By Daniel R. Ball
We were invited on the pheasant hunt, my brother-in-law and I, to join with Kenny, a family friend. Kenny’s a big guy with passions for deer corn, fishing, fireworks, all-inclusive resorts, and family, who works more than his share of hours at a water treatment facility that he lovingly calls “the shit factory”, and he’s just about as genuine, goofy and kind as one can be. As we pulled up he asked us in a clearly excited version of his nasally timbre, “You ready to shoot some chickens?”
And I was. I always thought myself an above-average wingshooter, as every lousy wingshooter does, and I thought pheasant to be game of a certain nobility and wildness. I’d been drawn, before I knew anything about hunting, to the thought of walking a field, watching for a male’s long tail feathers, bringing one down, and preparing a meal that surely would have to be better than the chicken it would inevitably taste like. It was something of a marvel to me that such an old and wild bird could even be found in our area, if only one drove far enough from the strip malls and suburbs that defined the Jersey I knew. Meeting Kenny that Thanksgiving morning, a bit of hunting experience under my belt, I was eager to see it, to make it real.
It was a perfect morning for hunting, sunny and cool, the oncoming winter not yet bitter. We rode with the windows of the pickup open. Arriving at the hunting club I tried to act nonchalant, suppress the instinct to puff out my chest among the older men in the parking lot, all of us with our blaze orange donned.
The clubhouse had a look of Germanic antiquity crossed with fraternity house chic. The trophies that hung on the walls evoked great hunts and fantastic settings; wild boar silently screamed with tusks bared, plump ducks soared in paralyzed flight, and a still moose flaunted its massive antlers despite being several hundred miles southwest or else thousands southeast of its true range. There were well-exercised beer taps in the corner of the room, a dusty pool table, and plenty of gathering space. Everyone there waiting for the pheasants was convivial and welcoming though reticent.
My brother-in-law and I introduced ourselves to the club member taking roll call. “Good name,” he told me, a fellow Dan. He collected the small guest fee, and ensured we had hunting licenses and had shot before. I’d hunted, but birdwise only clay pigeons, I told him, and those don’t taste as good. The four of us would be going out together. Dan had a couple of new dogs he was training, so it was a fitting match.
With everyone signed up and ready to go, we all stood in a large group in the sandy parking lot, waiting for, at the time, I didn’t know what. Then the birds arrived.
See, here’s the difference between hunting on New Jersey State land versus private hunting club parcels. To hunt on state land, you’re required to purchase a pheasant stamp to hunt them that season. The cost of the stamp pays for a breeding program so that two evenings per week, hundreds of birds are released into the fields of wildlife management areas for hunters to seek out during hunting hours throughout the week. This way, there’s no need to maintain population studies and habitat management, nor to require hunters to sex the birds by sight in the seconds between the bird appearing and the hunter taking a shot. On club land, the only difference is there’s no release program: club members must procure the birds and stock their fields themselves.
In both cases, the practice is logical and yet still somewhat jarring. It allows people to experience a hunt who otherwise would not have the privilege. At the same time, hunting culture is built around the idea of a return to wildness, when in the case of pheasants, the hand of humankind is entirely responsible for this semblance of abundance, the maintenance of huntable lands as well as the very lives of the animals pursued.
Our quarry was brought in covered cages in the bed of a pickup. I wanted to help and be a good guest, but there wasn’t much I could do, knowing nothing about keeping birds or keeping dogs. I just stayed back, watching as the birds were brought out one by one, the cage door slid back into place immediately behind them. Each big ornate cockbird, each petite plain hen, and each of a few tiny challenging chukar partridges was firmly yet carefully pulled out and lowered, flopping, into a burlap bag. Once upside-down and in the dark, they gave in, calm and still.
My brother-in-law and I made sure our licenses were properly affixed to our vests and that our guns were properly stowed for transport – about all we could do besides wait. On the way to Kenny’s, we’d belted out the chorus to a song called “The Bird Hunters,” a country number about home and seeking what’s real that has become a favorite anthem of ours. There in the lot we were silent.
The way stocking and hunting works is that one group heads to a location of a few acres, stocks the field, then moves to another location that the previous team has stocked, which they’ll hunt. If the timing goes right, no group sees the ones who stocked their field, and there’s an illusion that there was no stocking at all, that the birds were just waiting there, though it’s one that takes some imagination. The dogs, certainly, were not fooled, whining, confused, as soon as the cover was removed off the cages in the truck bed: “They’re right there! Bird bird bird! Don’t you see?”
The club leaders called out various locations, sounding like military commanders speaking to teams in code. They all knew where “Behind Thompson’s” or “The Old Barn” meant, and so packed and headed off once told. My brother-in-law would ride with Kenny, and I with Dan, his two yellow labs in the back, for the short drive to the field we would be stocking.
There’s this thing that happens when two New Jersey hunters first meet that I like to call “liberal chicken.” There’s a certain bravado that seems to be the default of anyone from Jersey the moment they’re holding a firearm, and so this strange little exercise comes in where we test the waters of whether we want to talk sensibly or else just keep the chitchat to guns and weather. We started with the typical topics about his dogs and the club and the handloaded shells I’d brought that had old-school fiber wads so as not to litter the fields with plastic. Then the topic changed to the price of rent in New York City, where I lived while my wife was getting her Ph.D., and about the New Jersey Fish and Wildlife Service and housing development in the state – a scarcity of land the looming specter in both cases that gave us each the vague sense that there was something gradually slipping from our grasp. Of course we left this sentiment implicit.
We arrived ahead of Kenny’s truck at the small close-cut soybean field sandwiched between residential lots amidst a grid of narrow paved roads. While we waited for them we would walk the length of the field, spotting how best to distribute the birds and ensure they were all within the thin property line. Dan told the labs to stay and be good as he closed the driver’s side door, dropping his voice and holding eye contact with the larger one as if to say, “I’m counting on you to make sure your sister understands,” and then we walked along the gravel path.
When Dan, genial, asked what I did for a living while my wife was getting her degree, I thought I’d win our little game of liberal chicken in a single sentence with, “I work for a Canadian nonprofit that tracks and reports on UN environmental negotiations.” But rather than accuse me of being an eggheaded idealist or scoffing at UN bureaucracy or the moot enormity of “saving the Earth,” Dan asked more about our mission and the value I saw in it. He told me about the work he did with Pheasants Forever, an organization that seeks to preserve populations of wild game birds and reintroduce populations that have been depleted and crowded out by development, the latter a Sysiphian task in the chopped up and parceled out open lands of Jersey: pheasants need space, and to hungry coyotes the semi-wild introduced birds are easy pickings.
I was struck, then, with just how unearned any of this was, for me. I was walking this field, a sometime resident and amateur hunter, with an expert who knew what the hell he was doing – in hunting and in life. Waiting in the truck were his birds, his dogs, and I felt just how intrusive it was that I was invited into this thing.
As if on cue, Kenny pulled up on the path, leaning out the open window and calling out his favorite line, “Who’s ready to shoot some chickens?”
We had a job to do first, of course. From the bed of the truck Dan and Kenny hauled out the burlap sacks of birds. Dan handed me the top of a bag and said, “Hold here, tight,” and I did. We walked out in pairs to either side of the field.
There was still a crust of ice over the wet soil of the thawing field, and as we walked out our feet crunched through into the muck. Dan explained how the whole area was set low, flood-prone, the lots palmed off cheap on unsuspecting homeowners who would have to invest in pumps to keep their basements dry, now that the natural flow of rainwater had been irrevocably altered. I felt the cold come through my less than waterproof hiking boots some seconds after stepping out of the puddle.
Dan motioned for the bag and I held it up, careful not to agitate the shifting mass inside. He looked inside for just a moment, surveying, then reached in like a magician and pulled out the first pheasant he could grab by the feet, a big male.
In order for a pheasant to remain in the field and not immediately fly off, it must be subdued. This is done by holding the bird firmly by the legs and rapidly whirling it in a vertical circular motion. Much like an astronaut undergoing g-force training in a centrifuge, the rush of blood to the bird’s head causes it to pass out. Its head is then tucked under its wing in order to mimic a typical roosting position, so that when it wakes up it will assume by instinct that it had gone to sleep in a safe area, and it will stay put, hidden in that same spot until the next squad arrives and the dogs come to seek it out.
Dan was a natural at this. He looked like a pitcher warming up his arm, the bird twirling and flapping its wings and then still, its emerald neck feathers brilliant against the hay-colored field until it was set down in the grass and stalks, at which point it became invisible. The single motion of tucking its head seemed so gentle, almost caring in comparison: “Sleep tight.”
Now, I’m a hunter. Though I try to keep my meat consumption in check – in fact the vast majority of my meals I eat vegetarian – I don’t have any particular qualms about killing an animal for food, so long as the harvest is sustainable, dignified, and done in a way that minimizes suffering. An important concept a lot of hunters hone in on is that of the “one bad day.” A cow or chicken or pig raised in a feedlot and industrially slaughtered essentially lives every day of its life as a prisoner, a slave of protein production. Game animals, on the other hand, live their lives as any wild animal should. My preference is small game, so in the case of a squirrel I might take, it means a life of playing with its siblings, roaming its territory, and chewing on wild hickory nuts, so that from its birth to the moment I take the shot, that squirrel only has one bad day.
As I watched the spectacle before me, I couldn’t help but consider the final day of the life of the New Jersey pheasant. It was brought in a cage by truck, stared down by dogs, shoved in a burlap sack, driven to a field it had never seen, plucked from the sack, given a ride on the Vomit Comet until knocked out, from whence it would wake up in the field as if hung over, scared up by a dog, and shot. Talk about a bad day.
In time we had all the birds placed. Good, even spacing, some hidden at a shrubline or in a little ravine to make more work for the dogs, keep it interesting. Dan signaled a thumbs up to Kenny on the other side of the field, who finished tucking a hen’s head and then mirrored the gesture. The breeze kicked up the scents of hay, ragweed, and distant woodsmoke. We headed back to the trucks. Dan sent a text message on his flip phone from the driver’s seat, ensuring the timing of stockers and hunters was synced, and started up the truck.
Like the ride from the club, this was a quick, mile-long, windows-down jaunt. I looked up at a fat squirrel as it teetered along a power line above the county road before jumping back amid the leafless branches. Lucky, that one.
Our field was similar to the one we stocked, rectangular and uniformly covered with dried and frosted ankle-high grass that crunched underfoot. The treeline was on the eastern side, so we had ample light without the sun blinding our shots. There was a broken down shed, the wood charcoal-gray with age, up at the edge of the field, and another narrow county road separating the field from the farmland to the west. The flat field was bisected by a line of tall, dense cattails growing in a little rain-carved trench.
Dan let the dogs out of the truck, and their joy was instant. This was their day, their game. The older brother bounded forward, immediately weaving and sniffing along the grass with his sister following and watching. Dan had to hold him back so he wouldn’t finish the game before we’d loaded our guns.
My brother-in-law would have the first shot from his spot on western tip of the line. The elder dog pointed and Dan called out ready and a hen fluttered up, still for a moment and then flying laterally for just a few yards until felled and retrieved by the dog. Guboy.
He got the bird packed away and the dogs were given water and in a few moments we resumed. This was all new to me, but the pace in particular I didn’t expect, chasing behind the dogs as they half heeded commands and alternately sniffed and leapt through the grass. The male dog again pointed and Dan called for ready and I clicked the safety with my index finger. The dog advanced, a rustle rose from the cattails, and the glowing yellow and umber feathers appeared. Huge, it seemed: a male. It should have been such an easy shot, such a slow, close bird, such ample time to shoulder the shotgun and breathe, but the whole thing had me stunned. I missed the first shot, behind the bird, pumped and shot again, still not leading far enough, losing in that moment the instinct for wingshooting. I hit the bird, just lower than I would have liked – a bit more care would be required later in the kitchen. It went down at the treeline and the dogs went running.
Each of the others got a couple of birds. I missed, I hate to admit, three more. Six shells, all shot way behind, the confetti remnants of the fiber wads flurrying down in front of me as the next guy took the cleanup shot. You try not to make excuses, like that I’d never hunted above dogs before, was thrown out of my element, accustomed to moving quiet and slow, alone in the woods. Or that I was just being safe, that I feared shooting too soon and endangering the dog, and so waited and waited until there was only blue sky beyond the brass sight bead. But none of this monologue running through my head did much for that sinking feeling, having made one shitty hit, the big bird weighing down my game bag, that train of thought ending with, “What the hell am I doing out here?”
Then, as the last hen bird came down, a little reminder. Dan held the collar of the older dog as the younger sister stood out in the field between them and the pheasant, looking back. “Dead bird!” Dan commanded, “Go on, girl, dead bird!” She inched forward in the sunlight, nervous, finally grabbing the pheasant and turning back to the chorus of “Gugirl, gu-gi-i-irl!”, running back with the wings barely fitting between her teeth, and yet the pride so evident in her happy, lolling face.
What a special thing, it seemed, that this was Thanksgiving morning. None of this was mine, to love or to criticize, and yet here I was, participant in this glimpse of joy. Here was the reason for it, for all its weirdness, its unnatural take on the natural. The land, the birds, the pursuit – it all may be a facsimile, but even a facsimile is reminder enough of all we stand to lose.
Daniel R. Ball holds an MFA from Stonecoast in Maine, where he studied under Rick Bass. His writing has appeared in FLDQ, The Whitefish Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife, Melissa, in New York.