The Native Bird

The Native Bird. Even when conditions are brutally hot and flushes are sparse, a sharptail hunt in Central Montana managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management is a total rush. I've been at it for decades now, every September, somewhere on the public lands of central or eastern Montana—­incandescent sunlight, the prairies toasted to the color of an elk hide, and the heart-­pounding explosion of a sharptail launching skyward from cover. It is always new, even if you've hunted the prairies a thousand days, been clawed by the same buffalo berry, stumbled in the hard-dried mud of the same steep cattle trails, turned your face into the same winds that define the American grasslands like no other force of nature can. Today is no different, this first afternoon of a three-day adventure in central Montana. I'm watching my buddy Doug Krings's new pup, a whippet-thin Llewellin setter named Rocket, discover her life's work, right here on this blazing-hot afternoon when saner folks, and saner dogs, would be shaded up or fishing a spring creek somewhere. Not for us the shade. We're here to hunt.