Still-hunting Grouse on Snow

[Garth Gustafson]

Its December so I thought I'd reproduce this classic grouse hunt by James R Benton written in 1893. From Upland Tales with permission from Safari Press.

The gray December dawn had caught the last whirling flake of the first snowstorm of the season, just the very morning for a still-hunt after ruffed grouse. The tracks in the new fallen snow will betray the whereabouts of the game, for all sign must be fresh and every trail upon the fair white surface as readable as a printed page.

Plod up the hillside, to the shadowy woods beyond. How the snow, clinging to the twigs and branches muffles the woods. The clear frosty ring of late autumn is gone. The sound of your voice is caught before it goes fifty paces. The report of your gun is choked in the echo-less silence. You fall musing mayhap on the beauty and weirdness of it all, when a handful of snow, slipping down your neck from some well-freighted, carelessly shaken twig, drives all the "weirdness" out of your mind.

But these hardwood saplings do not afford sufficient shelter for our game in this kind of weather, so we will visit a well known place where a number of short, bushy hemlocks clustered in little family groups make a relieving spot of color amidst the surrounding white.

How the ruffed grouse love these sheltering hemlocks. There they find protection from summer's heat, autumn's rains, and winter's snow. What cozy nooks to hide in, beneath the fragrant branches. Only the finest snow sifts through, leaving bare spots where the dry needles make the most comfortable of dusting places. The fox knows the secrets of the hemlocks too. Push through the thickest of the clumps and you will find the sly fellow's footprints with here and there a few wing marks in the snow where some wary old bird has sprung up before them. Or perhaps a few scattering feathers tell a sadder tale.

But look! See that sharp, decided track in the snow. No barnyard fowl ever left as clean-cut an autograph as that-how free and wild and independent. In it you can see the hardy Viking spirit of the true child of the North, the bird of the mountain and evergreen forest. This fellow was apparently out for breakfast; here he nipped a birch bud, there the scarlet twinkle of a wintergreen berry caught his eye. His tracks lead to that clump just beyond the brook, possibly he has two or three friends there with him. You go this side, I'll go that. Twit-twit! Whir-whir-! How the loose snow flies, there he goes! Quick! See the feathers! He made a bold attempt, but the old Parker was too true for him. There goes another! He's too far away! How his clean, brown form shoots along, as he makes for the old hemlock grove on the hilltop. We may find him there later.

Now we splash up this brook between the hemlock clusters. The ruffed grouse, like many that hunt him, seems fond of a place where he has not far to go for a drink. Careful! There is a likely looking spot, behind that decayed knotty log, half-hidden 'mid the small evergreens. Buzz! Never mind if you can't see him! Shoot through the bushes anyway. Always take every chance. Missed him? What of that? The man that never missed a ruffed grouse is one that never shoots before witnesses!

And now we follow the birds that have escaped up the slope to yonder hill-top where a grove of giant hemlocks have murmured to one another in far away voices through generations-shrieking and cracking with the tempest, moaning with the autumn wind, or mingling their whisper with the insects' hum on summer evenings. But here we are among them. Quite a climb. It isn't such a cold day after all. Now watch closely the lower limbs and stubs of the large trees. Oh, you thought that was an upright knot until it skimmed away? Never mind! He'll tree again. There he goes! You'd have hit him that time if he hadn't put that big tree between you? Probably, but that is a frequent trick of his. His grouse instinct seems to tell him that the opposite side of a tree is the safer, another lesson he has likely learned from the human example. Look up in that shaggy old hemlock fifty yards away! Third limb up, close to the trunk. Half-screened from view by that small twig, there he sits, straight and immovable as though a part of the branch. Softly! That immovable appearance changes at slightest notice to the most exaggerated motion. Well done! That was a shot to be proud of. The Flight of a ruffed grouse as he hums from a high limb and darts down a hillside is about the best example of unexampled celerity to be cited.

But now we come to a steep-sided ravine where a small brook dashes along between two high wooded ridges. My companion plunges into the thick undergrowth along the top of the ridge while I follow a sort of wood-path that winds along the bank of the stream. Wood-life is always thickest near the springs and streams. Today the new fallen snow is a sheet whereon the various acts and deeds of the prowlers of the night and early mornings are most plainly recorded. Who would have thought the old woods contained so great a variety of winter residents. When did you ever see one of those wood-mice whose tracks are stitched across the snow in every direction? But for this mark of their existence you would never know you had such neighbors. Reynard knows them however. His carefully-made footprints yonder indicate the deep interest he takes in their welfare, possibly he also has an eye on that series of incipient isosceles triangles that some little gray rabbit left behind him in the snow. Ah! there is the place where two or three old crows came down to get a drink, remarked concerning the chances of a severe winter, and then took a view of the landscape from the dead top of that maple on the hill yonder in order to see if their presence was required at the inquest of some defunct cow, or other unburied victim of age or circumstance. But my mind is suddenly diverted from this fascinating sort of "track inspecting", by the report of my companion's gun high up on the ridge. If he misses his bird there is a chance it may come this way. There-one hundred feet in air-wings set-feathers compressed, apparently to make as small a mark of itself as possible, shooting across the ravine like a bullet. Well! Here goes for luck. Fifteen feet ahead is not an inch too much. Hurrah! that caught him. His speed was such that he drops half way up the opposite hill, while a handful of fine feathers drifting down through the fading light show how hard he was hit. A hit like that makes up for twenty misses. What sportsman knows not the wild joyous thrill that follows such a clean shot! A minute before you were tired, your feet seemed bound to stumble against every root and stub in the woods, you began to think hunting was losing its interest, you didn't see just what you came for today anyway. Then the whir-the successful shot, and your muscles are springs, your feet scarcely touch the ground, your triumph breaks forth in a shout. Could the philosophers but grasp and make tangible this passing thrill, they need seek no further for the elixir of life. This exultation of a moment made enduring through an eternity of time must be the ecstatic existence of the Red Man's imagination pictures to him in his visions of the Happy Hunting Grounds.

But as I scramble up the hillside and pick up my victim (a cock grouse whose long glossy ruffs and goodly proportions proclaim him an old inhabitant of the cover) the last rays of the setting sun fade away and the gray chill of the winter twilight brings our hunt to a close. The farmhouse windows begin to twinkle across the snow and with game-bags far more comfortably filled than our stomachs, we tramp homeward. From some dark corner of the woods behind us a weird-voiced owl "does to the moon complain".