Yesterday afternoon as I pounded on my keyboard, I was reminded of a William Wordsworth poem, The World is too much with us.
"The world is too much with us; late and soon . . .
Little we see in Nature that is ours . . .
The winds that will be howling at all hours, . . . "
Most of the time Green Day, Roger Clyne&The Peacemakers, or Weezer are the poets reverberating in my head, but Minnesota's howling winds brought me Wordsworth on this day. It could only mean one thing - the woodcock had arrived and I needed to be amongst the alders listening for their flushing whistle.
It was already 4:10 in the afternoon, but the pull was too strong. I had to try to get to the woods for even the shortest of walks before sunset.
I hit the send button on half-done drafts, shut down my computer, and quietly slipped out of the office when no one was looking. I made it home in a record eight minutes, grabbed my shotgun, blaze orange vest, and loaded up the pup into the truck kennel. Pointing north, I raced against the setting September sun.
At 5:45p.m. I arrived at my state forest destination and slipped the SportDOG collar onto my shorthair pup, Trammell. I had one hour.
What followed in that hour was magical. Trammell hit the ground with her nose sniffing the wind. A grouse flushed wildly just 50 steps from my parked truck. Then it was on. Trammell disappeared into the alders. The SportDOG's hawk-screeching beeper collar went off. I approached through the tangle following the hawk-screech as quickly as I could. I parted sixty-seven alders to find Trammell locked in point as solid as a statue. The American timberdoodle, or woodcock, rose toward the canopy as my scattergun reached out and brought it back before it could escape into the burnt orange sky.
No sooner had I slipped the needle-nosed bird into my game vest than Trammell was locked up on point again. In sixty minutes, I flushed fourteen woodcock and two grouse with Trammell locking down eleven of those timberdoodles with magnificently solid points. I wasn't able to find shots on the grouse through the autumn leaves, but the state-limit three timberdoodles had found their way to my vest.
