De Bat (Fly in Me Face)

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

bathead.JPG

De bat he rat got wings, all de children know dat,
What I want to know from de Lord is how you get de wings on de cat.
They say de bat got radar and he can fly through fan,
But what I am afraid are is that he got another plan.
To fly in my face, oh-oh, fly in my face, oh yeah,
I hope de bat he don’t come out and fly in me face tonight.
One thing I forgot to tell you about the human race,
Everybody get a little upset when a bat fly in they face.

    – From the song De Bat (Fly in Me Face) by Carly Simon

De Bat

Bats strike terror in my heart. Few things in this life can frighten me like a bat on the wing in the bedroom in the dark of the night.

Because our home is a 130-year-old log house built on a limestone foundation, bats have interrupted my slumbers several times over the past thirty years. It is a moment that tests a man’s courage and resolve. No man who hopes to retain an iota of self-respect can, at these times, pull the covers over his head and beg his wife to get up and kill the bat. No, it is a man’s job. A brave man’s job.

Naturalists love bats and extol the virtues of these magnificent winged mammals that eat their weight in mosquitoes every night of a hot and humid Midwest summer. They even recommend (are you ready?) building bat houses in the back yard to attract and shelter them. Put up nesting boxes for bats, just as we do for the bluebirds and the wrens we love. Whatever.

I have tried to develop this same admiration and affection for the local member of the order chiroptera, commonly called the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), but to no avail. For I have looked them full in the face, these bats, their tiny but vicious faces that combine all the snarling menace and hatred of the wolf and the baboon, and I know them for what they are: Satan’s flying rats from hell.

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Grouse Hunting

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

Looking back on it, I might have talked up Abbey too much, and I probably did not say one good thing about anybody else’s dog, and I did line up my nine empty shotgun shell hulls on the countertop between the kitchen and the main room and put a grouse feather in five of them and a woodcock feather in three of them and then held up the last one and said, “I know you guys are surprised that I missed a shot, but I’m a big enough man to admit I’m not perfect, and so I’m putting this one right up here with the rest.”
-From the novel  Hunting Birds – The Lives and Legends of the Pine County Rod, Gun, Dog and Social Club

Grouse Hunting

Don’t get cocky about your bird hunting, because as soon as you do something bad is going to happen. You will get into a shooting slump and miss ten or a dozen shoots in a row at easy birds that your dog has pointed and held for you, and you will have to take a lot of ragging from your hunting buddies about what a sorry-assed shooter you are. Or you will fall and twist your knee and be out of action for a week, or the firing pin will break in your best shotgun.

That’s if you’re lucky.

If you’re unlucky, it will be a lot worse than that, like the transmission on your pickup will go out, or your dog will catch a porcupine, or you will fall in the creek on a cold day when you are three or four miles from your truck. Or you will get arrested and put in jail on suspicion of first-degree murder, which is what happened to me on Saturday night.

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If a bird fall…

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

???????????????????????????????If a bird fall, it is like being able to bring back a token from a dream.

– Vance Bourjaily (1922-2010), from his book The Unnatural Enemy

If a bird fall…

All bird hunting is creative fiction.

Perhaps it seems that way only to me, as a writer who hunts upland birds. (Some would suggest that I am an upland bird hunter who coincidentally writes.)

But for every bird hunter, writer or no, at day’s end, the moment the dog is back in the travel box, the shotgun in the case, the birds in the cooler, and the vest and chaps in a heap in the back of the pickup truck, the hunt goes through a metamorphosis from enactment to history to fantasy.

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Clay target games

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

Sporting clays

The clay target game is good practice. In fact, if one can explore it from all its angles, it is the best available practice.  It teaches timing, lead, angle of flight, and all the seemingly necessary functions of mind and body, but it is still not bird shooting.  – Burton L. Spiller (1886-1973), from his book of stories Drummer in the Woods

Clay target games

To become a good wing-shot, to master the art and science of shooting a bird in flight, you must learn and practice by shooting one or more of the clay target games: trap, skeet, sporting clays, five stand, and a dozen other lesser-known.

In my part of the country, a bird hunter may have been able to become a first-class shotgunner a hundred years ago when the short grass prairies teemed with sharp tail grouse and the brushy waterways supported peak populations of bobwhite quail. In that golden era, he might shoot at hundreds of birds on the wing each year. Even today a shotgunner, at least a wealthy shotgunner, can travel to Central or South American counties where he can shoot at unlimited numbers of doves and waterfowl.

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Snowshoes of white ash and rawhide

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

SnowshoesAfter 25 years of use, these traditional snowshoes, made of white ash and laced with rawhide, are still in good shape. This is the Michigan or Huron style snowshoe. Today’s snowshoes are high-tech, made with tubular aluminum frames and thermo-rubber decking, and equipped with integral bindings and crampons. I can trip and fall equally well in all types and styles.

 Snowshoes of white ash and rawhide 

Life in a northern town begets a love-hate relationship with snow.

I’m not talking about those snow skiffs and sprinkles that dust the streets and lawns of more southern locales, providing residents with a day or two of holiday season décor and then melting away. No, I am talking about the parts of the country where a December-through-March series of Arctic air mass storms dump weekly deliveries of snow that accumulates to 20, 30, 40, 50 inches and more. That’s in the flat snowfall areas; the drifts get seriously deep.

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One good dog

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI was twelve years old the first time I ever shot a bird on the wing over a pointing dog, and it was by far the best thing that had ever happened in my life. I still remember standing there shaking because I was so excited to have shot a honest-to-god ruffed grouse in the rainy popple and cedar woods on a cold morning. The smell and taste of the gun smoke was in my nose and mouth, and my ears were still ringing from the sound of the shot, and a wet orange-and-white Brittany spaniel was handing me the dead bird, and I was thinking that heaven must be just like this.
            — Bird dog trainer Preston Carter, from the novel   Hunting Birds – The Lives and Legends of the Pine County Rod, Gun, Dog and Social Club

One good dog

A bird hunter only gets one good dog in his lifetime.

I’ve heard that old saw a hundred times. Not sure how it ever got started or why anyone thinks it’s true, but every now and then I’ll still meet another bird hunter in the field, ask him about his dog, and hear something like, “Oh, he’s not so good, but I had a really good dog about twenty years ago, and you know you only get one good bird dog in your lifetime.”

Really? Over the past forty years I’ve had four, and the sixteen-month-old puppy I started this season also promises to be a good one.

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Lefever Nitro Special

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Jerry Johnson

Lefever Nitro Special

Take you a workingman’s lass and polish her bright as brass;
Dress her in such finery as she never hoped to see. 
But in truth, oh how it hurts, you’ll find ’neath silken skirts,
She’s plain Judy O’Grady, not the colonel’s fine lady.
           — Clement Seagrave

 

 

Lefever Nitro Special

When we first met and I picked her up in Reno, I could see that she had had some hard use. She had gone all gray and silver, and she was bruised and scarred here and there and most everywhere. A once shapely thing, now down on her luck and her looks.

But she opened easily without squeak or rattle or sway, and a look down her bores showed she has no pitting or scoring inside, where it counted. She locked up tight with her action release lever still right of center, and her triggers both let off sharply and crisply with no bump or grind.

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Graceful double guns

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Jerry Johnson

Clean Truck Sept 2013 022

If there’s bird hunting in heaven –
Grouse, woodcock, quail, pheasant, and Huns –
Son, you can take this as Gospel:
God blesses sixteen gauge double guns.
 
Don’t offer me an over/under,
Semi-autos and pumps don’t abide,
Keep your twelve and twenty gauges;
I’ll shoot a sixteen bore side-by-side.
 
            – Clement Seagrave

Graceful double guns

No gentleman would hunt upland game birds with anything other than a double gun.

I will reluctantly accept an over-and-under double barrel in the field, but be aware that when I say ‘double gun’ I am referring to a side-by-side double barrel.

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Red elm

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Jerry Johnson

Firewood Stack

White elm burns like rotten mold;
Flames that sputter low and cold.
Red elm burns both hot and bright;
A steady fire all through the night.
– Clement Seagrave

To heat your home with a wood stove, you have to enjoy cutting and splitting wood.  Oh, you might get by for a year or two on the fallacious belief that you are befriending the forest eco-system, or the erroneous idea that there is economic benefit in heating with wood rather than fossil fuels.  But to keep at it for year after year, twenty or thirty years, you’re going to have to really like the heavy work of cutting and splitting and hauling and stacking firewood.

Love it, in fact.  Do it not as a noisome ritual of September and October, but as a fun and rewarding labor of love.  Recreation.  Play time.

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