Arrival
With the long autumnal sun just failing to pierce the South Dakota cold, we had the perfect start to a week of pheasant hunting. It was our second outing and my brother and I felt confident. We believed we had all the rookie mistakes out of the way and that even without a dog, we could fill our game bags. We ended our first trip shooting three birds on our final day, so we assured our two first-timer friends that we knew what to do. I even made predictions.
We began that first day riding the confidence of our beginner’s luck, ready to limit out. Not fifteen minutes after we loaded our guns, we came upon the ideal pheasant hiding spot, a little pond surrounded by cattails with a section of thick switchgrass sheltered just out of the wind. Our next step was simple enough, find and shoot the bird.
However, like the rest of their upland brethren, finding a pheasant is never so simple. With the instincts of a chicken and the size of a Great Horned Owl, pheasants prefer to run from danger and fly only when forced. If flushed, they use their wiry legs to launch themselves into the wind, turning to catch it with their wings, and letting Mother Nature carry them to the nearest area where there aren’t hunters with guns.
In our excitement, we forgot all this. Rather than having the wind force the pheasant to turn broadside toward us, it flushed with the wind coming from our 4 o’clock and charged away from us. I let loose with both barrels from my LC Smith and watched the pheasant sail into the distance. Not hearing any shots coming from my friend in the least bad of all our bad positions, I looked over to see him fiddling with his safety.
As the shooter who whiffed, I helpfully explained to the group that our failure stemmed not from a lack of competence, but from the much more fixable problem of positioning. Sitting around the campfire enjoying a scotch and a cigar to end the day, we felt hopeful for the coming week. With five days of hunting ahead of us and the scotch restoring our confidence, we naturally expected to take home fifteen pheasants.
Trial
The next afternoon nothing moved, not even a breeze. The sun beat down on us field after field – the balmy rays keeping the pheasants from the thick cover we had succeeded in on our first trip. Pheasant hunting, especially without a dog, shares the frustrations of fly fishing. You constantly assure yourself you’re doing the right thing and when nothing hits, you’re tempted to change the fly. Maybe we’re walking too fast? Too slow? Should we hop fields more frequently? Can we book a guide last minute? Can we book a dog? Somewhere in the midst of those doubts, we stumbled through a small section of cattails ringing a pond and bookended by thick switchgrass that looked ready-made to hold pheasants. But reaching the end of the cattails, we again kicked up only disappointment.
Converging to talk through where to go next, twelve pheasants exploded from our midst. We hesitated, mouths agape, before slinging a wall of lead at the fleeing birds, and – much worse than missing the full dozen – wounding two. They hit the ground running, disappearing into a large section of nearby grass and apparently, an alternate dimension.
Tasting the bitterness of failure and wasted life, we called it after an hour of looking for those two birds. I favored ending our frustration and returning to the cabin. My brother and my friend John, however, insisted that we hit one more spot on the way back. Though content to brood by the campfire, we had just spooked twelve pheasants–I convinced myself we could find more.
Feast
The day’s final field seemed to hold some promise of redemption in a thick patch of switchgrass that lay just off a small, unharvested cornfield, perfect for hunkering pheasants. Mustering what enthusiasm we could, we plodded through the grass. As the sun danced behind us, a gentle breeze picked up in the waning day, and right as I regained the joy of hunting again, from the corner of my eye something burst out of the grass.
I froze, perceiving a bobcat–but wait, it was a jackrabbit! I fired my gun, adding to my missed shot tally, as the jackrabbit in an unfortunate, but understandable error, headed straight for the cornfield. But by heading toward safety, it ran directly through our group’s field of fire. Everyone else let loose, but the rabbit kept running. As it neared the cornfield, we all assumed it was yet another lost opportunity.
Until the rabbit collapsed.
An absolute chunker of a corn-fed jackrabbit, he must have weighed close to ten pounds. We could not believe our eyes–a spoil like this required a feast beyond our basic cabin food. Recovered from the sting of the lost pheasants, we raced to town to secure the fixings needed for a proper celebration.
The rabbit cooked for nearly three hours, so we had plenty of time to relive our moment of triumph. We determined that apart from it not being me, we could not know who delivered the fatal shot. It ultimately didn’t matter–the sense of redemption made an already rich meal that much richer. We savored every moment of that evening, grateful for a peaceful end to a tumultuous day. With three more days of hunting ahead of us, I wondered aloud if maybe we’d get another rabbit. One for Thanksgiving?
Epilogue
While I did shoot a pheasant of my own before the trip ended, nothing quite stands out like the rabbit. That night was a celebration, spurred by a moment of surprise joy exceeding any of the individual successes we had envisioned. But, as I look back, we celebrated each night that week, grateful for the chance to just be out hunting together. This is why I drag my friends half-way across the country to hunt birds (or evidently, anything in season). Every evening allows all the toil and the occasional successes of a day of hunting to fade away, and we are all satisfied with simply sitting down together to a wonderful dinner or around a campfire sipping whiskey and reliving what the day brought us. Tomorrow will always come, and with it, more ups and downs. Maybe a sixteen-hour drive home. But in those evenings, in those quiet moments, we need nothing else.
