Doc Thanks for reminding me about hunting Huns will living in Alberta. They get up like little rockets, was mighty good sport.
Cheers NC
NC... thanks back. I was up in Alberta last week for a medical conference and some skiing with my daughter (she flew in from Wisconsin to rendezvous with me, we ski'd Lake Louise together for the first time since my knee replacements 10 years ago).
I spent a few days with my Dad, who's 86 now. We played cribbage, drank Big Rock beer, and reminisced about all kinds of stuff (daughter loved hearing the old stories I've heard a million times).
The last time I hunted with Dad was 15 years ago. As it happens, it was his last hunting season. I moved to Wisconsin the following spring, and Dad decided that he didn't care to hunt without me and my dog(s), so he gave his shotgun to my brother and retired from the bird-killing business. And I might add that he had killed a lot of birds, when he was in that business, especially in the early days when the limit on ducks was 25 and you could bring home 5 pheasants a day without a bird dog.
As it was each season in southern Albeta, our first hunt that season (1996) was the opening upland weekend (not including pheasant), which meant Huns. Dad, my son, and I drove down to the open country in the Eastern Irrigation District southeast of Vulcan. This was prime Hun country at the time, and had been for many years. I hear they've cleaned up the irrigation canals since then, and the vegetation is way down and so are the birds... sad, but what can you do?
Anyways, we got into bird country early that cool September morning, and had a cup of coffee in the truck while we waited for shooting light while Brit the Mighty Pheasant Dog beat the inside of his crate to death with his tail and whined up a storm. Brit considered Huns almost beneath his dignity, but only just... once he got scent and the guns barked and birds fell out of the sky, he gave up his pretensions of grandeur and had him a high ol' time...
We pulled into an abandoned farm yard I had had good success with now & then previous seasons. There was a grey and weathered little farmhouse on the southeast corner of the land with a big overgrown carragana hedge hemming in the home yard to the west and north, and beyond that a nearly-dry creek running northeast-to-southwest, and beyond that a hill to the north and some granaries just below the summit. If you caught a covey in the short grass of that yard, they had to flush higher than they normally do to clear the hedge and make for the hilltop beyond, which gives a gunner a wee edge you don't always have on these little grey rockets.
We limbered the guns, and set Brit out to quartering across the thin grass on the back of the property. The sun was just hitting the treetops overhead, and Dad and Luke moved out on the flanks while I took the middle. Brit got birdy on his second or third cast, it was that quick. I called to the guys to move up quick as you have to do when hunting over a flushing Springer, and they did, and just like that Brit put his nose down into the grass and a big covey of 15 birds or so thundered out of the shortgrass prairie, rising high as they had to to clear the carragana hedge 40 yards away, blue sky and snow-capped mountains beyond them, the birds rising into the first light of sunrise.
Guns came up almost of their own accord and spoke reflexively. I saw my first bird fold, and watched my second bird get away clean. In my peripheral vision to my left I saw Luke's bird fall to the second shot from his 20-gauge Wingmaster.
I shifted my focus to Brit, and saw he was on my bird already. I had long since stopped wondering at how Brit always knew which bird I had shot in a covey flush, but he always did. Dog magic. He brought it to hand, then immediately galloped out to fetch Luke's bird, which he had marked even while rocketing to his first retrieve. Great dogs can do that.
Then I turned to my right, where Dad was standing with a little smile on his face. Luke was a young hunter then, so I naturally tended to pay closer attention to him. I had heard Dad shoot 3 times, but hadn't marked his shots at all.
"Well," Dad announced, "I don't know what you guys are going to do for the rest of the day, but I'm gonna put my shotgun away and drink coffee. I got my limit."
I goggled at him and said something impolite, as one does when someone makes utters such an obvious lie in the field. No one, and I mean NO ONE, kills 5 Huns on a single flush. Period. Maybe ground-sluicing a flock with a 4-gauge punt gun, but never hard-flushing birds with a 16-gauge Model 12.
But Brit went to work, and sonofabitch if he didn't eventually bring in 5 Huns from Dad's side of the field. It took a while, because the fifth bird was a moving cripple, but old Brit was a savvy retriever and tracked the Hun down into the crick bottom and got it out from under a pileup of dead Cottonwood.
"Okay," I said to Dad, eating crow as gracefully as I could under the circumstances. "You killed your limit, I'll give you that. But to do so, you had to be flock-shooting."
Now, anyone who's hunted covey birds knows that the surest way to miss clean is to flock-shoot. It was a deliberate insult, or should I say, deliberate balls-breaking.
"Nope," Dad declaimed calmly as he slipped his Model 12 back into its case and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. "The birds on my side all broke left to right. I killed the first bird just off the flush, then swung and there were 2 birds superimposed, so I snap-shot them, then swung right, and the same thing happened again."
"Bullschitt," I muttered, and Luke grinned into his cup of hot chocolate.
Now, my Dad had been hunting birds in Alberta and Saskatchewan for 50 years. He had told me every one of his hunting stories at least 50 times, and I knew for a fact that he had never scored more than a double on Huns in all those years, never mind a triple, never mind a quintuple! To be truthful, I don't know anyone who's scored a triple on Huns, and I've hunted with some damn good shotgun men over these last six decades.
Dad was a good shot on game, but he was what he called a "snap shot", a man who can hit quickly, but isn't much good on "set" shots such as ones where you wait that half-second for two birds to line up. I knew this not just from his stories, but from 30 years of hunting with him and watching him shoot.
So I called him on it, but he just shrugged and smiled and sipped his coffee.
Well, as I recall we all got our limits on Huns that morning, and lucked into some puddle ducks on a canal just after lunch, and it was a good day as we set off west and north back to Calgary in the warm golden autumn afternoon.
As it happens, the subject of that hunt came up this last weekend as Dad and daughter and I sat over the cribbage board sipping Big Rock and snacking on cheese and venison sausage I'd brought up from Texas. I admit I pushed him a bit.
"C'mon, Dad," I said, "You've got to admit that there had to have been just a smidgeon of luck on that morning."
He grinned. "Well," he said, taking a sip of his beer. "There might have been."
