Whether your next bird hunt occurs up north, down south, out west or halfway around the world, something about the experience will linger in memory. Remains of the day could be momentous, such as the incredible triple someone makes or perhaps how a fabulous retriever or pointing dog prompts his owner to gush with pride. Years later certain fading remnants might seem insignificant, like how the wind blew so hard that day or how good the homemade pie tasted at the truck stop on the drive home. Whether or not these inconsequential snippets that become consigned to memory involve people or places, dogs or diners does not matter.
What matters is that you were there and you remember. Fact is, you can’t forget.
After years of hunting birds in many places, I have come to recognize a common denominator in what I am likely to recall. It’s the places where people used to live but no longer do. Abandoned homes—those desolate ones with sagging roofs missing shingles and that lean left or right from the weight of time—are a special magnet. Their bleached clapboards are soft to a thumbnail. The old places stare through paneless windows at the itinerant grouse hunter who tarries to snap photos. The stone foundation may have crumbled; a rusted hand pump in the front yard guards a pair of apple trees bowing low with uneaten fruit. Look hard, and you may find a toy wagon smothered by weeds. A rose bush still blooms.
Inside, the stories that lie behind shards of torn wallpaper cannot be told, because no one is left to tell them.
But people did live here, didn’t they? What were they like, and did they hunt? Was the hunting as good then as it is today, or was it better? Either way, why did the owners leave, and where did they go?
Forty years ago my friend Dan Nelson and I hunted sharp-tailed grouse and Hungarian partridge near North Dakota’s Lake Sakakawea. An abandoned two-story farmhouse, long gone to gray for want of paint, stood alone in a sea of shortgrass prairie that had obliterated driveway ruts. A battered mailbox bore the faded and improbable name “Joseph Stinkface.” Who Mr. Stinkface was is one of life’s mysteries that I still ponder from time to time. Was he an immigrant or Native American? Did plunging wheat prices drive him away? Something else?
And did Joseph Stinkface hunt birds here, as my friend Dan and I came to do? I like to think we shot some birds that day. But that’s a part I don’t remember.
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