Pheasant high
The gray-haired lady at the rental-car station in Pierre, S.D., was sliding the contract over the counter when she stopped and looked up through her horn-rim glasses with a sweet, grandmotherly smile. She had a question. “You know the rules, don’t you?” Rules? The smile disappeared. “Yes,” she said firmly. “No blood or feathers inside the car — or the trunk. “And make sure you look under the seats and in the trunk for any spent shells and live ammo. “And remember these cars are not made for driving across fields. They will get stuck.” I asked, “How did you know I was going hunting?” She let out a sharp laugh, an age-appropriate substitute for “Duh,” before saying, “Why else does a man come to South Dakota this time of the year? Just look around.”
Outside, a line of heavy-duty pickups and SUVs had pulled up to the small terminal, the names of hunting lodges painted on doors that were being held open for men wearing blaze orange hats and carrying gun cases. The whole scene was being serenaded by the voices of hunting dogs — pointers — jumping excitedly in their kennels.
If this is October or November, then men with dogs and shotguns will be migrating to South Dakota. The reason is obvious anywhere the eye falls outside the parking lot: an ocean of prairie rolling to the horizon in waves of golden grass, unbroken by a single tree. It’s a visual slice of heaven for an upland bird hunter. It’s like a gourmand finding himself alone in Paris with an unlimited expense account.
“Oh my God, just look at this habitat,” gushed Kerry Luft, a Chicagoan who had driven here with hunting partner Kevin Burney of Wisconsin. “If you’re a bird hunter, this is absolutely gorgeous.”
While game birds such as sharp-tailed grouse, prairie chicken, Hungarian partridge and ring-necked pheasant also thrive in other areas of the country, nowhere are conditions as ideal for upland bird hunters as on the great northern prairies.
“You’ve got this short grass, nothing more than knee-high, and you’ve got firm ground that’s very easy to walk on,” said Burney. “It’s a gorgeous scene, but, best of all, you’ve got an unobstructed view to watch the dogs work.
“This is just perfect. That’s why bird hunters love it.”
And that’s why hunters have filled the 50-room Lode Star Motel in Fort Robinson, a dusty crossroads village on the Crow Creek Sioux Indian Reservation, one hour east of Pierre. The reservation spreads across 300,000 acres of prairie habitat along the Missouri River. Most of it is used for ranching and some is set aside in conservation easements, which means the grasses ideal for what hunters call “prairie birds” dominate.
But there are enough patches of corn and brush-filled creek bottoms to provide excellent habitat for a thriving pheasant population as well.
The bird population supports dozens of commercial lodges, places where a hunter can enjoy sumptuous accommodations and gourmet meals between forays into the expensively maintained fields behind guides and their well-trained dogs. But that can cost $2,500 for four days.
Things are different on the reservation. Pheasant season opens here a full two weeks ahead of the state’s season. And the $150 reservation hunting license entitles a hunter to try his luck on most of those 300,000 acres.
That’s why the vehicles in the parking lot have license plates from as far away as Arkansas and North Carolina.
The hunters who arrived as strangers form an instant brotherhood discussing the details of the sport they love. The talk is about double-barreled shotguns, shot shells, hunting sites and weather conditions but mostly about dogs — training them, hunting with them, caring for them, feeding them, which breed is best or worst.
“This sport really is about the dogs,” says Burney, 40, a software salesman. “That’s what really attracts people to the sport.
“I hunt ducks, deer and turkeys, but nothing really gives me the satisfaction and the thrill as watching one of my dogs work across a field, looking for birds to the exclusion of everything else, admiring their athleticism and determination.
“Really, shooting the birds is probably the least important thing. Watching your dog work well, and ending with a great point, that’s the payoff.”
Burney and Luft have arrived with four dogs — Ivy, Birdy, Bump and Chips. They are all pointers, short-haired, floppy-eared, rawboned animals with white coats spotted by liver-colored patches.
At 7 the next morning, Peter Lengkeek of Soldier Creek Outfitters arrives. For a $100 fee per man, he’ll show Luft and Burney around the reservation, putting them on choice locations as well as some lands closed to the general public.
“There’s grouse pretty much everywhere on the reservation, but the tribe leases some of it out to private owners, ranchers and such,” said Lengkeek, whose Dutch father married a member of the Sioux Nation. He is holding a map of the reservation with a checkerboard pattern that shows which sections are privately held and which are tribal — and therefore open to any member of the nation.
The hunters follow Lengkeek’s pickup truck across pasture lands and wild prairie, through numerous gates before coming to rest on the top of a hill surrounded by knee-high grasses. Anticipation soars along the way, thanks to numerous coveys of grouse that break from the prairie. These are birds the size of small chickens that quickly cover a quarter of a mile through the air by alternately beating their wings and gliding.
By the time Burney has released Birdy from her kennel, the hunters are certain they’ll be getting quick three-bird limits.
Birdy seems to share that optimism. She bolts off across the field at warp speed, weaving a long zigzag pattern in front of the hunters, walking in a line three abreast. Birdy is all motion, ears flopping, tail wagging as she covers the prairie, sometimes bulling through the grass, other times bounding across it in long hops, her head constantly shifting her nose from the air to the ground.
She is searching for bird scent, and once or twice she seems to have it, momentarily coming to a sudden halt, head extended forward, body frozen — except for her tail, which continues to wag.
“She’s found a place where they used to be,” Burney said. “If that was fresh — if there were birds still there — she’d be on point, perfectly still.”
Birdy moves off again, eventually weaving so far ahead she is reduced to a mere speck at least a third of a mile in front of the hunters. Luft and Burney are pleased by the sight.
“You hear some guys saying they want their dogs working within 30 feet of them, because they don’t want to miss birds. But that’s because they’re used to hunting pen-raised birds on shooting preserves,” said Burney. “But in this kind of cover, I like my dogs to work as far out as a quarter-mile. I want them to be questing for birds, which means searching for them. That way, I know I won’t trip over them.
“And there’s no danger of the birds getting away. If these dogs find a bird, they’ll hold that point until we arrive. If the bird starts to move on the ground, they’ll move up on them.”
Thirty minutes later, Birdy hasn’t uncovered any birds.
“Just because we saw them flying doesn’t mean we’ll find them on the ground,” said Luft, 39, a journalist. “These conditions — dry and warm — are probably the worst you can have for a dog. The heat wears them out, and the dry ground means the birds’ scent doesn’t linger very long.
“But I’m still loving this anyway. This is great walking. This is gorgeous.”
As the sun breaks through a thin wedge of morning overcast, Luft’s words are driven home in Technicolor. The landscape changes from gray to a deep, burnished gold, and a rising breeze beating the grass sends ripples racing across the prairie.
But the morning doesn’t come to a satisfactory close until a dog — this time Bump — comes to a sharp point, a moment that Burney and Luft seem to savor more than the shot that brings down the flushing grouse.
Other hunters are planning to seek pheasant without dogs by organizing drives — groups of up to 20 people walking in a line across fields to jump birds. Burney and Luft decline the invitations.
“I don’t want to sound like an elitist,” says Luft, “but the real sport in this is watching the dogs work.”