by Jay Cassell
And although he was pretty much self-educated, he began to write, working nights on his old Oliver typewriter. He sold “His Majesty, the Grouse” to Field & Stream in 1931. It was the first of 53 Spiller stories that magazine would print. The last was “Grouse Oddities,” in 1967, when Burt was 81.
Between 1935 and 1938 the Derrydale Press published a Spiller book a year—all numbered, deluxe editions limited to 950 copies. First came the classic Grouse Feathers, then Thoroughbred and Firelight and More Grouse Feathers. All have been reprinted one time or another. Those original Derrydales are treasures.
Around that time, someone dubbed Burt “the poet laureate of the ruffed grouse.” The name stuck, as it should have.
In 1962 Drummer in the Woods, a collection of previously-published grouse stories (mostly from Field & Stream), appeared. Burt also wrote a boy’s adventure yarn called Northland Castaways, and in 1974, the year after he died, Fishin’ Around, a collection of his low-key fishing stories, appeared.
I guess at one time or another while the two of us were eating my mother’s applesauce cake by a New Hampshire brook or bouncing over a dirt road between covers or trudging side-by-side down an overgrown tote road, Burt told me most of his stories. Whenever I reread a couple of them, as I do every time I take out the old Parker, I can hear Burt’s soft voice, see the twinkle in his eye, and feel his finger poking my arm for emphasis.
In 1955, when I began hunting regularly with him, Burt was already 69 years old. He was a small, wiry, soft-spoken man, old enough to be my father’s father. I called him “Mr. Spiller,” as I’d been taught. But on the first morning of our first hunt he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Burt, please. Call me Burt. When a grouse gets up, you can’t go yelling ‘Mark! Mr. Spiller!’ now, can you?”
I never heard him raise his voice, curse even mildly, or criticize or poke fun at any man or dog. He was a devout church-going family man who did not hunt on Sundays, even though it was legal in New Hampshire, or drink alcohol, but he was neither pious nor self-righteous.
A good joke, for Burt, was a joke on himself. His favorite stories were about the grouse that outsmarted him and the times he got lost in the woods.
He wore an old-fashioned hearing aid, the kind that plugged into his ear with wires running to the battery in his pocket. “I can hear pretty well,” he told me cheerfully, “but sometimes I have trouble picking up the direction.” It had to have been a terrible handicap for a grouse hunter, and it probably accounted for the fact that even in those years when partridge were bountiful in his covers, many a day passed when Burt never fired his gun.
When he saw a bird, though, his swing was as silky as I guessed it had been fifty years earlier. Once he and I were trudging side-by-side up the old Tripwire woodsroad on our way back to the car. Our guns dangled at our sides, and we were talking and admiring the way the October sunlight filtered through the golden foliage of the beeches that bordered the roadway and arched overhead. Dad and the dog were working their way along parallel with us somewhere far off to the left.
Suddenly Dad yelled, “Mark! Your way!”
A moment later a grouse crashed through the leaves and rocketed across the narrow road in front of us. It didn’t make it. Burt’s Parker spoke once, and the bird cartwheeled to the ground.
It was a spectacular shot.
Burt picked up the stone-dead partridge and stroked its neck feathers. Then he looked up at me. He shook his head and smiled apologetically. “Sorr y,” he said. “I should have let you take him.”
He knew, of course, that the odds of my shooting that grouse were exactly the same as his own when he’d been my age: about one in fifty. But that was Burt.
I was young and eager, and I tended to measure the success of a day’s hunting by the heft of my game pocket. I learned how to hit flying grouse the old fashioned way—by shooting often and relying on the law of averages—and as much as I missed, and as much as I expected to miss, I still tended to kick stumps and grumble and sulk when it kept happening.
Burt used to tell me, “Just keep shootin’. You can’t hit anything if you don’t shoot. And always remember: every time you hit a flying grouse is a good shot.”
I noticed that he never grumbled or sulked when he missed, although, to be accurate, he didn’t seem to miss very often. Even on those days when birds were scarce, and it rained, and the dog behaved poorly, and nobody got any shots, Burt always had fun. Afterwards, when we dropped him off at his house, he always smiled and said the same thing: “A wonderful hunt. See you next week.”
Gradually I learned to say the same thing at the end of every day—“A wonderful hunt ”—and mean it. Burt taught me that.
He was moving a lot slower in 1964, and although he still wore the old hearing aid, he didn’t seem to pick up sounds as well. Burt was 78 that year. But he still greeted us the same way when we picked him up in the morning: “Hi. I’ve been expecting you. It looks like a wonderful day.”
On the second weekend of the season after we laced on our boots at our Bullring cover for the day ’s first hunt, Burt said, “Uh, Bill? Can I heft your gun?”
I handed him my cheap Savage single-shot.
He threw it to his shoulder. “Comes up nice,” he said. “Mind if I try it?”
“Sure,” I said, though I couldn’t understand why he’d want to.
“Here,” he said. “You better take mine.” He handed me his slick little Parker.
I carried Burt’s gun through the Bullring, and he carried mine. I recall missing a couple of woodcock with it. Burt, straggling along the fringes of the cover, had no shots.
At our next stop, Burt picked up the Savage. “Never got to fire it back there,” he said. “Mind if I try again?”
And so Burt lugged my gun around that day while I carried his Parker, and Dad’s journal reports that I ended up shooting a woodcock, while Burt never dirtied the barrel of that Savage.
When we dropped him off, he said, “Why don’t you hang onto that gun if you want to.”
“Well, sure,” I stammered. “I mean, I’d love to.”
He smiled and waved. “A wonderful hunt, wasn’t it?”
The next week when we stopped for Burt, it was my Savage that stood on his porch alongside his lunch pail and boots, and he carried it all day while I toted the Parker. And nothing was ever again said about it. We had swapped guns, and Burt had managed to accomplish it his own way, without ceremony. He never even gave me the chance to properly thank him.
I know for certain that Burton Spiller shot only one more grouse in his life, and it happened a couple of weeks after we’d exchanged guns. He was following a field edge while Dad and I were slogging through the thick stuff, and a bird flushed wild and headed in Burt’s direction. Dad screamed, “Mark! Burt!” and I could hear the frustration in his voice, knowing that Burt probably couldn’t hear him and wouldn’t hear or see the bird.
But a moment later, from far off to our right, came a single shot.
We hooked over to the field and emerged behind Burt. He was trudging slowly up the slope, my gun over his right shoulder and a grouse hanging by its legs from his left hand.
Burt Spiller shot his last partridge with my gun.
The following Saturday—October 31, 1964—sometime in the morning, Burt fell. He never complained—didn’t even tell us when it happened—but by the middle of the afternoon he had to call it quits.
He was still hurting the next week and the week after, and then the season was over.
Burt Spiller had hunted grouse for the last time.
During the next decade, Dad and I visited him periodically. He always had a smile and wanted to hear about the hunting. He continued to write stories and raise gladioli right up to his death on May 26, 1973.
A few months later, the old Savage came back to me with Burt’s instruction: “For Bill’s son.”
Dad and I continued to hunt Spiller country for the next several seasons. Then one October we found a powe
r line had cut the heart out of Schoolhouse. The next winter, Bullring became a highway cloverleaf and a Stop & Shop parking lot took the upper end of Tap’s Corner. A couple of years later, the dirt road to The Old Hotel got paved over, and pastel-colored ranch houses sprouted up along both sides.
Burt’s covers, those that remained, changed, too. Mankiller and Tripwire just didn’t look birdy anymore. The hillsides that had once sprouted thick with juniper and birch whips and head-high alders grew into mature pine-and-hardwood forests, and after a while we stopped hunting Spiller country altogether.
Anyway, it would never be the same. It always seemed as if we’d forgotten the most important stop of all—at the white frame house in the village of East Rochester, where Burt would come to his door on a Saturday morning, grin and wave, lug his gear to the car, and say, “Hi. I’ve been expecting you. It looks like a wonderful day.”
Reprinted with permission of the author. To order his books, go to www.williamgtapply.com.
Targeting the Thunder-Maker
ROBERT F. JONES
Some upland wingshots I know spend their spring months engaged in such lesser outdoor activities as trout fishing, turkey hunting, running white-water rivers, gardening or even (for shame!) playing golf. Not I. From mid-April to early May you’ll find me at dawn prowling the vernal woods of southwestern Vermont or walking the adjacent dirt roads, rain or shine, listening for the sound of distant thunder. Spring, after all, is the prime drumming season for ruffed grouse.
As the late Gordon Gullion—who knew more about Bonasa umbellus than any other researcher of the 20th Century—wrote in Grouse of the North Shore, “Fishermen working a favorite trout stream in the spring often hear the drummer’s roll from nearby hillsides. Canoeists drifting down a river on a midsummer afternoon may hear an occasional drum from the bordering woodlands. In the fall, hunters waiting quietly for a wary whitetail frequently hear the distant drumming of the male ruffed grouse. Mid-winter drumming is infrequent, but occurs from time to time. It is not often heard, but the unmistakable marks [of the drummer’s wings] can be found on snow-covered logs in January and February.” Yet the peak of drumming activity comes “as the snow melts in the spring and the breeding season approaches.”
I’m not out there listening to drummers for the sheer, heartwarming, aesthetic experience of it. To my ear, a drumming grouse is nowhere near as mellifluous as a “singing” woodcock or a gobbling wild turkey. And just being out at dawn during April in Vermont can make for a wet, muddy, bone-chilling morning. Even if the sky is clear and the sun has some strength to it, that only provokes the black flies to chow down more greedily. But for the dedicated grouse hunter, these excursions are worth the discomfort. If you know where a cock grouse is drumming in springtime, you know he’ll be in the same general vicinity five or six months later, come bird season. And if his drumming has managed to secure him a mate or two, there’ ll be plenty of naïve young grouse wandering the woods as well.
Though spring drumming serves as an advertisement for hen grouse to “come and get it,” the most important purpose of sounding the thunder is to warn all other male grouse within hearing to keep clear of the drummer’s turf. This is usually a chunk of woods about eight or ten acres in area. As Gullion notes, “In contiguous, good ruffed grouse habitat, drumming males are often spaced quite evenly, about 148 to 159 yards apart. . . .” I’ve never found them that close together, but if your spring scouting expeditions are profitable and local habitat is good, you may hear as many as three or four drummers sounding off almost simultaneously. Under the right conditions—a cold, windless, slightly misty morning—a drummer can be heard as far as a half-mile away, though a quarter-mile is more often the case in the dense woods ruffs prefer. Heavy spruce or fir cover muffles the sound even further.
During the spring drumming season, cock grouse sound off for five to eight seconds per drum roll, and the riffs are almost always spaced four minutes apart.
Gullion writes, “The drumming sound is made by the bird leaning back on his tail and striking his wings against the air violently enough to create a momentary vacuum, much as lighting does when it flashes through the sky. . . . Contrary to some of the tales one hears, the male grouse does not beat on a log with his wings, nor does he peck the log to drum.”
Though the classic drumming scene, beloved of 19th-century artists, pictures a cock grouse standing tall on a massive, hollow, moss-covered blowdown in thick, primeval woods, it turns out that today’s grouse don’t even need logs to drum on. Gullion, during his 33 years of study (1958 to 1991) in the Cloquet Forest of northeastern Minnesota, found them playing Gene Krupa on boulders, woodpiles, exposed road culverts, the roots of trees, mounds of bare dirt “and even the snowbanks along roadways.” Here in interior New England I often find them drumming atop old stone walls where former pastures have reverted to aspen groves. The frayed, molted wing feathers on or near the walls confirm that these are indeed drumming sites.
There’s often a kind of ventriloquial quality to a grouse’s drumbeat. This is especially true in the steep, hilly, wooded country that characterizes most good New England grouse coverts. What’s more, ruffs sometimes change position while drumming on their log or stone wall or boulder, turning a complete 180 between drum rolls. This can throw off the listener’s sense of the drummer’s location by as much as 30 to 45 degrees. Still, if you wait patiently for perhaps a half hour—say seven or eight solos, quietly changing position from time to time—you can usually zero in on the drumming site. Approaching it is another matter.
Gullion found that at Cloquet, “good drumming sites are quite predator-proof.” This clumsy, two-legged predator can second that conclusion. During my first bird season in Vermont I spent many a grouseless morning trying to sneak up on and bushwhack a drummer that had the nerve to sound off not a hundred yards from my house. For some reason this bird was drumming as if it were springtime—which they’ll do. I once heard a ruff, maybe this same one, drumming his wings off at midnight on New Year’s Eve, under a full moon that turned the snowy meadow behind my house into a reflecting shield that almost made me wince. He kept it up until moonset, at 5 a.m.
My “house grouse” was brazen, to say the least. This was in the early years of my great black Lab Luke, and the grouse drove both of us nuts. Time after time we tried to flush the thunder-maker, pussyfooting up on his drumming site like a couple of scalphunting Apaches, but whenever we got to the knoll where he worked his tympanic magic, he was gone. We never heard him flush. He just walked off into the woods as silent as a ghost. Ten or twenty minutes later we would hear him sound off again from one of his subsidiary drumming logs. His primary log, a wind-toppled white pine, was anchored by a big ball of roots and dirt. Gullion calls this a “guard object,” and male grouse are “partial” to such blowdowns. “On this sort of site,” he says, “the bird will usually select a drumming stage on the trunk about three to five feet from the root mass [which] provides protection against predation for as much as an eighth to a quarter of the horizon.” Luke and I always seemed to approach the bird from the wrong quarter. When we finally wised up, we tried to outflank the bird, coming in from a different direction that took us through heavy young aspen whips and up a steep hill. By the time we got up there, of course, he was always long gone.
“In spite of the drumming [which alerts predators] and the amount of time that a male grouse may spend on his log,” Gullion says, “he is probably more secure there than at any other time in his life. We have never seen evidence of predation at a log that was in really good cover.” Tell me about it.
Of course, man is only a minor predator on the ruffed grouse. Bobcats, lynx, foxes and coyotes are far more successful at procuring a pa’tridge supper. But the raptors do even better. Great horned owls, gray owls, barred owls and goshawks cut a wide swath through grouse populations, particularly during snowless winters. If the snow is deep enough, grouse can burrow into a drift to spend the night, but in an open winter t
hey must roost in the trees, making them easy pickings for night-hunting owls. And during daylight hours, most of which grouse spend feeding, often popping buds and catkins from various trees (primarily aspen), they are vulnerable to attack by goshawks. Indeed, Gullion remarks, “goshawk” could very well be a contraction of the words “grouse hawk,” so successful are these big blue-gray accipiters at snagging ruffs.
You would therefore think that a male grouse would be a damned fool to announce his presence from his drumming log and stay there for more than an hour a day. But drumming logs are chosen carefully. They’re usually surrounded by a thick growth of brush or saplings. “This should extend at least three feet above the level of the log,” Gullion writes, “and more often 15 or 20 feet. At preferred sites the density of hardwood saplings is usually in the range of 3,000 to 7,000 stems per acre.” Mighty thick stuff. Brush surrounding drumming sites is even denser—close to 10,000 stems per acre. “This vertical cover,” Gullion continues, “should have a fairly even distribution around the drumming [log] to provide optimum protection for the male. The drumming male also needs a clear escape route from the log, a path where there are few branches or stems to impede rapid movement by a fleeing bird.”
No wonder Luke and I could never flush the house grouse. But trying to do so produced some good shooting despite our frustrations. The knoll where the drumming log lay looked down on a piece of wet ground that harbored plenty of woodcock. A half-dozen times during our stalks we flushed young grouse-of-the-year feeding in the vicinity, and I managed to scratch down two or three of them. So all was not in vain.
The following spring I managed to catch a glimpse of my nemesis. More than a glimpse. I left Luke at home one morning and crawled on my hands and knees up to the knoll. It was just getting light, and the ground was so damp that no leaves or twigs crackled as I stalked closer and closer to the thunder-maker. He was drumming every four minutes—hot, hectic flurries like a chain saw starting—and I timed my movements to coincide with his riffs. He was really fired up now, so into it that he’d lost his fear of man. Gullion on a number of occasions got so close to drumming grouse that “they would step onto an opened hand and allow themselves to be lifted above the ground, but they would not allow another hand to be brought close to them; they would not tolerate being restrained in any manner. . . . On several occasions when the moon was full, using a headlamp, I have snuck close enough to touch drummers on their logs.”