What I'm Running From

There's a reason I'll head into the mountains week after week, even when the odds of success are poor.

My hunt on Monday started at 8 a.m. with a happy jolt as I spotted a LOT of fresh tracks in the road: doe, fawn, buck, bobcat, fox!

I had never seen buck or fox tracks in this spot in the El Dorado National Forest. But there they were in the fine powder created by an endless crawl of trucks and ATVs, as sharp and unmistakable as craters on the moon.

What I didn’t see was mountain quail or grouse tracks, and this is a place where I almost always see at least quail tracks. Nor did I hear a peep from the covey that always seemed to be in this spot. And since I was there to hunt birds, that was not good.

So the cool mammal tracks were a gee whiz start to what became a womp womp hunt - five-plus miles of hiking that yielded only two opportunities, each a tiny pine squirrel staring at me from a log eight yards away. I’m not confident I can take that shot without destroying the meat, and not so desperate to kill something that I’d take the risk.

Also, they’re just too damn cute.

The fact that the birds were gone wasn’t surprising. Rifle deer season had opened here two weeks earlier, and once deer hunters saturate the area, many critters beat a retreat to less accessible areas - places where honest hunters are quick to admit that even if they did get a buck, they’d never be able to pack it out.

Yet I went hunting Monday anyway.

Why?

Gambler’s optimism was definitely part of it. You never know when you might luck into a perfect scenario: birds flushing (rare) in a clear shooting lane (more rare) where retrieval would not involve charging into mountain whitethorn that would embed its thorn-tips in my thighs (they always land in mountain whitethorn).

And it was the closing day of our monthlong grouse season. Boy, it would be nice to kill a grouse in my home hunting grounds!

Hunting Grouse Is So Easy. Except When It's Not.

But I have come to realize there’s more to my motivation.

There has to be, because mountain quail hunting, even at its best, has a very low return on investment: high exertion at high elevation with a high likelihood of 2 a.m. leg cramps to follow, all for two or three small birds.

I do these hunts during deer season, year after year, because the world up there is so much better than the world I occupy down here in civilization.

That world has been getting me down. Despite the fact that there are good people doing good things, it’s been hard to escape the fact that greed - for money and power - is driving a huge percentage of the ills our society faces.

Social media and video and games are designed to addict us because it makes some people rich. A pharmaceutical company floods our country with opioids that touch off a deadly epidemic, just so its owners can get rich. Vast swaths of grocery store aisles are filled with garbage that is killing us, because crap cloaked in convenience makes manufacturers rich. Democrats and Republicans can no longer compromise to actually get things done because compromise doesn’t win elections. Vladimir Putin has deployed an army of digital trolls to sow division among us, because chaos among his enemies improves his position of power.

It’s depressing!

And it feels unsolvable.

So I retreat to the world where those people can’t touch my life. The world where greed, sooner or later, always proves self-defeating. The world that was here before we were, and will be here long after we’re gone.

And truly, even on the worst of days in the field, there is usually a reward.

On Monday, I pushed into territory I’d never walked before - always useful - and I could’ve sworn I smelled grouse at one point.

Yeah, I know that’s weird, but the first time I ever killed a ruffed grouse, in Minnesota’s Northwoods, I smelled it right before it flushed. My sense of smell is weird: Sometimes I can’t smell a fresh cat turd in the litterbox that’s so heinous it drives Hank outdoors. Sometimes I can smell game.

So I’ll go back to that spot in the forest a few more times to see if my nose was right, and if it was, I’ll return for next year’s grouse season.

Last week, on another quail hunt where I never saw or heard quail, I also explored new territory. And as I found myself heading into in an area that had burned last year, I looked around, spotted all the right signs, and thought, “Damn, this looks like it would be a great morel spot!”

How-To: Scout and Hunt Burn Morels

Two steps later I looked down and found dried morels.

And two steps after that, I found fresh ones.

Morels are normally done by June. This year, I was picking them in substantial quantities as late August 14. But this was October 6. Unbelievable. And now fresh morels are back on the menu!

So this world isn’t just an escape from the forces of doom. It’s an escape to a place where hard work and persistence yield results, even if they’re not always the results you were seeking.

That’s the world I want to live in.