The following piece first appeared on the now deceased website, Floodplains Magazine. I am releasing an edited version here on Afield Notes in memory of the main character, who recently reposed to the grouse woods. Original accompanying art by David Wilson is also included. You can support his work and learn more about him via his website or instagram.
I lifted up my twelve gauge into some kind of a ready position and crept into the woods. I could make out Eric’s blaze orange on the other side of the thick cover to my left. Beyond him, walking along the narrow dirt road flashed the orange of a third hunter’s cap. Eric yipped a note in the opposite direction and the orange hat responded in kind. It was easier having a hunter on the road that edged the property. No way to get lost, easy boundaries to follow.
The thick-set pines before us were an hour behind in the morning light. As if it could get any more difficult, it made catching a partridge with my eyes as challenging as taking one with an explosion of shot. We moved into the thickness. A flurry. Bird to the right, bird in front. A shot from my gun. A shot from Eric. Nothing from the road.
Partridge hunting is a surprise two seconds of chaos. If it takes three seconds, the bird is halfway to the next block of woods. We found Eric’s bird and knew there was no need to look for mine. Picking up those first feathers in the morning meant we’d add to the freezer. Eric yipped at the road. A distinct holler came back in a whooping noise and the woods fell quiet again.
We admired our harvest at the vehicles. I managed somewhere amongst my flailing around with a firearm to get a bird whose color matched my lightly rusted hair. Eric held up a gray phase with a beautiful spread. It was a special location to get both types of birds.
We glanced up the road to see our third hunter making her way out. She clutched her shotgun in both arms like a life raft and her orange cap covered the top half of her ears and hid her cropped, white hair. Her vest draped over her small shoulders like a cape, a throwback to a time when they didn’t make women’s sized hunting clothes. It had been ten years since Grandma Troy last fired her shotgun. After the morning hunt on her land, it was approaching eleven.
No one in the Troy family was exactly sure of the last time she let loose a cartridge from the barrel of her twenty gauge, but they all seemed relieved when she made the mature decision to stop shooting. Every so often she yelled from the road about a bird and every so often one of those yells turned into a fleeing partridge dodging sticks and branches along its unfortunately chosen route along the hunting line. She knew the partridge were there, but I wasn’t sure if she could see them.
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