Riverman
Member
Over the years I have kept a large file of quotes that I liked from various sources. Some are from books and others are from speeches. Here are several that I thought folks might enjoy about grouse and pheasant hunting. I have left out Aldo Leopold quotes and will post them separately. I was limited to 10,000 characters so I will post some other quotes in another post.
“It seems to me that any man who loves the grouse would have to love a dog, for these are two of his Makers finest creations. And though they are our favorites, they please us in exactly opposite ways: one the very essence of all things wild and free—the other the embodiment of loyalty and service. And now, in those brief few moments of the point, they are linked by a tenuous thread of scent, and primal instincts that neither of them can fully understand.” George King, Thats Ruff!: Reflections from Grouse Country
"Someday we'll find the perfect gun and perfect dog and live happily ever after. Meanwhile the harsh dark hours of the night are softened and made light by the well-remembered memories of pups and quail . . . that arrived in time to save a day we almost considered lost."
Ah, sweet dreams are made of this.” Gene Hill, A Hunters Fireside Book
“Wingshooting: It's an ancient, honorable, and somewhat mysterious occupation to, at once, be both protector and taker of these birds. I'm not quite sure I completely understand it, which is just as well, but I do know that I have to be there every so often to replenish something in me. I'm not sure just what it is, but I know when it's done and done right." Gene Hill, "Shotgunner's Notebook
“Go to your freezer. How much and what kind of fish and game do you have left in there from the previous summer and fall getting freezer burn? Write it down and subtract it as penance from your bag limit this summer and fall.”— Jim Harrison, Sports Afield, 1994
“What if I made a bunch of money and die before I can spend it to buy the free time to fish?”— Jim Harrison, Field & Stream, 2003
“My own hunting and fishing are largely misunderstood activities cataloged under the banal notion of ‘macho,’ whereas I tend to view them as a continuation of my birthright.”— Jim Harrison, Just Before Dark
“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”— Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent
“If you hunt or fish a couple weeks in a row without reading newspapers or watching television, a certain not altogether deserved grace can reenter your life.”— Jim Harrison, Off to the Side
“When I’m fishing and hunting with the right attitude, I reenter the woods and river with a moment-by-moment sense of the glories of creation, of the natural world as a living fabric of existence, so that I’m both young again but also 70,000 years old.” — Jim Harrison, Field & Stream, 2003
“Barring love, I’ll take my life in large doses alone — rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”— Jim Harrison, Wolf: A False Memoir
“It is easy to forget that…we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs. The simplicity of this law of proportion came to me early in life, growing up as I did so remotely that dogs were my closest childhood friends.”— Jim Harrison, The Road Home
"Soak it up, go into it softly and thoughtfully, with love and understanding, for another year must pass before you can come this way again.
For neither you nor next November will ever be the same. " Gene Hill
“The ruffed grouse is an elusive bird, sometimes difficult to find and always difficult to center in a shot pattern. Grouse explode into flight at the most unexpected times; they dodge and dart through the foliage with uncanny flying skill; and they’re usually gone from sight within two very brief seconds. In strict terms of hit and miss, the average grouse hunter could be classified as a failure the majority of the time. Perhaps this is why we have this all-pervading curiosity about each other’s performance in the grouse coverts. Many surveys have been conducted by state game agencies and special-interest conservation groups to determine grouse hunter success rates. Every single one of them (to my knowledge) has shown the ruffed grouse is the most difficult game bird to bag in America” Dennis Walrod, Grouse Hunters Guide, page 6.
“The grouse, of course, dies., and there’s the rub, the dark question mark that causes us to ask whether we really have a moral right to hunt the ruffed grouse with intent to kill. We stand, holding the limp form of a ruffed grouse in hand, pondering (as we always do) the perfection in the feather patterns, and wish, however momentarily, that a quick toss upward could restore the now-quieted thunder. But then pride of achievement takes hold. The ruffed grouse is a worthy gamebird, and it’s not really all that often that we get to hold one, to possess it and to know that our skills afield have shown a tangible payoff.” Dennis Walrod, Grouse Hunters Guide, page 11
“A basic appeal of grouse hunting is that it is a sport not easy to be good at, one that tends to shed itself of hunters who are somewhat less than sincere about the sporting aspect of fair chase.” Dennis Walrod, Grouse Hunters Guide, page 11
“More than once I have vowed I wouldn’t go back, yet every year I pen the season dates into my calendar and, sooner or later, turn the blunt nose of my Isuzu Trooper west for another South Dakota Pilgrimage. Nowhere else have I found what I find here: birds in abundance in gorgeous country with superb reaches of cover where a pheasant dog can do what he was born to do. The land is big and a man with legs can usually find his way to a place of poignant beauty where the dramatic encounter of bird and dog can take place just as he has so often seen it in his dreams.” Steve Grooms, Pheasant Hunter’s Harvest, 2004, p 118.
“A biologist friend calculated the odds against a rooster growing old enough to attain trophy status. Of a hundred rooster chicks alive in the spring, fifty might be alive until fall. Of them, only seven will make it into their second hunting season. Of them, just a single bird is likely to survive to his third season. From a mighty cohort of twenty-four thousand spring roosters, a single cock might see his sixth hunting season (and then only in the impossible case of six straight years of favorable weather.” Steve Grooms, Pheasant Hunter’s Harvest, 2004, p 162.
“I don’t blame him (the farmer). He means to be a survivor in the game of agriculture--a brutally competitive game with weird rules and harsh penalties for losing. Yet each time we lose another favorable pheasant field, it feels like losing a friend to cancer. We go on looking for new fields and sometimes we find them. But new fields, like new friends, never seem to fill the holes left by the ones you loved and lost.” Steve Grooms, Pheasant Hunter’s Harvest, 2004, p 176.
“In all this, the pheasant you and I love so deeply is the canary in the mine. Although an “exotic” not originally found here, his right to a future is as absolute as that of any other species. There is nothing wrong with the pheasant that would explain his demise. What is wrong is the tyranny of a mismanaged agricultural system in which almost nothing wild is the given the chance to live.” Steve Grooms, Pheasant Hunter’s Harvest, 2004, p 190.
Bird hunting is a serious business, yet, when we reflect on the frailties of human nature, it is humorous to think that a sane business man will forsake his means of livelihood for a week or more, drive any distance up to five hundred miles, buy a nonresident license, chase a bird dog up hill and down dale for a period of days through storm and shine, will swelter, sweat, and swear, yet if he is so fortunate as to bag a half dozen grouse, will drive the long way home with sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks, vowing that he has had the happiest experience of his life.” Burton L. Spiller, Grouse Feathers, 1935, p165
“There’s an old saying that the quality of a sportsman’s character is inversely proportional to the size of the quarry he prefers.” Tom Davis, The Tattered Autumn Sky: Bird Hunting in the Heartland, p.126 of Woodcock Camp Revisited
“Best of all he loved the fall. The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods. Leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills, the high blue windless skies. Now he will be part of them forever.” Ernest Hemingway in eulogy for friend Gene Van Guilder who was killed by an accidental shotgun discharge. Quote is also on Hemingway’s memorial at his grave
“Nothing can destroy a man’s ego more than trying to shoot a grouse.” George Bird Evans, The Upland Shooting Life.
“If there is a heaven, it must have thinning aspen gold, and flighting woodcock, and a bird dog. George Bird Evans, October Fever
“If I were to give my two sons the things I have enjoyed most I would give them gifts nobody can buy, I would give them clear water, wilderness, solitude, roadsides free of litter, the opportunity to fish for salmon, steelhead, and wild trout.” Ted Trueblood 1969
“It seems to me that any man who loves the grouse would have to love a dog, for these are two of his Makers finest creations. And though they are our favorites, they please us in exactly opposite ways: one the very essence of all things wild and free—the other the embodiment of loyalty and service. And now, in those brief few moments of the point, they are linked by a tenuous thread of scent, and primal instincts that neither of them can fully understand.” George King, Thats Ruff!: Reflections from Grouse Country
"Someday we'll find the perfect gun and perfect dog and live happily ever after. Meanwhile the harsh dark hours of the night are softened and made light by the well-remembered memories of pups and quail . . . that arrived in time to save a day we almost considered lost."
Ah, sweet dreams are made of this.” Gene Hill, A Hunters Fireside Book
“Wingshooting: It's an ancient, honorable, and somewhat mysterious occupation to, at once, be both protector and taker of these birds. I'm not quite sure I completely understand it, which is just as well, but I do know that I have to be there every so often to replenish something in me. I'm not sure just what it is, but I know when it's done and done right." Gene Hill, "Shotgunner's Notebook
“Go to your freezer. How much and what kind of fish and game do you have left in there from the previous summer and fall getting freezer burn? Write it down and subtract it as penance from your bag limit this summer and fall.”— Jim Harrison, Sports Afield, 1994
“What if I made a bunch of money and die before I can spend it to buy the free time to fish?”— Jim Harrison, Field & Stream, 2003
“My own hunting and fishing are largely misunderstood activities cataloged under the banal notion of ‘macho,’ whereas I tend to view them as a continuation of my birthright.”— Jim Harrison, Just Before Dark
“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”— Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent
“If you hunt or fish a couple weeks in a row without reading newspapers or watching television, a certain not altogether deserved grace can reenter your life.”— Jim Harrison, Off to the Side
“When I’m fishing and hunting with the right attitude, I reenter the woods and river with a moment-by-moment sense of the glories of creation, of the natural world as a living fabric of existence, so that I’m both young again but also 70,000 years old.” — Jim Harrison, Field & Stream, 2003
“Barring love, I’ll take my life in large doses alone — rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”— Jim Harrison, Wolf: A False Memoir
“It is easy to forget that…we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs. The simplicity of this law of proportion came to me early in life, growing up as I did so remotely that dogs were my closest childhood friends.”— Jim Harrison, The Road Home
"Soak it up, go into it softly and thoughtfully, with love and understanding, for another year must pass before you can come this way again.
For neither you nor next November will ever be the same. " Gene Hill
“The ruffed grouse is an elusive bird, sometimes difficult to find and always difficult to center in a shot pattern. Grouse explode into flight at the most unexpected times; they dodge and dart through the foliage with uncanny flying skill; and they’re usually gone from sight within two very brief seconds. In strict terms of hit and miss, the average grouse hunter could be classified as a failure the majority of the time. Perhaps this is why we have this all-pervading curiosity about each other’s performance in the grouse coverts. Many surveys have been conducted by state game agencies and special-interest conservation groups to determine grouse hunter success rates. Every single one of them (to my knowledge) has shown the ruffed grouse is the most difficult game bird to bag in America” Dennis Walrod, Grouse Hunters Guide, page 6.
“The grouse, of course, dies., and there’s the rub, the dark question mark that causes us to ask whether we really have a moral right to hunt the ruffed grouse with intent to kill. We stand, holding the limp form of a ruffed grouse in hand, pondering (as we always do) the perfection in the feather patterns, and wish, however momentarily, that a quick toss upward could restore the now-quieted thunder. But then pride of achievement takes hold. The ruffed grouse is a worthy gamebird, and it’s not really all that often that we get to hold one, to possess it and to know that our skills afield have shown a tangible payoff.” Dennis Walrod, Grouse Hunters Guide, page 11
“A basic appeal of grouse hunting is that it is a sport not easy to be good at, one that tends to shed itself of hunters who are somewhat less than sincere about the sporting aspect of fair chase.” Dennis Walrod, Grouse Hunters Guide, page 11
“More than once I have vowed I wouldn’t go back, yet every year I pen the season dates into my calendar and, sooner or later, turn the blunt nose of my Isuzu Trooper west for another South Dakota Pilgrimage. Nowhere else have I found what I find here: birds in abundance in gorgeous country with superb reaches of cover where a pheasant dog can do what he was born to do. The land is big and a man with legs can usually find his way to a place of poignant beauty where the dramatic encounter of bird and dog can take place just as he has so often seen it in his dreams.” Steve Grooms, Pheasant Hunter’s Harvest, 2004, p 118.
“A biologist friend calculated the odds against a rooster growing old enough to attain trophy status. Of a hundred rooster chicks alive in the spring, fifty might be alive until fall. Of them, only seven will make it into their second hunting season. Of them, just a single bird is likely to survive to his third season. From a mighty cohort of twenty-four thousand spring roosters, a single cock might see his sixth hunting season (and then only in the impossible case of six straight years of favorable weather.” Steve Grooms, Pheasant Hunter’s Harvest, 2004, p 162.
“I don’t blame him (the farmer). He means to be a survivor in the game of agriculture--a brutally competitive game with weird rules and harsh penalties for losing. Yet each time we lose another favorable pheasant field, it feels like losing a friend to cancer. We go on looking for new fields and sometimes we find them. But new fields, like new friends, never seem to fill the holes left by the ones you loved and lost.” Steve Grooms, Pheasant Hunter’s Harvest, 2004, p 176.
“In all this, the pheasant you and I love so deeply is the canary in the mine. Although an “exotic” not originally found here, his right to a future is as absolute as that of any other species. There is nothing wrong with the pheasant that would explain his demise. What is wrong is the tyranny of a mismanaged agricultural system in which almost nothing wild is the given the chance to live.” Steve Grooms, Pheasant Hunter’s Harvest, 2004, p 190.
Bird hunting is a serious business, yet, when we reflect on the frailties of human nature, it is humorous to think that a sane business man will forsake his means of livelihood for a week or more, drive any distance up to five hundred miles, buy a nonresident license, chase a bird dog up hill and down dale for a period of days through storm and shine, will swelter, sweat, and swear, yet if he is so fortunate as to bag a half dozen grouse, will drive the long way home with sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks, vowing that he has had the happiest experience of his life.” Burton L. Spiller, Grouse Feathers, 1935, p165
“There’s an old saying that the quality of a sportsman’s character is inversely proportional to the size of the quarry he prefers.” Tom Davis, The Tattered Autumn Sky: Bird Hunting in the Heartland, p.126 of Woodcock Camp Revisited
“Best of all he loved the fall. The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods. Leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills, the high blue windless skies. Now he will be part of them forever.” Ernest Hemingway in eulogy for friend Gene Van Guilder who was killed by an accidental shotgun discharge. Quote is also on Hemingway’s memorial at his grave
“Nothing can destroy a man’s ego more than trying to shoot a grouse.” George Bird Evans, The Upland Shooting Life.
“If there is a heaven, it must have thinning aspen gold, and flighting woodcock, and a bird dog. George Bird Evans, October Fever
“If I were to give my two sons the things I have enjoyed most I would give them gifts nobody can buy, I would give them clear water, wilderness, solitude, roadsides free of litter, the opportunity to fish for salmon, steelhead, and wild trout.” Ted Trueblood 1969
