November Slough—Pheasant by Jim Rataczak Courtesy of Wild Wings

Fortunately, late in December, the diminishment of your desire to kill a pheasant, or anything, after you’ve killed so many, is balanced almost perfectly by the increase in your desire to do right by your dog, and to keep on hunting.

Photograph by Terry Wieland

We’ve only one virginity to lose, wrote Rudyard Kipling, and where we lose it there our hearts will be. Kipling was writing of the sea. I am writing of ruffed grouse. I was nine. It’s like it was yesterday. That’s not the day I shot a ruffed grouse, for that would come some years later. No, it was the day I first saw one, heard one, and felt it as it landed near me in some leaves on a brittle day in October.

For two years of inquiry everybody had told us everything about bandtailed pigeons. They said they were very challenging shooting as they screamed across high ridges and saddles. They said they were very hard to kill; you need an ounce and a quarter of # 6 shot. “They love acorns, and elder berries, and manzanita, Cascara, and Arbutus berries. But if they’ve been eating acorns they’re rally bitter. They had told us everything in fact except the one thing we wanted to know—where to find some.

Produce a new shotgun and it’s the first question you hear: “What are the chokes?”
Shotgunners today are obsessed—there is no other word—with muzzle constriction. So it may come as a shock when I say that choke really doesn’t matter. Of all the thoughts that run through your mind when you pick up a shotgun, choke is no better than fifth down the list, and some believe it should be dismissed almost entirely.

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There are few things in life, Dale Spartas tells us, that remain as unforgettable as a traditional Southern plantation quail hunt on horseback, accompanied by a mule-drawn wagon and a brace of English pointers, coursing and flashing white through the Georgia pines, before slamming into stylish points on a sunny February morning.

If I close my eyes, and listen carefully, I will hear them baying, Mr. Herman’s bear hounds at full cry, back in the honest days before radio collars, when a bear hunt was just that, a hunt. At stake was a full larder for the cold months ahead, a warm blanket or soft rug.

In 1972 the world’s best wingshooting venue was discovered, and I was in on the development of that destination. This was Colombia, South America, and the Cauca Valley soon became the Mecca for dedicated wingshooters. The flat valley floor was home to small grains of all varieties.