A prairie pothole, Ashley, ND.
The sky was overcast and the air cool as my three sons, Matt, Chris, and Jack walked a natural grass field bordering a small lake near Ashley, North Dakota. Reid Amborn, a friend of Matt’s and a fellow IT nerd, walked with the Munger clan as well. I was on the far western edge of the line of five hunters and two dogs searching the tall prairie grass, hoping to pop a rooster pheasant or two out of concealment. It happened sparingly on this, my eighth or ninth trip (I’m turning 60 this week and forget such details) to hunt pheasants in North Dakota. In two hours of walking, we jump three or four shootable roosters and hit one. I missed an easy shot and cursed my ineptitude. The big, brilliant bird glided merrily across the water of an adjacent pothole, cackling in delight as the steel shot of my round fell into the green water. Chris correctly gauged the speed and ascent of a male pheasant and brought the bird to earth. Kena, Jack’s year-old black Labador, and Lexie, Matt’s matronly seven year old red Labrador, found the downed bird but didn’t do what their labels boast they should do. Instead of retrieving the bird, they stood over it imperiously but refused to pick up the dead rooster and return it to the shooter. Chris tucked the dead bird in the pouch of his hunting vest and we moved on.
Kena and Lexie waiting for someone to hit a bird.
My old man, Harry, turns 87 years old this week. His birthday is a day before mine. I will be turning, as the young folk like to say pejoratively, “the big Six-Oh”. Dad lives in Florida now. He finally got a Florida driver’s license after selling the familial home in the Piedmont Heights neighborhood of Duluth. He’s lived in Florida for the majority of each year for the past five years or so, but, until he sold the house, he resisted becoming a resident of the Sunshine State. Now he can vote for former Republican-turned-Democrat, Charlie Crist for governor. That, despite the loss of the house, brings a smile to the old Democrat’s face.
Grandpa Harry at the hunting house.
This trip was conceived by Harry and his hunting buddy, Bruce Meyer, several decades ago. When the men were in their late 60’s, they started making annual treks to South Dakota to hunt ducks and pheasants. They grew weary of the scarcity of land to hunt, the constant rejection at the hands of local ranchers who wanted to charge $50-$100 per day, per hunter, to hunt what are supposedly wild birds owned by the people of the State of South Dakota. So the two old men migrated a bit north, renting a motel room at the Ma and Pa motel in Ashley, North Dakota, the tiny county seat of McIntosh County. Later, they befriended local farmers and rented trailers or cabins or old farmhouses as lodging. By the time my old man got around to asking Matt and I to join the trip, these connections with farmers were near an end: The same monetary demons that had made hunting in South Dakota so expensive had crept north. We began renting houses in the town of Ashley for the trip and searching for public or non-posted farm land to hunt rather than arrange to hunt on specific farms. It’s not the best arrangement for filling a hunting vest with dead birds but it serves our purposes. We work hard, walking the land, looking for opportunities to hunt, and enjoy an environment uniquely different from the rolling hills, lakes, swamps, and forested closure of our native Minnesota. Even last year, when the bird count was dismal in southern North Dakota due to the brutal winter of 2012-2013, the five of us (with Harry scouting out new spots from the car while we worked the land) had a good, if not productive, hunt. This year, prior to heading out, we toyed with the idea of hunting public land in nearby South Dakota. The conservation lands (plots where farmer and ranchers leave natural cover for wildlife production and allow public hunting in return for a government subsidy) in the Ashley area, and throughout all of North Dakota, are rapidly disappearing as more and more prairie is converted back to agricultural production. But, in the end, we chose to hunt what we knew.
The crew at rest after lunch and a tough morning hunt.
Over four days, we walked tree lines, sloughs, shoreline, and native grasslands in search of gorgeously hued roosters. One morning, a morning where Chris and I both downed birds, we saw more than twenty female (hen) pheasants (can’t shoot ’em) but only three males. That was pretty much the story of our four days in Ashley. That and chasing the occasional corn fed, very fat and very robust white tail bucks and does out of their hiding places, the sound of a two hundred pound deer getting up from rushes three feet away enough to cause your heart to race. And seeing raft upon raft of floating ducks on prairie ponds. And watching a big, bushy tailed coyote, its coat splendid and thick against the noonday sun as it eyed us from atop a hill, the land barren of trees; the sun hot and summer-like. And the flights of white trumpeter swans and Canada geese and sandhill cranes and mallards and bluebills headed south towards the Platte, dotting the blue sky.
Jack stretching out the kinks.
There were, as with all family hunting and fishing excursions (Reid now being, after two years of hunting with us, an honorary Munger) a couple of tense moments, a few words exchanged that we regretted, apologized for, and then moved on from. But really, given the fact all of us were dog tired and frustrated with the lack of roosters to shoot, the discord was minimal. There were no hasty words said that festered. As on any Munger outing, we debated and teased and challenged each other, with much commentary directed at Chris, whose evenings were cluttered with texts and emails back to Minnesota to a certain lady lawyer who is the main focus of his life.
Pheasants down.
Travel arrangements this year were a bit more complex what with Harry living in Florida. His Tahoe is in storage back in Duluth because he and his significant other, Pauline, rely upon her van for transportation when living in Florida. There’s no need for two folks over 80 to have separate cars in one place. A few years back, I convinced Dad that it was a better plan to fly back and forth between his two places of residence instead of trying to drive the 30 hour jaunt. That meant leaving the Tahoe in Duluth. To make this trip, Dad flew from Port Charolette to Fargo where Chris and I picked him up. The plane was on time. Harry was in good spirits and I had his shotgun and gear in tow, ready for his use.
Matt, Jack, and Reid drove separately in Matt’s Suburban, taking a more southerly route from Duluth through Fergus Falls and then on to Ashley. In all significant ways, this is now Matt’s trip: he rented the house we stayed at, he planned the menu, he shopped for the food, and he functioned as our camp cook. Chris is our bird cleaner, a job that hasn’t been too taxing the past two years. Reid makes the lunches we pack into the field and lends a hand doing dishes and cleaning the house. Jack and I shared most of the dish washing and kitchen clean up, my youngest son showing new-found maturity in never grousing or objecting to the tasks assigned.
A Waterfowl production area. Steel shot only.
There were few occasions on this trip for us to be energized by clouds of pheasants rising into the climbing or setting sun. We tried to hunt smarter, to be more contemplative in our journeys across the land in search of birds. But there were few opportunities this year to shoot roosters. Time and time again, Lexie stopped dead in the grass, her nose twitching, or, in Kena’s case, the young Lab bounded through the waist high sedge and thistle, ears flapping in the warm breeze, nose vertical to the scent of a bird, only to kick up a dusky colored hen. Off limits. But still exciting, if somewhat disappointing. Our luck changed in the last hour of the last day. Chris’s plan was to move slowly through a waterfowl production area we were hunting at the cusp of sunset, the end of shooting time, pushing birds against a road and a fence line. After a long walk with nothing to show for our efforts, we ascended the last hill of the trip. Birds erupted everywhere. Jack and Matt, both birdless to that point, each knocked a cackling North Dakota rooster to the ground. Reid did the same. Chris shot and missed. My gun remained silent. And yet, it was a magnificent end to a fine, fine trip.
The boys after a fruitless walk on a hot day.
Peace.
Mark
