January Grouse

Hey lads,

I managed to scratch down another grouse on Friday. It was 58 degrees F, there was a nice steady 10-12 mph wind out of the southeast, and I was in shirtsleeves under my ancient Carhartt vest in the middle of January. Go figure. All the snow was completely melted where we were hunting, where two weeks ago it was knee deep. We put in an hour's hunt at the end of the day and were in the field by 3:30.

As an aside, I had loaded up the vest with some ancient Winchester Super X "Small Game Hunter" loads, 6s that I have used for late season grouse previously. They don't even make these loads anymore. But after missing several grouse during my last hunt, I wanted to make sure it was me missing and not 7.5s merely crippling the birds.

The first 45 minutes were uneventful, but wouldn't you know it--Katie pointed a woodcock under a pine in a sea of dogwood. Given that woodcock doesn't open for another nine months, we gave that bird a pass on the repoint, and we kept working Katie southward into the wind.

At about 4:15 or so, we crossed a woodroad and headed downhill into small patch of cover that has harbored some late season birds in years past. Not thirty yards in, Katie beelined it due east sideways into the wind, and I lost the sound of her beeper. Here's one of those cases where she wasn't exactly following my mental gameplan for working the covert, but I caught myself thinking: "Now what would I tell Mr. Mike in this situation. Oh yeah . . . in the words of Datus Proper--forget geometry."

So I hustled after Katie, crossing a small swale that was running hard with meltwater, and then downhill along the swale to where Katie was on point. At first I had trouble locating her, but in half a minute or so there she was: locked up under a pine, pointing downhill into the breeze toward a patch of dogwood.

With "walk in boldly" as my guide, I began to walk in on her point aiming for a spot about twenty yards in front of her. Boy did I guess right. The bird went up wrrrrrrrrr, low to the ground and angling away from me right to left, aiming for the protection of the gorge that was only sixty or seventy yards beyond. BANG--I missed at about ten yards with the front trigger. The bird flew on, then behind a sapling. BANG, with the second trigger, a brush shot aimed at the bird right through and around the sapling--and with that, the bird crumpled some twentyfive yards away. Winchester Super X 6s had done the trick.

Katie was on the flapping bird almost instantly, and, as I approached, picked up the bird and held it up for me as I reached her. This was the first time in nearly eight years of hunting with her I had ever seen her pick a bird up and hold it, and I will mark her down with her first official career "retrieve" on this bird.

So there you have it. We only saw the one grouse during the entire hunt and killed it cleanly. We poked around the covert until sunset, and that was that. We walked out in the dwindling sunlight and were back at the truck by 5 p.m.--it was still 58 degrees, but we had a January grouse.