Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/68594
Scalded by the wind, punished by the sun, reduced to insignificance by the enormity of the landscape and its infinite canopy of sky, you scan the horizon through narrowed eyes. Your quarry lies hidden in this sea of grass, that much you know, but it's slippery, mercurial, a perpetually moving target whose familiarity with the creases and contours of the terrain – as if it were a map encoded in its DNA – dwarfs your own. To know where, or when, you'll find it is impossible to predict with anything resembling precision. It could be a matter of yards and minutes; it's more likely, though, to be a matter of miles and hours, even days. So you simply keep searching, wading the prairies' tawny, rippling tide, a momentary disturbance cleaving its matrix of brilliant light and shifting, cloud-cast shadows. Your dog roams ahead, its speed and range compensating for your grievous lack thereof, its nose the only arrow in your quiver that remotely evens the odds. What progress you make is less toward a fixed point than toward a fortuitous intersection, a collision of vectors in space and time. Your stamina will be tested, yes, but more than that the strength of your resolve, the depth of your commitment. And, perhaps, the steadfastness of your faith. To hunt prairie chickens in the 21st century requires the ascetic zeal of a religious pilgrim and the obsessive determination of the master of a whaling vessel. It's an adventure in anachronism, a pursuit whose appeal is so difficult to convey to anyone not similarly afflicted that you might as well be speaking the click language of Bushmen – and whose rewards, to the typical observer, appear irreconcilably meager compared to the massive level of effort required to obtain them. K In other words, prairie chicken hunting doesn't resonate much in a society that worships at the altar of American Idol. Its delights are largely intangible, its satisfactions intensely private. It may be the purest form of hunting I know. It is surely the most introspective. You don't have to be an Old Soul to be a prairie chicken hunter, but it helps. illing prairie chickens is easy. The hard parts are (1) finding them and (2) flushing them within range of a scattergun. This latter consideration is somewhat relative, of course. Many birds at dicey range by my standards were right in my friend Bill Shattuck's wheelhouse – and it's no coincidence whatsoever that Bill was not only the most successful prairie chicken hunter I've ever known (or heard of), but the finest long-range wingshot. As another friend put it upon hunting chickens for the first time and finding himself in a mild state of shock at the ranges involved, "It's a full-choke, 12-gauge deal." Strictly speaking that isn't true – but it's pretty darn close. The classic chicken-hunting scenario is to walk to the edge of forever without seeing a bird, and then, when you finally stumble into a bunch, have to make a 40-, 50- or even 60-yard shot. That's a tall order when you're feeling frisky, much S POR T IN G CL A SSI C S 108