Wildside column: It’s all in the art of the hunt

As pheasant seasons go, the one that just ended was, for my hunting buddies and me, about average for the past three years, which is to say pretty good.

Terry Franck, Arthur Clark and I, with the occasional accompaniment of Bobby Moses, harvested 58 roosters, most of them from the fields around our mutual hometown of Quasqueton.

That may sound like a lot, but it's not in relation to the effort expended - essentially every non-holiday weekend during the season that ran from Oct. 29 through Tuesday, which yielded an average of one rooster per hunter per day.

Some might think that too low a return on an investment that consists mainly of the time and energy required to walk through often highly resistant vegetation. But to us, the payback is more than commensurate.

Start with the drama of a perfectly executed point in which Gunny, Arthur's German shorthair, slows his frenetic motion to a crawl before locking up - nose down, eyes glazed, tail and forepaw rigidly extended in opposite directions.

That is the yin of pheasant hunting, a freeze-frame moment of quiet and calm in which we humans inch closer and position ourselves to cover all the soon-to-be fleeing bird's potential escape routes.

Then comes the yang, the moment of release, when beating wings and raucous cackles shatter the silence, when an impressionist blur of beak, claws, eyes and plumage coalesces into a streaking ring-necked missile that will be out of shotgun range in three to four seconds.

When all goes well, as it usually does in those situations, Gunny or Rocky, Terry's Labrador, will have a bird to fetch.

When all does not go well, as happened with Arthur and me on New Year's Day when we flushed the same pointed rooster twice in 10 minutes without disturbing a feather, we can only assume it was a spirit bird, best to be left alone.

Such forgettable moments are thankfully counterbalanced by memorable ones that stand out even among the highlights of more than 50 hunting seasons.

Mine came during our annual foray into a friend's three-acre thicket of willows and horseweeds in which winter pheasants always concentrate.

While Terry and Arthur, with their dogs, entered the thicket on one end, I blocked the opposite end in hopes of intercepting roosters fleeing before them - a sound theoretical tactic that has proved less so in practice.

Just as they entered the cover, a rooster flew toward me and landed in the grass. As I walked toward the spot, it flushed and I shot it. As soon as I placed it in my vest and replaced the spent shell, another rooster flew across in front of me and I felled it.

Two shots and two roosters in two minutes - surely it does not get any better than this, I thought, just before a third flushed at my feet and joined the others in my vest.