Thursday September 30, 2021

    I’ve been in the northwoods again lately. Not unusual for me since I live there all year around, but it was different in that I was hunting ‘partridges,’ (Ruffed Grouse), the smoke-colored denizen of northern forests and swamps. I was in the company of one of my wife’s three sons, Craig, who had succumbed to the combined allure of beautiful September weather, and partridge season and archery season for deer.

    I used to hunt partridge years ago and have eaten many. Ruffed Grouse, aka ‘partridge,’ is an upland game bird that, as my memory serves me, tastes great, whereas its close cousin, the Sharptail grouse doesn’t taste as good, and has forever imprinted that impression on me. Sharptail prefer open fields and thick willow glens, to the Ruffed Grouse hideouts in the woods and under tree boughs. The one thing they have in common is that both birds, suddenly bursting from cover, can scare the living b’jesus out of a unsuspecting person, which is something better to be experienced, than merely described.

    Craig had purchased a Wicked Ridge Invader 400 crossbow; a technologically advanced ancient weapon made in the form of a horizontal archery bow that is held with both hands, one hand on the forearm of the stock and the other hand at the trigger, as one would hold a rifle or shotgun. He will use it in place of a conventional bow during archery season for deer. Wikipedia defines it as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow.

    Wikipedia doesn’t mention that vertical archery bows now have a mechanism used in common with a cam and pulley system that once the ‘draw’ of the arrow and bowstring is reached, the arrow is effortlessly held in place, thereby relaxing the shoulder muscles of the shooter. The arrow is then released by means of a ‘quick-release trigger,’ affixed around the archer’s wrist and held in the archer’s palm.

    Craig also brought a Springfield 410 pump action shotgun with him that he hadn’t used for many years. It’s a perfect little gun for hunting grouse of any stripe, but as he found out, after missing two quick shots, it is something that requires periodic practice to use efficiently. I tried to allay his embarrassment by saying it sometimes happens to people as they age, (He's over 50) as had happened to me. Although I often shoot firearms the year-around owing to my rural residency, at this age I’m not the shooter I once was, (or thought I was.) 

    Craig intended to deer hunt at home that evening so we didn’t want to walk through woods and field edges here to ruin his chances. Instead, after a good breakfast, we went to a family hunting camp a few miles away to hunt partridges. Being a weekday, no one else was at the other camp. No vehicles were seen on the country roads. There was hardly anyone working in the fields. It was quiet all around us except for the sound of the wind through the trees. 

    Yellowing leaves fell from the trees to the ground among their brethren adding to the many reds there in shades of crimson and the splashes of florescent greens against the earthy grays of woody-stemmed foliage. Deer sign was everywhere appearing as narrow, circuitous, deeply-imprinted trails cross the wooded landscape, snaking through hollows framed-in by grotesque lichen-encrusted poles of dead diamond-willow, balm-of-Gilead trees, and thick shocks of alder bushes. 

Eight-foot tall black ash saplings dominated a clearing below aging poplars in the vicinity of where had stood several good-sized parent trees forty years earlier. The deer camp guys used them as firewood. These hundreds of healthy-looking saplings are in no danger of meeting the same fate for many years to come.

    As Craig and I walked through that woodland; he in the woods, me on the outside, I thought back to 1983 when I used to frequent that area as a newly-divorced man. Despite my intimacy with the land and its warmth of familial history, I distinctly recall how lonely these same woods felt. Rather than being liberating, it was lonely; meaningless. Knowing that there was no one ‘home’ to get back to colored the experience so graphically, I recalled it as a flashback. 

    But here I was, all these thirty-eight years later, walking with Craig, as I have done with his mother and his siblings, who loves the woods as much as I do, and cause me to help enrich our combined experiences of them, here, whether we all hunt or not. 

    Ah but, you wonder, did Craig bag any partridges or deer? Choosing a spot to hunt deer, after we discussed recent trail camera sightings, Craig decided to sit atop the ground rather than in a deer stand, and wait for a big buck. He had chosen to use the crossbow to hunt deer, than use his rifle, because No. 1) Archery season got him into the woods sooner than wood Firearms Deer season. And, No. 2) using a crossbow created a new challenge, in that he would only shoot a trophy-sized buck.

    Finding a tree to lean against, he positioned a inner-tube cushion to comfortably sit on, and with his crossbow cocked and ready to fire across his outstretched legs, he settled in, to become still-as-stone.

   Except for a florescent-orange cap, as is called out in the Minnesota hunting regulations, he was wearing camouflage top to bottom; his freckled and reddish bearded face covered by a pull-up mask, when a whitetail doe walked slowly into view, eating as she came. She stopped fifteen yards away from him, and never acted as though she knew he was there. He remained motionless. 

    This went on for several minutes, when suddenly he became aware of something right beside him; something within arm length ...

    It was a partridge.

    Pecking among the leaves there, the partridge was totally oblivious of Craig beside him/her, all dressed up in a camouflage suit that looked like leaves and twigs so he could not be seen; it certainly worked.

    Something I may not have mentioned is that partridges are rather stupid birds, and owing to that fact they fall prey to hunters of all ages -- even those over the age of fifty, who sit stock-still against a tree never moving anything except their eyeballs.

    The deer moseyed away, and was soon gone from Craig's view; and just as soon, the partridge was far enough away for Craig to shoot it with the crossbow. He shot another with the shotgun the next morning just before he left for home.

    He says he'll be back.