Hitchock started it with The Birds

Don’t blame Alfred Hitchcock.
I was 11 years old when I first saw “The Birds.”
It remains one of my favorite movies.
But it’s not simply the idea of crows, seagulls and sparrows attacking humans that intrigues me, it’s the shots they offer -- left to right and right to left passing shots, straight-aways and incomings, lot of incomings.
I fantasize about rescuing Tippi Hedren with my Model 12, racking a shell into the chamber and dusting the gull that attacks her early in the film.
And Suzanne Pleshette never would have died had I been there to fend off the crows.
But most of all I dream about birds flying closer instead of farther away. Therein lies the advantage of hunting birds on the fight.
The birds I hunt are seldom closer on the second shot. Rarely does the Hungarian partridge that flushes in front of my dogs come toward me.
Oh, sure, every once in a while a bird does fly in my direction, but rarely does that bird live to pass on his flawed genes.
Unfortunately, the birds that flush out of range and fly over the horizon seem to do most of the breeding.
What fun it would be to hunt ducks that didn’t flare when they spotted my poorly camoflauged carcass, but flew at me instead.
I’m sure I’d become a better shot. Give those sharptail grouse flushing out of range a few seconds to spot me and here they’d come, closer and closer until even I couldn’t miss.
And if I did.
No big deal.
It’s not like missing a shot at a charging Cape buffalo.
Even though the birds in Hitchcock’s film killed a number of folks, I think I could easily handle the average grouse in hand-to-wing combat.
At least I hope so.
I hate to think I’d turn and run, screaming like a little girl while that sage grouse I missed cleanly pecks me on the back of the head.
But who knows? The humiliation of losing a fight to a three-pound bird might send me into a comatose state like the one that befell Hedren after she was pecked and wing-slapped into unconsciousness by a swarm of gulls.
Had she been packing a Winchester pump, I like to think she’d have been able to control her emotions and pile up those birds like a dove hunter in Mexico.
But that’s just fantasy.
My reality is quite different.
It involves a lot of misses at the south end of too many fast-flying northbound birds.
I can’t blame Hitchcock for that.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Hunting season has returned at last

Only in Montana could I have such an opening day.
First light on Sept. 1, found my son-in-law Aaron and I hunting ruffed grouse in the Beartooth Mountains south of Livingston.
The dogs put up a few singles, but I missed the only shot I took. By 10 a.m. it had gotten hot and we called it quits.
On the way back to town we slowed to watch mule deer and whitetails still in their summer coats, and surprised a young black bear feeding on chokecherries at the edge of the road.
In the distance we could see three mountain ranges, the Crazies, the Bridgers and the Gallatins. The longest undammed river in the lower 48 -- the Yellowstone -- wound through the valley below us.
Back in Livingston I hitched my drift boat to the truck, said my goodbyes and headed home to Malta. Once hunting season arrives, I pretty much give up fishing, but with a little camouflage, the boat will make a great duck blind.
The skies were clear of smoke across the middle of Montana and I watched the state’s lesser-known mountain ranges rise on the horizon likes ships at sea. First the Snowies and the Little Belts, then north of Lewistown, the Judiths and the Moccasins.
Every stock tank I passed, it seemed, held ducks and geese and a stiff wind blowing out of the west hinted at more to come.
I ate chile rellenos in Lewistown and let the dogs swim there in Big Spring Creek where it passes through town before getting back on the road.
Smoke from wildfires still burning in the Bob Marshall Wilderness drifted across the Missouri Breaks and hid the last mountain range of the trip, the Little Rockies, until I topped the hill on Highway 191 above the Fred Robinson Bridge and they appeared out of the haze.
Sage grouse and sharptails fed along the edge of the pavement, nearly invisible against the dry grass, and a pheasant flushed as the truck blew past, filling the mirror with a blur of wings.
Scattered bunches of antelope grazed across the prairie in the fading light and I slowed to watch a badger scramble off the road at my approach.
Finally I topped the last hill and the green line of the Milk River bottom bisected the arid landscape below me. I was nearly home.
I’d been skunked on opening day, but it was a day to remember nonetheless.
And it was only the beginning.
Hunting season has returned at last.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net