Oak just had to wait 10 months but finally pheasant and duck season got started on November 12th for 2020. Back to the usual haunts in Eastern Washington's Desert Unit, sleeping in the bed of the truck while listening to the generator of the warm duck hunters sharing the trailhead. Woke up to a freezing fog, crackly crystals, and confident roosters spouting off.
Like always, we couldn't connect the cackling to a bird on the ground but a mile in we put up some teal. Two shots, two birds knocked down but apparently not hard enough. Visibility was only 50-70 yards so we couldn't tell if they had swam into the reeds or were just sitting on the other side of the pond. After looping around the shore, we were back where we started and those ducks decided it was time to make an escape. They must have drawn straws because the first came flying straight at me and I missed him both times, giving the second one a free pass.
That was pretty much how my day went. I lost track of the clean misses on ducks. The roosters were pretty sparse this year and flushing wild. The one I dropped fell into the creek behind a screen of 15' tall reeds. By the time we got up there and realized the creek was there, he had floated out of sight and was probably causing some confusion among the ducks downstream. Oak even flushed a wounded duck from a shoreline of a lake that could only swim away and even though I could see the pellets all around him, he just dove under and never came up again (at least that we saw). Had a diver duck pull a similar trick of diving after the shot but he came rocketing back out of the water and that was the point where I swore off shooting at ducks for the day. Oak couldn't even look at me on the drive home... On the plus side we saw more deer than ever before and he still found at least 20 pheasants and a couple quail coveys by the end of the 14 miles. You might just see flat scrub brush and swamp in the pictures but I love it out there even with no protein in the cooler. Walking around with a gun is a weird way to find inner peace but watching the instincts and drive of my hard working dog in that country is about as close as I get to a quiet mind.
The Redemption Tour:
Back at it on the 20th for what was supposed to be another tune-up for the long season. Turns out it was the last trip to the Desert... Most of the ponds and lakes were frozen, the ducks had moved on, and the pheasants were even more spooked.
Looking down over the edge convinced both of us that we didn't need back to back 10 mile hikes and we settled for working along the top until we could reach a drainage to hunt that would at a minimum provide the illusion of bird habitat.
At said drainage we found an old road that might be headed for the now abandoned town of Jericho. All wikipedia says is it's an "extinct town". If I can find the grandparents of an old timer out there, I'll get the scoop on Jericho and the neighboring Smyrna and report back.
On the way to the truck we ran into three huge coveys of quail that once busted provided single and double flushes for almost a mile. Oak at this point had given up on me as a hunter but maybe we will come back next year with the right ammo for the little torpedoes. We even heard a rooster cackle and we found him! Alas, he flushed on the opposite side of an olive tree from me and I could only give him a salute. Still confused by a universe where I'm a successful big game hunter but can't bring home tasty birds... but already thinking about ways to get Oak into the field sooner next year.
