The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

Hunting wild stuff, be that antlered animals or fowl of any sort, is usually a result of an introduction made by one special person who took the time to expose a youth to the outdoor lifestyle.  The number of people who hunt today only make up about 11% of the United States population and that number is falling.

I have been hunting since I was 14, almost 50 years now and I can say there was not that one special person in my young life. My dad was busy raising a family and working extended hours for almost his entire adult life and never had the time to introduce me to hunting.

I would ride my bike to a State Waterfowl Refuge about six miles from my house and sit along the refuge line waiting for a not-so-smart goose to fly over. It goes without saying my earliest memories of hunting were not very successful. I went none the less. I would walk around the very few public areas we had to try to shoot a rooster pheasant with very little success.

I did not own a hunting dog and even if I was lucky enough to shoot one, I only found about half of them. When I was 24, I attended my first Pheasant Forever chapter meeting to see if they could use one more foot soldier. There I met a guy by the name of Les Johnson. Les was 16 years older than me and out of the goodness of his heart he felt sorry for me and offered to take me with him on a walk in the tall grass with his dog Missy.

We met at his house and off we went to a small public hunting area just north of Wilmont, Minn. This was back in the days when there were very few pheasants on the landscape and even fewer places for a rank and file 24-year-old to hunt. Nobles County Pheasants Forever would just two years later buy the very first piece of land that was then opened to the public as a Wildlife Management Area. It was the first land acquisition in the United States by this fledgling habitat organization that started in St. Paul just four years earlier. The Nobles County Minnesota chapter has completed a total of 45 of these parcels over its now 40-year history.

We walked around for a while with little to see and even less to shoot at. As we headed back to the truck, which was about 300 yards from where I was standing, the dog stuck her nose into a patch of tall reed canary grass. You could not see the dogs head or shoulders but her butt and tail were clearly visible. Les as any good mentor would, told me to get ready and told Missy to “get em.”

A second later a giant rooster the size of a hula hoop busted skyward from the grass. I was ready but not as ready as I thought I was and I pointed the gun in the general direction and after three booms the rooster was still making his was skyward on the way to the next county. After my gun was empty and the rooster had reached the furthest reaches of gun range Les nonchalantly shouldered his gun and with one shot the bird crumpled and gravity did the rest. Missy did her job and in the shortest of moments was proudly delivering the bird to Les’s hand.

I never killed the bird and only proved how inept I was and it was still one of the greatest moments of my life. I had seen just what an evening in the tall grass was supposed to look like. It changed my life. Not just a little, but as profoundly as any event in my prior 24 years.

Since that encounter I have spent the past four decades making sure I was a good shot and over those same years I have personally owned about a dozen well-trained retrievers. For the past 35 years I have kept at least three-four dogs in my home and spent thousands of hours training them and helping other want-to-be hunters train their own dogs as well. I am one year short of 40 years as a Pheasants Forever volunteer and morphed into what Doctor Seuss’s books would refer to as a character called Lorax.

The Lorax has a saying that “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” The Lorax always defended the forests. He would say the trees have no voice. Wild creatures, including pheasants, have no voice of their own except for the humans who defend their habitats and all of the other creatures they share it with.

That exposure on this one non-descript evening from a guy who took a novice under his wing and gave the time and frustration that must have accompanied it has made me into the passionate wildlife conservationist and habitat guy I am today. I still work in conservation as hard today as I ever have for the better part of the last 40 years. Just like my shooting our habitat successes have improved with time and practice.

I had no mentor as a youth but I sure had one that night when I was 24 years old. Today, as we are both 40 years older, I am 62 and Les is 78, he can no longer pound through the tall grass like we once did four-five days a week, but we still make special time to chase a rooster together every now and then. Shooting a bird is far less important than it once was but I can guarantee you one thing, in the wise words of Les Johnson, we always make sure we have a quality outing. A bird or not, an evening with my old friend of more than four decades, sitting on the tailgate of his almost always new Dodge, is always a quality evening.

As I look back across my entire adult life, of all the people who have ever inspired me, nobody has had a greater influence in my outdoor passions and habitat successes as Les Johnson and for that I will always be in your debt.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

If you have any questions, reach out to me at scottarall@gmail.com.