The wiser among us limit our exposure to contemporary distractions, among them the economy, also too many crackpots running for too many offices and, not least, the health scare du jour, most recently that posed to our longevity by ... vitamins!
Pay too much attention to these and the result, oftentimes, is pain radiating from the neck into the jaw, finally twisting the brain, also multiple tics, for which perhaps the best antidote might be the placement of a really big gun in one's cold bare hands.
Which is what the state's pheasant hunters will do Saturday, their boots laced high, the wild thing just up ahead. If there's a surprise, it's that the entire populace won't be similarly armed and in lockstep, parading hither and yon, the state's grand collection of dogs also out ahead, the whole bunch barking and yipping, alert for roosters.
Really, pheasant hunting is that much fun, and it speaks to mankind's tendency toward sloth that perhaps only 75,000 human-canine tag teams will be afield when the season's opening bell rings at 9 a.m. Saturday.
Yes, the time between flushes will be longer this season than last, due to the cruelties of winter and perils of wet springs. But when a big boy finally erupts, all florid and feathery, long tail trailing behind -- the white ring around its neck resplendent against the bluest of skies -- scattergunners of all ages will grin as they touch their triggers. Boom. And perhaps boom, boom again.
Wackos who troll the Internet dispensing vacuous observations make something of the ring-necked pheasant's illegitimacy as a native species. Well, OK, we got them from China. But in Minnesota and most every other place, homeboy prairie chicken and sharp-tailed grouse had already been doomed to irrelevancy as game birds. Sadly, their lives did not align well with agriculture, particularly with the advent of eight-wheel-drive tractors and 20-bottom plows, to which pheasants have accommodated, more or less, kinda.
I myself have outlasted a small kennel of dogs in the pursuit of these birds. And outlasted some trouble as well. Some years back my friends and I were run out of a motel in a town that will remain unnamed, the proprietor huffing in our rearview mirror about our parentage and, as I recall, throwing a shoe at our fast-departing truck. The allegation that one in our bunch had bathed his skunk-laden springer spaniel in his rented room never was confirmed by a court of law. Therefore it didn't happen. And if it did, I didn't condone it.
I have told the story before about an opening day some years back when my friends and I were parked in a lot adjoining a state wildlife management area. We had arrived early and planned to high-step it, phalanx-like, through the entirety of the area beginning at 9. But a few minutes before that time, a wreck of an old pickup with oversized rubber showed up with three ragamuffins scrunched shoulder-to-shoulder up front and a ribby cur dog in the back.
