A Saskatchewan foray for Huns & sharptails
The writer had grown old. But a last gasp before the sedentary life of pipe and book seemed appropriate. The humble gray partridge—or Hun, as it’s known to some—would be an appropriate choice, if only because it was the first gamebird I had brought to bag some 60 years before. What was required was something special: spectacular scenery, great guides and dogs, and plenty of the toothsome little pals. But where to go? The Northumberland of my boyhood was long gone, yet the recollections of English gray partridge in fragrant cow meadows lingered, if only as tantalizing memories.
Fortunately, one of my hunting chums is a genuine gentleman sport who has sampled all the classic shoots the blue planet has to offer: driven redlegs in Spain, gray-winged francolin in South Africa and red grouse in Scotland. The estimable Charles Wickham is originally from the South, where his schooling in wingshooting began. “I shot a little growing up, and it was mainly doves,” he said. “But one of the first times I really hunted was off of horseback hunting wild quail in South Carolina. I think I got a bird or two with my .410, but that may just be wishful thinking. I really got the bug when I went to New York City after college and a close friend got me interested again. Great trips to South Dakota, Texas and Eastern Canada got me hooked for life. It’s fair to say I’m now an upland bird hunting addict.”
The Saskatchewan prairie is bisected by many large "coulees," or gullies, that harbor coveys of Huns. (Photo by Charles Wickham)
Wickham now lives in the Pacific Northwest, the better to chase a variety of winged game. For the previous four years he had been making a partridge pilgrimage to Canada’s western prairies with outfitter Dave Brown and had been waxing lyrical about the outcomes. Listening to my nostalgic laments and pining for a shooting career bookended by partridge, he suggested I join him on his annual trek to Saskatchewan . . . .
The journey north offered ample opportunity for reflection, and since I was not behind the wheel, I drifted into reverie. The best things in life improve with age, and an appreciation of the partridge as both a sporting bird and table fare is one of them. For a UK ex-pat living in the US, there are always reckonings with what one has escaped but also what one has left behind. My transatlantic odyssey entailed changes I couldn’t have imagined growing up in North Britain, but pursuing and eating partridge is as pleasurable as a pensioner as it was when I was a teenager.
I was born into a sooty city with starlings and sparrows as the only avian life, but I celebrated my sixth birthday in an entirely different place: a development on our city’s verdant edge. We had been rehoused by a benevolent local government from a slum to a red-brick scheme that promised modernity.
Charles Wickham (left) and the author enjoyed a productive pilgrimage to Saskatchewan. (Photo by Charles Wickham)
But the years after the Second World War are an alien land, and my memories of the partridge are illusive. Did they really poke about in our potatoes and cabbages that first year on the city’s fringe where the council estate ended and the unchartered farmland began? I wondered if I remembered them at all, or if I merely invented their presence in our freshly planted Eden.
We were transplanted townies who grew up not in the years of the coronation and decolonization but in a lost alluvial past where folks didn’t look, dress or think anything like we do now. Steam trains still ferried élites to distant moors in preparation for the Twelfth, and if the middle class wanted grouse for supper, they bought them from a game dealer. Our role back then as working-class wingshots is not easy to explain to Americans, who live with proclaimed equality and not in a top-to-bottom society whose upper tier surrendered its privileges as slowly as it could.
At our backs was the gray city; to our front partridge trod the rippling grass between Shorthorns and Ayrshires. Urban boys stumbled upon their rude nests and took eggs or chicks home to raise. None survived. At a slightly later hour we unveiled the species’ mystery and wonder as a sporting bird. Given that we mostly walked or cycled home empty-handed, we learned that this was a silly way to spend time if you were hungry. Yet we were in green land and felt immersed in nature, with wet Northumbrian pasture providing favorable nesting conditions and partridge-friendly habitat.
The plump, finely feathered bodies in hand provided a problem. We knew of their “delicate flesh” from reading secondhand magazines but had no clue how to prepare them for the table. Our urban parents were of no help; they had no experience with game. From a Victorian cookbook as thick and tattered as a household bible, we learned how to pluck, singe and draw the birds, slowly overcoming the nauseous task of divesting partridge of their innards. We certainly cooked them longer than necessary, but at a time when any animal protein was welcome, we imagined ourselves “cordon bleu” gourmets. Only later, after I married a Gascogne-trained chef, did I fully appreciate their culinary nature: not the robust character of snipe or woodcock, but a delectable subtlety that was entirely unique.
Gray, or Hungarian, partridge were the gamebirds of the author’s youth—and they remain a favorite. (Photo by Steve Oehlenschlager/steveoehlenschlager.com)
Years passed before I understood just how fortunate I had been. I eventually washed up in the Pacific Northwest in country that held some local partridge. It took a while to discover that they were not quite as abundant as I had hoped. Which certainly factored into my decision to join my friend Charles in making a sortie into Saskatchewan in September.
Motoring through flat, autumnal grasslands, we observed a countryside alive with game. Pronghorn antelope, sharp-tailed grouse, speckle-bellied geese and sandhill cranes dotted the landscape and were all visible from a moving SUV. You know you have arrived at a “sportsman’s destination” when the monument at the entrance to town features giant antelope and specklebellies. Last time anyone counted, there were 413 souls living in Cabri, Saskatchewan, a town free from traffic lights. Our home for two days was the Sunrise Motel, from whose veranda we watched the sun dawning out of the eastern horizon. “Finally some truth in advertising!” Charles commented.
We were greeted by our bilingual Canadian guide, Monsieur Paul Laframboise, who works for Dave Brown as a hunting guide in the fall and as a fly-fishing guide on Alberta’s Bow River in the summer. He explained that the Austro-Hungarian Empire provided the original partridge after those from Britain proved insufficiently hardy to survive Saskatchewan winters—hence the name “Hungarians,” or simply “Huns.” The most poetic way to hunt Huns is over pointing dogs, and Paul had an abundance of pointers and Brittanys. Over the course of our two-day hunt, the guide and his dogs introduced us to an abundance of Huns as well as many sharptails.
Initially, the Saskatchewan prairie appears flat, but it is bisected by many large “coulees.” A coulee is a gully, or ravine, packed with native plants. The term “coulee” comes from the Canadian French word “coulée,” derived from the French “couler,” meaning “to flow.” And some of the larger coulees did, indeed, contain streams. Descending into these swales with their autumnal colors provided panoramas so lovely that they would be worth visiting even if you had no intention of pulling on boots, picking up a shotgun and shooting game. Nor is this the vertiginous landscape of the blue grouse or lung-busting chukar country; it is something altogether more tolerable on an older pair of pins—simply spectacular Saskatchewan scenery with its patchwork of grasslands and cropfields.
The patchwork of grasslands and cropfields produced numerous coveys of Huns. (Photo by Steve Oehlenschlager/steveoehlenschlager.com)
On the first morning our initial loop produced two small coveys of six to eight Huns that held for the dogs. Charles and I both scratched a bird from the first covey, and the partridge were easily retrieved by Paul’s excellent Brittany. The second covey was bumped by my inexperienced two-year-old griffon, Bunty, which I had dragged along in hopes of getting her valuable experience on abundant birds. The bumped Huns appeared to pitch into a shelterbelt, but a saunter down the line with guns on either side proved fruitless. Our second loop, through an altogether larger coulee with a big-running pointer named Belle, was a delight. With each sweep, the dog covered huge amounts of country at high speed without bumping a bird. When she did lock up, sometimes it took as long as 10 minutes to get to her, by which time the birds had either crept some distance or held. Most flushes produced large coveys of as many as 15 birds. My whiffs went mercifully unmentioned, but Charles shot like an angel and easily achieved his generous eight-bird limit.
On the second day Charles, having limited on Huns the previous day, unsurprisingly elected to shoot sharptails. I elected to join him. The first pack of grouse appeared as periscopes sticking out of a field of stubble. The birds clearly had us in sight, and despite our direct approach—or perhaps because of it—proved to be what a countryman of mine once described as “irreproachable.” They took flight wild, never to be seen again. This prompted Paul to bundle us back into the rig and drive without further ado to a spot he dubbed “sharpagedon.”
On the second day the group focussed on sharptails—many of which held well for the dogs. (Photo by Charles Wickham)
And sharpagedon it proved to be. Prairie grouse were plentiful both in large coveys and as single birds. It seemed that none had seen hunters, as they sat like stones. The dogs did well on this second and final day, and within a short time Charles had his limit of three sharpies and your writer had even dropped a couple. We also encountered multiple coveys of partridge, and I surprised myself by shooting a right-and-left with my over/under—not an easy task in any language. We also put to flight a large wisp of migratory Wilson’s snipe, which we declined to shoot because we were loaded with lead instead of nontoxic. It was great fun to find three distinct species in what, to the untrained eye, appeared to be identical habitat. We returned to Cabri to learn that several denizens of the Sunrise Motel had enjoyed successful days at sandhill cranes, pintails and mallards—all of which were being prepared for the table by a local enterprise called Curly’s Bird Cleaning.
Quartered safe back at home in the US, preparing the birds in the time-honored way for the table, I mulled over my time in Saskatchewan. Certainly watching a friend enjoy success had been a pleasure, but so, too, had been remembering youthful experiences that set in motion a lifetime of desire—not, perhaps, the passionate quest for game of a hungry young man but rather the gentler emotion of wonderful times rekindled. What began as a schoolboy’s search for affordable food has matured into something altogether more worldly. Perhaps we travel through our mature lives with a desire to inhabit moments from our formative years in which success and happiness were fresh. A part of us longs to reproduce the almost-forgotten scenes and images from a more innocent past.
When the guns are retired to the rack for the last time, most Western wingshots, I think, will recall not the cackling pheasant springing from the cattails, or the greenhead decoyed over vintage blocks, or the quail exploding from deep cover, but rather the bomb burst of whirring partridge on an early-autumn day. The gray partridge was the Englishmen’s chosen bird long before the pheasant’s triumphant traverse of the terrain. Whether wandering the rich pasturelands of Northumbria’s coastal plain or the great Western Prairie, the rise of a covey of partridge will always stir the hunter and gatherer within.
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