There are certain telephone lines, especially in small towns and rural communities, that have distinctive sounds. One buzzes like a bumblebee tangled in a clover head. Another makes with a low musical hum. I recall one, in a town in the Cumberland hills in Tennessee, that sounded like static in an old-time radio set when a thunderstorm was gathering.
Harold Wilkins happened to have a line of that kind, and that was how I knew who was calling me the instant I lifted my receiver, even before he said a word. Harold and I had held a number of conversations during the fall, all of them concerned with· the same subject, pheasant hunting. Much good had come out of our long-distance talks all through October, and before the month was over I had come to regard the sputter of his wire as one of the most seductive noises I ever listened to. I had only to close my eyes to have it bring visions of frosty swales, weedy cornfields, setters at work, a cock pheasant rocketing out of the dead goldenrod.
But when I heard the song that particular morning I was puzzled. It was now the second week in November and pheasant season had been closed for more than a fortnight. I wondered why Harold was phoning now. He didn’t leave me long in suspense.
“What are you doing next Monday?” he asked abruptly.
“I’ve got a big deal on,” I said.
“I’ll bet it concerns rabbits,” he snorted.
“Wrong!” I answered, and went on to explain about the white-tail buck that had fed all summer in an abandoned field less than a mile from my back door.
I live in southern Michigan, 100 miles or more below the forested and cutover region normally reckoned deer country. But in the farmlands where I reside, forty miles outside Detroit, we have a sizable herd of white-tails. They frequent the woodlots, the small swamps, and the brush-grown abandoned farms. A white-tail can make out nicely in a small patch of cover if he’s let alone, and this particular herd has increased at a great rate in recent years.
In the fall of 1948 the Michigan Conservation Commission, knowing from bitter experience that too many deer in farming country are a far bigger headache than too few, opened every one of the state’s eighty-three counties to legal buck hunting, for the first time in more than fifty years.
And so a neighbor and I were out to get a certain buck that we had watched at intervals from July on. We knew his ways, where he fed, how he traveled to and from the field. We thought we could outsmart him on the first morning of the season — the very Monday that Harold was asking me about.
“And what,” I asked, “do you have in mind?”
“Oh, I thought you might like to go pheasant hunting,” he said casually.
“I know other ways I’d rather land in jail,” I retorted. “Maybe you forget, but the pheasant season is over and done with, like the last rose of summer.”
“You live too sheltered a life,” he jeered. “Ever hear of a place called Ohio?”
I started to climb down off my high horse. I could see a plot taking shape, and it interested me.
“Yeah,” I admitted, “I’ve read about it. Somewhere south of here.”
“A couple of hours south as that jalopy of yours rolls,” Harold agreed. “And they have pheasants down there. Birds with white collars. They hunt ’em.”
“In Ohio?” I asked incredulously. “Funny I never heard about it!”
“There are lots of things you never heard about,” Harold assured me. “Now what are you gonna do next Monday?”
“What’s so special about Monday?” I demanded. “Why couldn’t it be Tuesday or Wednesday?”
“Monday happens to be the day Ohio pheasant hunting starts.”
A Buck in My Backyard
I was in a tough spot and I knew it.
“Look,” I implored, “every fall since I can remember, I’ve driven 100 miles or more to go deer hunting. Now I’ve got a chance to kill a buck in my backyard and you want me to pass it up! This dog-gone deer I’m telling you about won’t keep. If I don’t get him somebody else will. Everybody in the neighborhood knows about him. It’s Monday or never, as far as he’s concerned. How about putting this Ohio expedition off just one day?”
“Pheasants don’t keep well either,” Harold reminded me. “You’ve hunted ’em long enough to know that the first two hours of shooting are the best of the whole year.”
“But there’s more than one pheasant in Ohio,” I persisted, “and this buck is the only one I know about in these parts.”
“You mean he’s the only tame one you know about,” Harold sniffed. “Would you go along Tuesday if Clyde and I postponed the trip?”
Would I go along for one more day of pheasant hunting, three weeks after saying farewell to that sort of thing for a whole year? Would a condemned man accept a reprieve? I did my best to get my feelings across to Harold.
“O.K.,” he agreed. “We’ll meet you for breakfast at Whitey’s place, south of Jackson, at 6 a.m. Tuesday. We can go in one car from there.”
“Doesn’t 6 o’clock seem kind of late?” I suggested.
“Shooting doesn’t start until 9,” Harold explained, and that settled that.
Thirty Minutes to Wait
I was on time at the rendezvous, but Harold and Clyde Anderson were already waiting.
“Get your deer?” they asked the instant I stepped out of my car.
“No,” I admitted. “But another hunter did, about fifteen minutes after daybreak.”
Harold shook his head sadly.
“I knew we should have gone to Ohio yesterday,” he declared.
We drove south across the state line, into the level farmlands of northwestern Ohio, and stopped at some town or other to pick up our nonresident licenses. Clyde and Harold knew a farmer a few miles farther on, and they had made the necessary arrangements in advance. When we drove on, the legal shooting hour was only thirty minutes away. We waited for it at the corner of a weedy stubble field.
Six minutes before 9 an impatient hunter off to the south jumped the gun with a salvo of three shots. But nobody else followed his example, and the fields were quiet again for five minutes. Then there was gunfire all around us and Clyde opened the car door for the two setters, Bill and Freckles.
“Come on,” he told them. “It’s time to go.”
They didn’t need urging. They had been penned for three weeks and they hit the stubble at top speed, covering half of it while we were walking the first fifty yards from the car. Out in the center of the field, Clyde’s dog, Freckles, whipped suddenly sideways and slammed into a rigid point. Bill came circling cautiously in to honor it.
They obeyed their orders to be steady. They were like marble statues there in the weeds as Clyde walked in with Harold on one flank and me on the other. The bird lay until Clyde was alongside the dogs. Then it went out with a telltale whicker of wings.
“Hen!” Clyde warned sharply, and we stood and watched it sail off and pass from sight beyond a brushy fence row. It was the first bird of the morning and the dogs wanted to chase it, but Harold and Clyde checked them sharply and they went back to work. They hadn’t gone thirty yards farther when Bill made a find.
His bird ran, and he broke point, circled, and picked it up twice before he managed to nail it hard enough to make it stay put. Then it flushed while Harold and I were still a long gunshot away. But that didn’t matter. It was another hen.
About then we missed Clyde. Looking around, we saw him moving down on Freckles, stanch on a third bird halfway to the far fence. We waited for action, but it turned out to be a dud. Another hen.
“Watch your step,” Clyde called back across his shoulder. “There’s bound to be a cock in here somewhere, with this bunch of hens.”
It seemed likely he was right. Working independently, both dogs got points again in the next five minutes. Freckles’s bird got up wild, and Bill’s waited until Harold all but stepped on it. Both were the wrong sex for shooting.
“You don’t suppose all the pheasants in Ohio this fall are hens, do you?” I asked Harold.
He shook his head emphatically. “There was a cock in this stubble somewhere,” he declared, “but it sneaked out on us.”
The behavior of the dogs backed him. They were covering the field in wide sweeping circles, plainly convinced there were birds still on the ground.
Then it happened. At the edge of a fence row 300 yards away, two cock pheasants lifted suddenly into clattering flight, squawking as they slanted off toward the next farm. Harold turned an accusing glance on me.
“That’s what we get for coming down here one day late,” he said. “They learned their lesson yesterday, that pair did. I told you pheasants won’t keep, once the shooting starts!”
We watched the pair of cocks until they dropped into a big willow swale half a mile away. Our host had told us we were welcome to hunt on any farm in the neighborhood, so we went after them.
The swale covered five acres and it was grown up with a tangle of brush higher than a man’s head. The dogs slammed in and were swallowed up in the dead grass and goldenrod. We tried to follow them, but the going was so heavy that shooting was out of the question. We clawed our way back to the edge and took up positions at three bordering points.
Within five minutes, four hen pheasants zoomed out of the brush and flew away. But the cock birds we had marked down didn’t show up, although we gave Bill and Freckles ample time to work the swale. Either the two ringnecks had slipped out to another hiding place, or they had simply stayed in and given the dogs the run-around.
“They get smart in a hurry,” Clyde remarked significantly when I met him at the upper end of the swale.
We crossed a pasture without finding birds, then came to a ditch grown up with weeds and brush. Harold took one side with Bill, while Clyde and I took the other with Freckles. Before he had gone half the length of the ditch, Clyde’s dog made game in a patch of thick cover, pussy-footed ahead a few steps, and stiffened out on a hot scent. A moment later the bird tried a get-away. We heard the flailing of wings in the grass ahead of the setter, then an outraged cackle of alarm and resentment. A big cock pheasant burst out, his white collar and chestnut breast gleaming in the morning sun as he climbed to clear the trees along the ditch bank.
Clyde’s automatic boomed, and the bird turned shapeless and fell. Freckles picked it up and brought it back to his boss, and I felt better about the fact that I had stalled this trip one day. At least, the ice was now broken.
But for the next two hours it looked as if that was all we were going to accomplish. The gunning in the fields around us had died down to infrequent rumbling. We knew well enough the meaning of the long periods of silence. Other hunters were finding no more birds than we were. True to custom, the pheasants had holed up for their midday siestas. The best shooting period of the day, the first hours of morning, was over. And the best shooting of the year was ended, too. The hunting would become a lot leaner for the rest of the season.
Just before we went back to the car for lunch, Bill gave Harold a chance at a handsome cock bird near the edge of a cornfield. Harold made good. But even with that, our kill of two birds for the forenoon was hardly what you could call impressive.
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“You and your miserable deer hunting!” Harold grumbled while we were eating. “We let you talk us out of catching opening day, and look what happens. Every pheasant in Ohio has picked himself out a bomb shelter by now. If we get one bird this afternoon we’ll be lucky.”
For a time after lunch, things looked bad. The lull lasted for a couple of hours. In that time the dogs found three birds, one at a time, but none with even a trace of white around the neck.
Bill broke the jinx finally in a field of scrubby corn, and gave me the first shooting I’d had all day. We were within fifty yards of the end of the field when the dog circled across in front of me, in a way that indicated he had a bird running. In the same instant a pheasant flushed on my left, in front of Harold, and he called a sharp warning of “Hen!” as it cleared the corn. Then I saw the setter slide to a stop and stiffen. I walked ahead three or four steps. The bird flailed up. It was the right gender and I nailed it. Bill brought it back, his head held high in pride.
I was still telling Bill what a great dog he was when Clyde let go a shot at the far side of the cornfield. I whipped around to see a cock spinning down and a little cloud of feathers drifting on the still air. Then there was a commotion in the corn midway between Harold and me. Two more birds, a cock and a hen, rocketed out side by side. Harold dropped the cock cleanly, and Bill raced over to take care of his part in the affair.
At the fence we laid our birds out on the grass and took inventory. We lacked only one of our legal limit of six pheasants for the day.
The willow swale where we had lost the two cocks in the morning was just across the next field. Somebody suggested we give it another whirl, so we went that way.
At the margin of the brush, Freckles picked up news that stopped him cold. I walked in. The bird must have been the granddaddy of half the pheasants in that corner of Ohio. He was as big a ringneck as I had seen in a blue moon. His tail seemed to stream out a full yard behind him. He cleared the grass, banked at right angles, and climbed to hurdle the willow clumps. I sent three shots after him and — never loosened a feather!
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It took the dogs an hour to find me another bird. In that time they put up three hens, and one cock that got away from them on the ground and flushed wild. They located one finally in a fence corner. in a patch of cover no bigger than a tablecloth. It was one of those unlikely spots that a cock pheasant is apt to rely on after a couple of days of dodging dogs and guns. This one knew he was cornered the instant the dogs pointed him. He wasted no time. He sneaked through the fence and started down a grass-grown furrow on foot.
But Bill broke stand and headed him off, and he had the choice of lying to the dog or getting air-borne. He flushed without any delay, but I had had plenty of warning by that time and I was close enough to cut him down before he got aloft a dozen feet.
Harold walked over to help stuff the bird into the back pocket of my hunting coat.
“Did I hear you make a remark a while back about pheasants not keeping?” I asked him dryly. “Seems to me you said something to the effect that if we couldn’t get down here yesterday, we might as well stay at home. How about it?”
“You know I was right!” he retorted. “Every bird we’ve killed today has been as jittery as a rabbit at a dog show. Pheasant shooting gets to be a tough business after the first three or four hours of the season.”
He broke off and stood for a minute scratching Bill behind one ear. “But that’s the way I like it,” he grinned. “I never did care much about armchair hunting, and these Ohio ringnecks have been exactly right. Especially since we gave up on pheasant shooting for this year about three weeks ago!”
This story, “Pheasants Won’t Keep,” appeared in the March 1951 issue of Outdoor Life. Have a request for an old OL story you want to read again? Write us at [email protected].
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