Opening weekend a mixed bag

For the past 25 years, Wee Willy's tavern in Quasqueton has put on a free chili lunch for pheasant hunters on opening day.

On Saturday, for the first time ever, not a single hunter showed up - a sign as poignant as thousands of empty game vests that an era is ending. Fortunately, Hawkeye fans took up the slack, and no chili went to waste, according to proprietor Bill Berns, who said the chili tradition will remain unbroken next year.

I and my three regular hunting buddies - Terry Franck, Tyler Franck and Arthur Clark, all of Quasqueton - usually partake, but this year, discouraged by the lack of local prospects, we hit the road at 5 a.m., bound for public hunting grounds in north-central Iowa.

By 11 a.m., however, three birdless hours into the season, we were having second thoughts. Had we stayed home, at least we would soon be enjoying a hot bowl of Nellie Berns' homemade chili.

Then, as we dragged ourselves along a gravel road, returning dispiritedly to the pickups after a fruitless circuit of a dense cattail marsh, the bored dogs suddenly dived into the ditch and flushed a rooster, whose noisy ascent was halted at treetop height by a hail of steel shot.

Reinvigorated, we walked into another cattail marsh, from which two cacklers departed at once, neither making much headway before joining our instantly tripled daily bag.

Soon, farther into the section, two more roosters fell as they tried to make a break from a standing corn food plot, and we were officially having fun.

Yet another rooster flushed out of gun range, but we watched him land and deployed our assets to surround his position, which he soon found untenable.

Our seventh and final rooster flushed within five yards of Arthur, who had the luxury of a leisurely shot to close the day.

While Saturday had turned out better than we'd hoped, Sunday failed to live up even to our meager expectations.

Hunting what we figured would be our best habitat in Buchanan County, Terry, Arthur and I meticulously combed 100 acres of grass and weeds surrounded by picked cornfields, bagging the only rooster we saw 15 minutes into the hunt.

Unlike Saturday afternoon, which was often enlivened by pulse-quickening ringneck flushes, Sunday soon devolved into a four-hour endurance march, with repeated crossings of a steep-sided winding creek interspersed with interminable slogging through horse weeds and Reed's canary grass, our boredom and drudgery only occasionally interrupted by the hissing, shrieking, snarling annoyance of a dog-raccoon fight.