Hunting Chukar can be very exciting; learn to be nimble and pack light for an easier trek across the valley where you are hunting.
Rose starts getting fidgety, and Sam, Alan, and I look at each other with anticipation. We keep stalking upwind, contouring along the 30-degree grade of our draw, squinting for feathers you only see when they’re too far away or moving too fast. Sage goes on point and our hearts rev up. I hear Sam’s 12-gauge pound above me and twirl just fast enough to see a covey vault downhill, only a few feet off the ground, like Olympic ski jumpers with wings. As quickly as they show up, they make minor flight corrections and disappear behind a crest below us. It’s on.
A few hours earlier, as we loaded our packs into his brother’s pickup, Alan said, “I can’t believe you’re back.” He had put it to me plainly before our first Oregon chukar hunt. “The first time, you go because you don’t know any better. After that, you go for revenge.” We’d bagged three birds that first weekend and I was hooked. If you’re hunting chukars for sustenance, accounting calories spent versus calories retrieved, you’d starve to death, and you’ll do well to keep a cost analysis far from your thoughts. But now I have a bone to pick.
As the truck crests the hill of what I know to be our last cell coverage, I pull up our destination’s forecast: 35-ish degrees F, 50 percent chance of showers, and 38 percent chance of absolutely miserable. I was glad for the rain gear I’d packed. As my buddy says, “The nice thing about wet pants is they make damp pants feel really good.” I’m experienced now. This trip, I’m going to be as dry as a BBC comedy.
We open the tailgate, and the energy and giddiness of the dogs is palpable. Alan’s dogs, Rose and Sage, hop out first, and Sam’s dog, Jiji, follows. Rose (short for Calrose) is an aging English Pointer that Alan and his wife nurtured from a sick rescue dog from California into a sniffing machine that lives to roam long and turn her compass tail toward invisible roosting places until the time is right. Sage is her apprentice that Alan pretends to train while Rose isn’t teaching her the things that matter. Jiji is of unknown lineage and, like me, is enthusiastic just to be under a big sky, tromping around with friends who know what they’re doing.
We do some final gear checks at the rig, and I have an internal struggle as the “be prepared” Boy Scout in me fights with the guy who hunted this area last weekend like a Sherpa, carrying everything but the kitchen sink. One never wants to be caught away from a vehicle without enough gear to spend an unexpected night. My alter ego remembers that seven days ago, the toil of the hills turned 34-degree chill into T-shirt weather in a matter of minutes. I screw up my mental courage and decide to ditch my down vest and those rain pants that are just going to make me hotter anyway.
“At least the mud is cleaning the dust off my boots,” jokes Alan, referring to the thick volcanic mud that clumps and clings as we clamber from our parking spot through the charred and gnarly junipers sprinkled onto the landscape between us and the bluffs that our quarry call home. A fire clawed its way through here a few years ago and left the invasive junipers black and barren, something that would make a great Halloween decoration. The earth itself was cleaned of debris, and the chukars love nibbling on the new growth that’s easy to get at, thanks to the cleansing fire. As it happens, in nature, disaster doesn’t discriminate, and the bleached white bones of an unfortunate ungulate stand out almost phosphorescent in stark contrast to the dullness of the quiet hills.
We arrive at the precipice of the valley we’re to hunt in, and the view is breathtaking. People think of Oregon as the temperate rainforest that fills the leafy left edge of the state. Mountains there wring out warm Pacific moisture as it tries to creep inland. This moisture makes everything grow to the point where it’s easy to feel hemmed in by the greenery that restricts views of the bigger terrain, like being on the inside of a submarine that someone converted to a greenhouse. We are not on the rainy side of the mountains, and spread out below us is an expanse of low-lying clouds flowing down dry, brown valley fingers like colossal glaciers of fog dumping their fluffy, white sediment into the river valley impossibly far below.
Today’s trek is a little less tiresome than the last one because of some small but important gear tweaks. When each step becomes arduous, you start to pay attention to every little detail that belabors your ascent. Discounting necessities, such as water and shells, it’s easy to sort out what’s dragging you down. The hunting knife gets replaced by a penknife that weighs an eighth as much. My keys can be left in Sam’s truck, since they aren’t going to work on his door if we’re locked out. After realizing last week that my jeans were tugging on my legs with every step, I went through my closet and picked out a lightweight pair of nylon pants that slid over my legs like satin sheets. All that forethought is bound to pay off.
Seeing the dogs work is a true treasure. While we might cover a dozen or more miles hunting the slopes, the dogs are easily clocking a marathon at something between a jog and a gallop. Alan and Sam do their best to protect the dogs’ paws from the rocks dumped here in ancient lava flows, but the enthusiasm of the canines doesn’t lend itself to the longevity of such encumbrances as tape and booties. The love and the symbiosis between the men and their dogs shortens the stretch of imagination needed to envision a time when a person was nothing without their dog and the dog was nothing without their human, and together they were an intuitive and unstoppable team.
Sam’s shot is a success, and we recover his bird with ease, a nice inaugural omen of an easy, plentiful hunt. Sage keeps pointing every time she smells a mouse, and this apprentice hunter readies his gun every time she does. Sage and I have a little informal rookie agreement: I’ll tolerate her pointing at something that isn’t a bird, and she’ll tolerate me missing something that is. Another half-mile and we round a point punctuated by a gnarly rock outcrop. This time, Rose picks up some scent, and Sage is on something that isn’t a rodent.
In a flash, their beautiful red beaks and striped plumage turn into a blur as chukars hop up and bomb down the hill away from us. Not only do they catapult to top speed in a wink, but they also fold up and skim away in conditions under which nobody practices. Even people who have access to firefighter ladders and high-perched boulder fields never summit those with shotguns and yell “pull!” They’re almost always flying down and away from you, allowing them to build speed almost instantly. Their flight reminds me of something out of Star Wars or those huge Russian ground-effect planes on the Caspian Sea; chukars never go more than a few feet off the ground, and they travel with the speed of a rumor.
Fortunately, I have plenty of time to pick a target, squeeze the trigger deliberately, and then take the safety off. In my peripheral vision, I see the puff of feathers and tumbling trajectory that are telltale indicators that somebody made contact with a bird. It’s Alan’s time-tested Winchester that’s made its mark, but in the excitement, he hasn’t considered where his bird might fall once he’s shot it, nor that it might try to die someplace particularly grueling, out of spite. “It went down there,” says Sam, pointing a long finger toward what may as well be Mordor.
Alan is finding his way to the bottom of a basaltic palisade ravine that I usually associate with carabiners and top ropes. I contemplate following him down to help look for his bird, but I’m carrying around a 20-pound pack on knees that were never supposed to support this much man. Add this to the wet, lichen-covered rocks, and it’s a formula for following the dog around the long way; she knows where birds might be anyway. I let Sam know I’d rather not make him drag me out of the ravine on a stretcher with his brother, and I start chasing the dog down, only to scare up a single bird with enough time to swing my barrel and miss it two glorious times. “Those shells were too heavy to carry uphill anyway,” I shout to Alan, who’s still looking for his prize in the ravine that’s now surprisingly far above me.
I recover my breath and pause for a second to look out over the fire-scorched landscape when I hear the noise and realize they’ve done it to me again. I chased the birds a mile down a steep slope and, while I was slipping on loose rocks and struggling to keep my muzzle pointed safely, the birds teleported up the other side of the draw and are taking a well-earned break to laugh at me. They’re chattering and squawking in a tone and vocabulary that are unmistakable cries of mocking victory at having tricked us down the landscape and upwind of their position. Alan’s tall frame finally sidles up beside me and follows my gaze to the burned-out tree that’s the source of the clatter, leagues above us. His eyes catch me in a sidelong glance as he mouths a single, haunting word, the sound of which is stolen by the wind: “Revenge.”
The desire to follow them once again is so saturated with frustration that there’s no question the three us of will charge up the hill after them. At this point, it’s hard to tell who’s still planning to hunt chukars and who’s planning a murder. I watch jealously as Sam and Alan, whom co-workers used to call “Lincoln” for his bony frame, lope back up over the elk trails terraced into the sides of hills – hills that look, on a topographic map, like someone gave a precocious toddler too many crayons, too much time, and an unlimited supply of Mountain Dew. If you were able to choose an ideal inseam for this type of jaunt, 29 inches wouldn’t be the first number that comes to mind. Thankfully, the brothers are carrying water for the dogs, so maybe our handicaps even out. Despite being far down into the canyon, there’s a lot still beneath us, and the view is amazing. Unfortunately, the uphill view is also stunning, and, because of the roundness of the hills, there are a heartbreaking amount of false summits between us and the truck.
As we approach and then pass the place where we know them to be, we realize the birds disappeared on foot over the next ridge without a sound. Sometimes, the Cascades don’t catch every little drop of that Pacific moisture, and by this time, the wall of water we spied moving in from the other side of the valley has run aground at our doorstep.
It turns out that satin sheets don’t slide well when they’re drenched. I try to ignore my wet, burning legs as I march back up the grade to our parking spot. Each straining, slippery step to the ridge sounds in my ears like a coxswain barking out the cadence of my feet, but instead of hearing “row, row, row,” all I can hear is “revenge, revenge, revenge.” Maybe by the time we get home, these will turn into damp pants that are going to feel really good.
Josh Lau is a writer, engineer, inventor, Eagle Scout, and centimarathoner. He raises chickens and steers in the Pacific Northwest with his patient wife and awesome kids.
