Hells Canyon

Hell’s Canyon, This post not about Utah. Hells Canyon for you who don’t know is the Mecca for North American Chukar hunting. This is one of my favorite past times. And though Utah promises some very good Chukar hunting opportunities this year, an annual trip to Oregon to hunt Chukar in Hells Canyon is something I always look forward to doing with my friend Randy Schwandt. This year we brought along Kevin Jennings too. It was his first trip, and a relatively inexperienced upland game hunter, he was in for a treat. Hells Canyon, is heaven for chukar, and you would think this makes it heaven for Chukar hunters also, well, Chukar hunting is full of paradoxes. It seems the perfect environment for these birds, and on a bad day you see some where around fifty. But seeing isn’t shooting. The terrain is some of the roughest, steepest and hardest to maneuver. As they say, you hunt them once for sport, you spend the rest of your life hunting them for revenge. Some say a chukar hunter will walk an average of 10 miles for one bird. I don’t have much experience hunting big game, but it seems to me this is a tad tougher than what is required of the obese individuals I see shooting Big Horn Sheep on the outdoor channel, and for a lot less meat. This is hunting. Clichés aside you do it for sport, and the love of chukar meat. This isn’t about filling your freezer, or feeding the family. Calorie wise you burn more than you could ever get back from the chukar itself, hunting it. This year, Kevin and I took off to Ontario Oregon after church on Sunday, stopped at Cabela’s in Boise, to check off that store as one visited, and ended up in Ontario around seven in the evening. In the morning we headed out. It was a great two days of hunting. The first morning spotting a little draw in which to make our ascent, we parked, got the dogs ready, and began walking. Billie and Thistle set out to be the heros of the day, both German shorthairs that love to hunt. And it wasn’t 15 minutes into our hour long ascent up an incline of about 60 degrees, that Billie went on point. There isn’t much more beautiful than a pointer pointing. Slowly approaching the point a quail flushed out of the sage brush and met its demise. A second one took my momentary sense of accomplishment as opportunity to escape. God bless quail. They were thick in that draw and carried us up to the top as if we were flying on their backs. One hardly notices the effort when one is having fun shooting and watching his dog point and retrieve. Kevin managed to bag two of these Californians, I had five and Randy who remained aloof from the quail got one any way. At the top, after a final flush of quail, we watched two coveys of Chukar split for cover. Seeing, is not shooting, and this would for the most part be our lesson for the day. Chukar get frightful, and learn not to hold to long. We decided to chase one covey around a knob, sidehillling it. Sidehilling, is the chukar hunters forte. Some dedicated chukar hunters have even taken to cutting one leg shorter than the other, so as to accomplish this task more proficiently. This means to walk not up or down a hill, but across it. In Chukar country, there can literally be a foot to a foot and a half difference in elevation from one foot to another, and the terrain is most often made of loose rock, and grass slicked with snow, rain, or dew. People say the birds are defenseless, and this is hogwash. I think I have jeoporadized my life more in the pursuit of chukar, than in any other activity in my life. And that is saying something, believe me. They may not have tusks, great weight, or razor sharp teeth, but they should be classified as dangerous game if for nothing else, the terrain upon which they greet you with the temptation to shoot. Many shots are passed over for no other reason than that to shoot, would spell the shooters demise much more surely than it ever would the Chukar. Shooting strait while your feet manage uneven, wet, slippery and rocky ground, is something you can’t learn at the skeet range. On this particular day, most of the birds decided to flush well before we were anywhere close to shooting range. But a sixth sense told me, one stayed behind. See that is the thing about chukar. Rare is the flush when all the birds get up at once. There always seem to be one or two that hold tight just a little longer, hoping you expend your ammunition on the others, and they can have clear sailing while you reload. Always reload quickly. Guessing that this would be the case, I scrambled. I knew where I wanted to be so the bird would be within 30 to forty yards, when it did flush. I was ten yards short, and took the shot with the bird at 50. Thinking I had not hit it, I was about to unload my second barrel, when the bird did a swan dive and crashed into the hillside on the other side of the canyon. It was a long shot, but this is the nature of chukar hunting. They are not quail. Load appropriately. I don’t hunt for much shooting a shot size smaller than 6. The quail I shot on the way up were hit with sixes, I loaded for Chukar not expecting to see quail. I often shoot 5s. It’s just the humane thing to do. Sevens and 8s are fine for the orange disks made of clay in controlled conditions. You are likely to do nothing but injure most birds with them. I just let the quail get out a little further, gives me a bit more time to take the shot if nothing else. The rest of the day, we followed the dogs, and watch chukar flush at distances even I am not comfortable takeing a shot at. By the end of the day, we were so far skunked that when the dogs went on point and the birds flushed a hundred yards out and down from Kevin and I we decided to unload our weapons by firing in their general direction, and to our surprise, two actually fell. One started running and Billie retrieved him about three hundred yards down the draw. Man’s best friend.