I Witnessed the Glory Days of Sage Grouse Hunting

This story, “Walk Up a Flight,” appeared in the August 1953 issue of Outdoor Life. Sage hens are another name for sage grouse.

“Just a thousand miles away from home-and a-waitin’ for a train.”

The refrain of a lonesome hobo’s song kept running through my mind.

It was one of life’s darkest hours. There I was, in the shadow-filled lobby of Arco’s biggest hotel. It was now nearly dark, but I could still visualize the bleak, lonesome, sagebrush flats of Idaho. Windswept miles of them at the town’s edge.

I had just phoned home — Phoenix, Arizona — only to learn that my sched­uled trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River had been called off. The telegram announcing the change in plans had come after I’d left. And here I was, a thousand miles north of Phoenix with nothing but time on my hands.

The gloom that surrounded me was lighted by only one thing — the friendly face of a young man who’d been watch­ing as I stomped back and forth be­tween the phone booth and my chair, muttering when I couldn’t get a call through. The Forest Service telephone lines were shorted out, and I couldn’t reach the ranch on the Middle Fork to find out about the cancellation.

The young man appeared half amused at my antics, and when I realized what a spectacle I presented I had to laugh too. So I smiled at him and said hello a bit shamefacedly. He must have been a little bored, because we jumped at each other, conversationally.

This fellow proved the local saying, “You never meet a stranger in Arco.” After half an hour’s warm-up we were going fine. I knew who he was — Paul Vogali — and why he was there. And he knew all about my canceled trip down the Middle Fork and the great disap­pointment that was mine. Then he men­tioned having had a sage-hen dinner that evening. “My landlord,” he ex­plained. “went hunting today. He’s going again tomorrow.”

“Sage hens? I’ve heard about them but never gunned for them.”

“It’s a lot of work but it’s fun. Say, I’m going to phone Mr. Sillivan — he’s my landlord — a little later on. Would you like to go along if he has room? 

“I sure would.” I said enthusiastically. “I have no gun or license, of course, but I do have my camera and I’d like to get some pictures.”

Paul went on to explain that the sage grouse is strictly a Western species-a bird that sometimes runs as big as a small turkey. He said it was known locally as a sage hen regardless of sex.

“Well,” Paul concluded, glancing at his watch, “I’ve got an errand to do and then I’ll call Mr. Sillivan. I’ll drop by your room and let you know how I make out.”

I was just settling in bed, some time later, when a knock came at my door. It was Paul.

“Mr. Sillivan will stop in front at 6 tomorrow morning,” he said, smiling. “Shall I leave a call for you?”

He waved off my efforts to say thanks and disappeared. I went to sleep think­ing it’s a pretty good old world, at that. It was top-notch next morning, for right on schedule a car pulled up in front of the hotel and a fatherly-looking chap got out. He was Mr. Sillivan­ — Russ to his friends. He introduced me to Pete Anderson, who was driving.

They seemed happy to have another outdoorsman along.

The sun never seemed brighter than it did that morning when it came over the horizon and cast long shadows across the sagebrush flats, just outside town, where we parked the car. I was on my first sage-grouse hunt, although all I carried was a camera.

Arco, on the Lost River, centers an irrigated area of farmland. The green, saucerlike flats are rimmed by flat-gray sage which we were to hunt. The sea­ son had opened at noon the day before and was to close at sundown-only a day and a half of hunting, but I was in on it.

The distant boom of shotguns echoed across the valley as lucky hunters be­ gan to walk up sage hens. For that’s the way they hunt-walking through the sage, poised to swing on a flushed bird. Pete moved out to the left, Russ to the right, and I trailed slightly be­ hind and between them.

We skirted the irrigated fields of al­falfa into which hens had moved very early in the morning. The strategy was to intercept their return to the sage after they’d finished feeding.

A quarter of a mile away some other hunters were driving a cutover hayfield. They were pressing a stubble-covered corner when a trio of sage hens flushed with a roar. The hunters missed and the birds fanned out. One, on set pin­ ions. soared over us, within range. Russ missed. Pete led the speeding bird just right, and his shot folded it in flight. Then I got my first close look at one of the nation’s finest upland gamebirds.

With Pete one up, Russ began to hunt harder, and I trailed my host while he bird-dogged the flats and told me more about sage hens. They spend most of their time in the brush, but in early morning and late evening they move into the edges of the cultivated fields.

The trick is to get them just after they’ve had their morning meal. If you wait until 10 or so, until they get back into normal cover, they are hard to find in the miles and miles of open country. Then you really have to walk your legs off to get up a flight.

We whipped back and forth, frequent­ly finding a “set” where a grouse had spent the night, but no live birds. Across the ridges and down into the gullies, Russ and I stepped up the pace until we were both breathing hard. Finally he called a welcome halt on a ridge we had combed from one end to the other, keeping about 30 yards apart. While we rested Russ ventured the opinion that a sage hen is as unpredictable as a slot machine. After a five­ minute blow, we stepped off, and

Phr-r-o-o-m!

…right out of Russ’s pants cuff zoomed a sage hen!

It came up so fast Russ touched off toe quick. and shot under the bird.. The second blast from his 12 gauge auto­ loader, a miss too, caused the sage hen to jam down the throttle, and it scudded away over the next ridge.

Russ laughed as he turned. “Like I was saying,” he began — and another hen erupted from a near-by clump of sage.

As it curved away Russ, now over his nervousness, led the whistling bird and spilled it into a sagebrush thicket. The hen was a big one, one of the largest we were to see that day.

It was then well along in the morn ing, and the distant booms of shotguns were less frequent. Russ and I began the long circle to the car, and by now we were hunting well back in the sage, far from the alfalfa fields. We reasoned that the grouse had all filtered back through the margin we’d hunted earlier that day and were now sunning and dusting themselves some distance from the irrigated fields.

How wrong we were! We didn’t flush a bird.

Back at the car, Russ sighed deeply and comfortably as he eased himself down on the sharp edge of the bumper. I felt bowlegged. myself, and practical­ly numb below the waist. I was that tired. Then we spied Pete. who had gone off on a tangent of his own, coming out of the green saucer of irrigated fields.

We had no more than spotted his tiny figure, when a brace of hens rocketed out of the hay stubble in the very field that had yielded Pete’s first bird earlier that morning. We saw him raise his gun, then lower it, and moments later came the dull boom of his shot. He had missed.

The birds flew toward us. One curved away. The other planed down onto a sage-covered ridge.

Russ groped as he heaved to his feet and chambered a shell. The first few steps were painful as we started toward the ridge. Once there, we liter­ally trampled down the sage cover try­ing to flush the bird but finally had to give up, exhausted, given us the slip.

“We didn’t mark it well enough, I guess,” mumbled Russ.

In a while Pete came up, and he and Russ stood for a moment, debating whether they had enough strength left to go out after the rest of their bag limit.

It was noon. The hunt for sage hens had cleared my mind of the turmoil of the evening before. It had been fun, meeting these two strangers. But by now I was itching to get back on the road. Even though the trip down the Middle Fork had been canceled, I was optimistic. If this turn in luck would only hold there was no telling what sport lay ahead of me.

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As if reading my mind, Pete and Russ suggested we call it a day. They had a bird each, one short of the bag limit. We turned to go to the cars, and the ground seemed to explode with the roar­ing take-off of the sage hen that Russ and I had looked for vainly.

It had been hiding at our feet all the time we’d been standing there.

It erupted so fast that Pete and Russ were left frozen. Then we all had to laugh — laugh at one another’s dum­founded expressions. They’d missed with the shotguns; I’d missed with my camera — the best picture of the day. But I hadn’t missed a fine morning of brand-new sport. For that I could thank the friendly smile of a young fellow sit­ting in the lobby of the biggest hotel in Arco, the place where you never meet a stranger.