Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/554642
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 4 9 And so we did. Except not as easily as we imagined. While sharptails haven't the perambulating tendencies of pheasants, they can hike a dune or two, a skill honed over millennia chasing down grasshoppers and evading coyotes. These are gallinaceous survivors clinging to life in a fringe of cover rarely taller than a man's chest. They've not only survived, but thrived where 25-mile-per-hour winds are considered a breezy day and winter blasts can blow horizontal snow 40 miles an hour at 30-below Fahrenheit for three days running. The dogs pointed just under the ridge, but the birds were no longer there. "I'll bet they went over the top," I said. Cheyenne sneaked forward. We again stepped into nothing but grass. No feathered explosion. No grouse. Dave's big drathaar pranced over the top, nose low and forward, and went arrow straight. Again, no flush. Down into the next swale where surely this young brood, early in the season and unfamiliar with dogs and men, would hold. "Well this is odd," I confessed when we regrouped atop the next dune. Even the dogs were scratching their heads, casting left and right, confused. "Why don't I work over this ridge and into the wind back to the road, and you go back to the left on that first ridge?" Bean suggested. "If that doesn't turn them up, we go elsewhere." We didn't go elsewhere. Dave's drathaar was pointing on the side of a big dune when my setter stiffened near my side. I heard Dave's Benelli pop, soft and insignificant in the vast prairie space. A single sharptail came rocketing over the ridge, left to right. My shot tumbled it and ignited the half-dozen hidden birds that had inspired my setter to lock up. For a few seconds—swing and shoot, swing and shoot—time stopped and the world diminished to grass, sky, and grouse. Then they were in the grass and I could again hear Dave calling for his dog. His shotgun popped once more like a wine cork under a quilt in a distant bedroom. A covey of sharp-tailed grouse takes flight over typical grassland habitat found in the Nebraska Sandhills, which other than fences and a few roads, remain relatively unspoiled compared to other prairie lands.