The Bullet Proof Ptarmigan: Hunting with a young daughter

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“Where are my gloves?” I asked the universe as I dug through our hat box in the hallway.

            “I don’t know,” the universe answered in the voice of my older (at that time only) daughter, age 9.

            “I put them in here just yesterday when I was done with them,” I called back.

            “I borrowed them,” she answered again and anticipating my next question she continued, “because I couldn’t find mine.”

            And so, I began to look for two pairs of gloves when I shouldn’t have had to look for one.  Getting ready to go trapping with a nine-year-old Romay was a lot like what I picture Odysseus went through in getting his men on board the ship after each stop.

            That being said, Romay was by far the most reliable trapping partner I could have.  The wind could be blowing a -30 wind chill, but she was always ready to go.  Perhaps the better way to explain it is that she was always willing.  Getting ready took a great deal of effort on my part.

            The wind was on the calmer side this day as we warmed up the snow machine and loaded clean traps and bait into the cargo rack.  The little Ruger 10/22 would ride across Romay’s lap as I drove with her behind me. 

            “Ready?” I asked as I took my seat.

            “Mmmphph,” she replied as she buried her hooded head into the back of my oversized hunting parka to shelter her face from the cold that would come as we accelerated out of the yard.

            “Good,” I said as I hit the throttle.  I was pretty sure that her response had been in the affirmative.

            We made brief stops at each set to assure the traps were still operable and to freshen bait, but none were holding animals.  Fox were plentiful to the point of being a nuisance and Romay knew better than to play around the sets.  Scent was both our friend and enemy as the fox could pick up the stink of the attractant we left behind, but could also easily pick up the smell of a dirty trap, some stray manmade smell stuck to our boots, or a piece of gum carelessly spit out at the site. 

            Romay was careful to the point of lecturing her friends that we sometimes took with us.  She would almost scold if one of her contemporaries even looked like they were going to sneeze or spit near one of our sets.

            Our trapline trail took us up over a hill just outside of town before dropping into the shelter of the trees and then back toward frozen wetland bordering Norton Bay.  Passing through some willows, I spotted a ptarmigan about ten feet from the trail standing in the open.

            I got off of the machine, took the rifle from Romay, racked a cartridge into the chamber, made sure it was on safety and handed it back to the little huntress.

            “Go ahead and shoot it,” I prompted.

            “Shoot what?” she asked.

            “The bird right there,” I pointed at the bird that looked like a little white chicken standing on top of the snow.

            In Romay’s defense, ptarmigan are tough for the untrained eye to see.  When I first started hunting them, I could be about right on top of one before ever knowing it was there.  God made them white for a reason.  I still remember the first day I started seeing them.  It was like finally seeing the hidden picture in one of those dumb 3D picture books from the 1990s.  One minute there was nothing there, and then the next minute I couldn’t un-see the half dozen birds who were convinced that they were still invisible, clucking and scratching like domestic chickens waddling through the snow.

            “You see that willow about ten feet away that is bent over?” I pointed.

            “Yeah.”

            “Well, the bird is right next to it,” I said as it bobbed its head to one side.

            “Where?” Romay frustratingly asked.

            “You want me to shoot it?” I offered.

            “No!” she angrily whispered. 

            I was raising an independent, self-sufficient woman even at the age of nine.

            Something in Romay’s answer caused the bird to flick its tail, and that is when it revealed itself.

            “Hey, I see it,” she said crouching and drawing the rifle up.

            Ptchew! The rifle reported, an empty shell ejected out to the side, and a tuft of snow puffed up directly behind the ptarmigan.  The bird clucked and picked at the snow in front of it.

            “Just behind it,” I coached.

            Ptchew and a tuft of snow puffed just in front of the bird.  It turned its head to the side, its little bird brain studying this bizarre event.

            “Just in front of it,” I quietly called out.

            Ptchew and a willow just past the bird snapped off and fell to the snow.  The ptarmigan picked at the freshly clipped willow.

            Romay continued to take shots with me pointing out where each one was going until the ten round clip was empty.  She handed me the rifle and I took out the empty and replaced it with the full clip I had riding in my coat pocket.

            She burned through another ten rounds and I started digging for the loose shells that had been rattling around in my coat all week.  Gloves off, I reloaded the clip, while watching the bird who had not moved but a foot from where it originally was when we first saw it.  It was cold, but the wind was light, and we were sheltered in a little natural pocket.

            Ten rounds went into the clip, the clip went back into the rifle, the rifle went back into the hands of the girl, and ten rounds passed through the muzzle.  The bird looked up at the sky to see where the strange breeze was coming from.

            Another ten loose shells came out of my pocket and into the clip.  I put the full clip in and started loading the other empty clip as Romay continued punching holes in the defenseless snow surrounding what must have been a very bullet proof ptarmigan.

            With seven .22 catridges left, I loaded six.

            I pulled the empty clip from the gun again and replaced it with the partially full one, “I am keeping this one back in case we have a fox in our last trap,” I explained while holding up one bullet for her to see.

            Six shots later, and the ptarmigan had turned around and was examining the torn-up snow behind him.

            Disappointment and frustration were replaced by hope as I loaded the last reserve shell through the breech and handed the rifle back to Romay one last time.

            “This is it,” I explained, “there are no more after this one.”

            The little girl took careful aim, steadied herself, calmed her breathing, and gently squeezed the trigger.

            Ptchew!

            “You have to have one more in your pockets someplace,” Romay pleaded as we climbed back onto the snow machine.

            “We can’t get them all,” I comforted.  “Some of them have to get away,” I pointed out while watching the ptarmigan standing still only ten feet away from us.  It was definitely not trying to escape at that moment.

            Our last trap didn’t hold anything, and we didn’t see any more ptarmigan that day.  We rode home empty handed.

            “I should have hit that bird,” Romay commented as she slid off of the snow machine seat and began dragging her feet through the snow on the way to our door.

            “Don’t suppose you’ll want to go tomorrow now,” I said sounding sad.

            “We can go tomorrow?” she exclaimed her mood immediately changing, and she ran through the door and into the building.

             There would always be tomorrow.

Romay standing with her brother Ethan after a successful ptarmigan hunt

           

Preparing to build in Unalakleet: Marking where to dig

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Myra walking down from where the house may go (the small stake seen behind her to the left)

“See if you can find someone to dig some test holes for you.  You’ll want one where you might put your septic, one where your house will be, maybe one for your shop to get an idea of what the ground is like,” Dave Cunningham told me from his office at West Coast Aviation.

            Dave wears many hats, and though I ran into him out at the airport, I was asking him to wear his West Coast Construction hat… not to be confused with his fuel tank farm hat.  In all actuality, Dave is semi-retired which means he is down to probably only working a little over 40 hours a week if I had to guess.

            “Lee has some equipment up there already.  I’d ask him first,” Dave recommended.

            We spent some more time talking some vague logistics of what needs to get done in order to get a house built on the hill: things like we can’t handle 40’ connex containers in Unalakleet, how to get the road finished, Bering Pacific is the cheapest and earliest barge to ship materials on, and now is not starting too early to get everything lined up.

            Dave did not have Lee’s number and so my own digging started.  Life was so much easier when people had land lines and phone numbers in a book, or back when a quick internet search would find you a number rather than a company offering to sell you the number.  The school secretary, who stereotypically knows how to get a hold of everyone, didn’t have it, but gave me the number of someone who might know someone who had it.

            Three days later, and I had Lee on the phone.

            “Who is this?” he asked confusedly after not recognizing my voice or my name.

            “I’m Myra’s husband,” I offered my old standby that has never failed me in the Norton Sound.

            “Who?”

            “We have the piece of property just up the hill from your duplex.  The one with the shed on it,” I offered hoping for a bell to ring.

            “Oh, that Myra.  What can I do for you,” he happily asked.

            I explained our situation and what we were trying to do and found out that Lee would be out of town for over a month.

            “I’d happily do it for you it I was there, or even just let you borrow my hoe,” he said referring to his backhoe.  “But it needs some work.  If you are still needing it done in the spring, I can help you out then.”

            I thanked him and returned to the drawing board.  Waiting until spring means that we would be waiting an entire extra year to order our building supplies.  Everything has to be gathered for shipping in Seattle, packed into a 20’ container, and barged up the inside passage.  Then there is the extremely tight window of decent weather to build in as well as freedom from my time intensive job.

            I moved down the short list of people with heavy equipment.

            “Have you called Lee?” I heard from the other end of the phone.

            I sent Myra a text message with a link for Craigslist to a John Deere with low hours that would fit on an airplane for shipping.

            “That is a great price,” was the initial response that she sent.

            Myra was responsible for the maintenance department in Galena at the Fish and Wildlife station.  She knows equipment and what good stuff costs.  I did a little dance in my desk chair and watched the thought dots come up on the texting window.

            “Ask Dave one more time if he can dig the holes for us.”

            We both want a tractor, but we were hoping to wait until after a couple of other financial irons were off the fire.  Guess we were still waiting.

            Thankfully, Dave responded that he would try to get an excavator up there to dig some holes for us.  We just had to mark where things would be.  It is not guaranteed.  Dave’s equipment is heavy and a little overkill for this job which requires some off road, soft ground driving.  It was enough to get us out putting stakes on our property and discovering where the property lines are though, and getting a tractor of our own is still riding in our back pocket in case Dave’s equipment can’t get up there.  Renting our tractor out could help us pay for it if we have to go that route.

            We had been getting pretty discouraged in our search just to figure out how to get a couple of holes dug.  It all started looking gray… stuff is not cheap out here, nor is it cheap to get stuff here. 

            “Maybe we should just build a little cabin up there for someplace to get out of town,” we started thinking.

            Then we walked it again.  It is only an acre, but it is an enormous amount of space for us who are literally right on top of our neighbors with no yard, no storage, and no shop.  We started seeing where a greenhouse would go, the raised beds, the house, the shop, maybe a high tunnel, and we looked off over the ocean just down the hill to the west.

            “I don’t want to move,” Ellen reminded us.  “I want to stay in our house now.”

            “We would still live in Unalakleet,” Myra comforted, “we would just have a house here.”

"I don't want to move..."  

            “You’re building a new house here, Dad?” Ellen asked looking up at me.  “Ok then,” she responded to my nod.

            We climbed back into the car with the hurdles looking lower, the road to be completed looking shorter, and the payoff looking bigger.  It is a very small step, but the stakes are now in marking where to dig.

Looking to the west out over Norton Sound with the town just to the south.