoods, spindly things with a few yellow leaves still clinging, as sparse as the remnants of roast pheasant breast caught between the teeth. But you know that just to the left of the largest cottonwood, the lone tree with the golden eagle on the dead side-branch, there's a pool surrounded by joint-grass and a patch of wild roses. And there a pheasant might live.

THE TRICK HERE IS TO APPROACH the unseen pool like you would a sleeping deer, as cautiously as possible from downwind, because even though pheasants can't smell worth a hoot (thank God) they can hear like feathered bats. You have learned in past hunts that the pool lies in a deep hole, dammed by a slanted crumbling shale shelf full of trilobites and other unfortunate Ordovicians. Below the shale the dry crick twists through the sage again.

Since the pool lies spang in the middle of the buffalo plains, the only way to hunt it is to circle widely, waddling bent-over up the crick like a duck, the dog at heel, then run to the top of the angled shale and pin the birds in the cover along the banks. Otherwise all you're likely to produce is the unsatisfactory memory of roosters running a quarter mile away through the sage, tailfeathers near-erect like pointy middle digits, sending you their regards.

You have to hiss at the dog three or four times during the last hundred yards: he's finding traces of that morning's scent in the compacted sand along the wash's bottom. But he heels, wound tight enough that when you make the last run up the shale and then slam to a halt (like a crooked Statue of Liberty with a shotgun instead of a torch), he's already galumphing toward the wild roses and jointgrass. The first bird comes up mottled tan, a hen, but the second has a tail so long that the longest feather is bent by twisting through the short rosebush tunnels. The faraway bead on the full-choke barrel slides along the broken feather, the hard-flying body, and then past that squawking head and kapow! there are feathers all over the sagebrush.

Another rooster gets up at the upper end of the roses, flying directly away, and you put the bead up his tailfeathers and shoot. Feathers fly but he doesn't slow so you shoot again, biting your lip in the effort to drive an ounce-and-a-half of 4s up through the belly to the heart. Still flapping, he sinks into the sage like a fighter plane that never quite got enough speed off the deck of a carrier, and the dog runs past the first dead rooster, disappearing into the tall sage after the cripple. In 10 seconds you see his square brown head rise with a big loose bird in his mouth, the long tail flipping toward the sky each time the dog readjusts his tooth-grip on the breast feathers, tailfeathers not so erect and defiant now.

YOU FEEL PRETTY SLY as you take the first bird and send the dog back for the second, but by the time both are in the game vest and you're headed back across the olive sea you're caught in that odd reversal of the plains: suddenly youre too small under that huge curve of sky, as if the universe is always behind you, like Paul Bunyan's Hide-Behind. No matter which way you turn the cirrus sky will turn with you and some part of this wide-open world will escape. Even if you legally possess the two birds you killed and took from the sky, you will never possess one millionth of the plains, even in memory.

There have been many other western pheasant places like that: the badlands on the south side of the Missouri over in North Dakota; the tablelands on top covered with fields of durum wheat, the table dropping off into hard-bitten draws full of thorny buffalo-berry. The roosters came up almost vertically from the berry patches; the trick was to bring the shotgun up from below and shoot as the bead touched their heads. Or the slough of the Yellowstone, 10-foot cattails on the lowland side and irrigated barley on the other. The pheasants would fly from the cattails in mid-afternoon to feed on the barley, then digest and dust for an hour or so in the wild roses along the shore before flying back to their beloved cattails, where they were as unhuntable as Cape buffalo in elephant grass.

Or the alder-swamp pheasants along the Judith River, where you needed hip boots to wallow around the edges of beaver ponds, shooting the birds just as you would ruffed grouse except, of course, pressing your lips hard at each shot, willing those birds dead on contact, because otherwise they might drift under a beaver dam where nothing less than a backhoe could retrieve them.

Or the December snow along the Poplar where you and the dog followed the pheasant tracks into the shoulder-high rosebushes, pushing the herd of birds ahead of you along the deer trails to the edge of the river. You'd both stand there with breath hanging in the air, gray alders and cottonwoods along the bank above the slush-ice river, until the birds lost their nerve, trapped between you and the water. First a hen, then two, and then finally a rooster would spray out of the snow and fall to the quick shot of the old 12-gauge double gun.

THOSE ARE THE WESTERN PHEASANT PLACES I remember best, even though there have been better places to hunt them--"better" meaning more birds, in more conventional stretches of farmland cover. Still there are quite a few of those places, looking exactly like transplanted chunks of Iowa scattered among the mountains and out on the arid plains. Even a decade ago they were largely hunted only by locals. There might have been some difficulty getting permission if those pieces of micro-Midwest were next to a "big" town of eight thousand or more--places where only parish priests and family doctors got to hunt--but if you knocked on enough doors, far enough away from anything resembling a city, you could get on, as they say out here.

But then something happened. Actually, it has always--will always happen, unless plagues and wars kill enough of us to leave room on earth for the rest of what lives here. Forty years ago there used to be wonderful places to hunt wild pheasants east of the Mississippi, but now we have filled them up with subdivisions full of quaint homes, shopping malls full of stores that sell almost anything that isn't needed to exist, and new factories that make all the stuff we buy in the shopping malls to put in our homes. In between are eight-lane highways, so we can drive from the homes to the malls to the factories. All of these are filled with one hundred million new Americans, added in those 40 years.

In between are the shrinking places where birds and other wild things live. We keep dumping new and improved chemicals into these, to produce more food in less space for the one hundred million new Americans. Then we express surprise and outrage when pheasants disappear. We pack up and head where the air is cleaner and highways mostly have two lanes. Where wild birds can still live.

WORD GETS OUT: there's wonderful pheasant hunting still to be had in North Dakota or Montana or eastern Washington. This past October my wife and I happened to be driving along one of the loneliest highways in the Lower 48, through the middle of the sagebrush sea, where I once drove over one hundred miles and met two other vehicles.

One of those dry "cricks" parallels the highway for about 30 miles. It happened to be opening day of pheasant season, a date I often forget because opening days tend to be crowded, even in the West. And every quarter to half mile along the barbwire fence separating the highway from the crick was parked a vehicle with a dog box. Often there were two or three vehicles clumped together. Off along the dull purple willow brush of every bend in the crick were hunters wearing orange bird vests. It reminded me of a weekend I once spent during deer season in Pennsylvania.

What it comes down to is that there are no secret places left to hunt wild pheasants. You can come out here and visit--or even live--and it will be different than it is now back east, or in California. You will be hunting wild birds instead of paying for pen-raised roosters. But the frontier is gone. Just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared (60 million to less than a thousand) in a decade back in the late 19th century, the wide-open bird hunting has disappeared in less than a decade of the late 20th century. You may be able to buy some of it, or rent it from a rancher or outfitter, but the days of people expressing amazement that anyone would travel all that way, just to hunt a mere bird, are gone. The secret places have all been found.

We can point fingers in all sorts of directions. I can point at least two or three at myself. We all love to tell secrets, but mere secret-telling isn't what spreads Americans inexorably across America.

We keep using it up. We have since the first Americans crossed the Bering land bridge and started knocking giant sloths in the head, since Columbus sailed the ocean blue and Pilgrims pushed the Indians out of Plymouth Bay. This started the domino effect that pushed the Sioux out of Minnesota and then out of the Black Hills and got Custer killed. Lately the same domino effect pushed eastern urbanites to the suburbs, and then to California, and then to Colorado. Right now the first signs of urban hunting have begun here in Montana: the valley where I grew up now supports three shooting "preserves" where you pay to hunt pen-raised pheasants. This has happened because the valley has been half subdivided, and even where pheasants still find a brushy crick to live along, 16 screenwriters, hairdressers, and trust-funders own the brush--not one rancher. And none of them want you shooting pheasants in their 20-acre back yard.

Which is why quite often on summer nights I lie awake and listen to the coyotes singing on the ridge and find myself wondering if the chokecherry patch between the house and the crick will have cherries this year. The cherries attract pheasants and Hungarian partridge, and even a few porcupines and ruffed grouse. I lie awake not so much worrying about the chokecherry crop, because like rain and drought it has always come and gone, and the wild world just keeps truckin'. I lie awake like a grizzly bear, hearing voices from outside the edges of the wild, saying there's no place for grizzly bears, that the world would be a better place if we didn't have to worry about grizzly bears eating our kids while they wait for the school bus, or beating us up when we're hunting pheasants. And something in the coyotes' voices tells me that when the grizzlies go, wild pheasants won't be far behind.