Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 5, 1992 TAG: 9201080330
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
We had parked the pickup on an old logging road, just around the bend from the blacktop, and there they were, what we had come for: grouse.Three of them - maybe four - flushed from a tree lap above us when we opened the truck door, coming out of the cover in typical explosive, even flamboyant, style.
Had they stayed put, we might have passed them by. Grouse are silent on foot, boisterous on the wing.
Charles Bays let his 10-year old English setter out of the truck before it tore the tailgate off. Dressed in white fur, both fine and thick, Rip is a dog full of eagerness, even though age shows in its eyes.
"That's just about more grouse than I've seen all season," said Bays, who lives in Roanoke County.
Hunters like to talk about grouse cycles, those ups and downs of the population that mystify both sportsmen and biologists. If these noble birds were traded on the stock market, the current season would be bearish. Brush-worn and briar-scratched hunters are having to push through a lot of cover just to unseat one or two of the noble creatures.
Where we hunted, there had been a timber sale less than a decade before, and grouse had prospered when the sun struck the forest floor to stimulate the kind of plant growth this ground-nesting bird needs for food, cover and an edge over predators.
Some will argue that you should spare the woodlands from the saw, but a single logger often can do more good for grouse by accident than an army of people carrying banners that defy timber cutting.
Fresh in the woods, we flushed one grouse that we missed, then dropped a second, and missed a third that hooked off through the oaks and beech below us, like an inept golf drive.
Bays spotted one of the birds on the ground, a rare occurrence, considering their superb camouflage. For a millisecond he thought about shooting it there.
He pondered his generosity as he watched it fly behind a towering tree, as grouse have an uncanny ability to do.
One out of three is respectful shooting for this vexing species. Our marksmanship, however, would plunge from that point, which would be maddening to our young companion who is an outstanding shot.
Bruce Richardson, of Monterey, a founder of the Ruffed Grouse Society of America, once said: "I hunted grouse for years. I got to be a pretty good wing shot, but by then I was too old to hunt."
You hunt grouse to find them more than to kill them. Shooting is part of it, but when a grouse hunter tallies his records, it is the flushes-per-hour of pursuit that count most. The kills, which lead to a succulent meal, are a bonus.
If a grouse hunter could release a bird, like an angler does a trout, many of them would sail through the woods a second time.
The downed bird was stuffed into a rumpled hunting coat just as rain began to fall.
Rain can do a couple of things to grouse. If it is light, it can send them to open areas. If it is heavy, it can cause them to seek out the thickest cover possible. For us, they appeared to do both.
Rip made game along the edge of a 10-year old planting of white pines that were too thick even for a wind to penetrate. He did the same in a patch of red pines, but we could not unseat a bird. We got a couple up along a Christmas tree field and two more blasted off the edge of a logging road.
A grouse flush always is a shock, no matter where it originates, even when you have your shotgun cradled in expectation.
As we hunted, we chuckled about a friend who occasionally calls ruffed grouse "fool hens." There are no fool hens east of the Rockies. The birds we hunt are sophisticated in survival. Hunting has honed their instincts, tightened their muscles, brighted their eyes.
Much wildlife would be less enticing - hardly more than overweight zoo animals - were it not for the hunter. Hunting makes them more graceful, more alluring, more mysterious, more desirable.
Cold and wet, we had left the cover and were hiking back up the seeded logging road with little more than warmth and dryness on our mind. That's when the last bird flushed from a modest V of cover on the inside of a switchback.
It flew low and straight up the road, with no obstructions to mask its bomber-shaped body, its drumming wings. Two guns were up quickly, and the bird loomed huge and fallible over their steel barrels.
Ten yards, 15 yards, BOOM! Twenty yards, BOOM! BOOM! Thirty yards, BOOM!
Nothing. We couldn't claim a thing, not a fluttering leaf, not even a single feather for a March Brown trout fly.
Bays, who was out of position to fire, tried to ease the perplexity of the misses.
"You make the impossible shots, the ones when the bird is hooking around a big oak tree well out of range. You miss the easy ones."
On the way home, the dampness from our clothes fogging the windows of the truck, Bays inquired: "Do you remember the first grouse you ever killed?"
We nodded, reflecting on the occasion as if someone had asked about our first kiss.
"I was about 7 or 8, I guess," Bays said.
He had been rabbit hunting with an old shotgun that had a hammer you pull back. A grouse flushed into a field of broom sage and he dropped it.
"There were seven of us kids, and mom and dad. We had a feast on it."
Grouse always are a feast.