THE LAND NORTH OF SUPERIOR

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            September has come.  The trees are already showing color, just a hint of the riot of  reds, oranges and browns that would paint the landscape in a couple weeks.  On the morning of the tenth crisp fall air greeted me on my way to work  The air even smelled different, that first frost of the year, partridge season was almost upon the land north of Superior.

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            This year work commitments had not allowed me to hunt until the second weekend of the season.  Tales of plump grouse exploding from the still mostly leafed trees kept me on edge.  I must have cleaned my two bird guns five times each, they just gleamed.  I wasn’t worried about hitting what I shot at.  Our family, in a normal summer will spend five or six afternoons at a local sandpit.  The whole family shoots all the guns, from .22’s to .410’s, 12 gauges and the .308’s and 30.06’s for the fall moose hunt.  This ensures that one can actually hit what one aims at, ensures that scopes and sights have not been knocked off alignment, and most importantly that you are not flinching when you pull the trigger in the bigger guns.

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            I took my boat along, meaning to spend part of the afternoon fishing for pickerel at one of my favorite lakes.  I was almost to the lake before I saw my first partridge, and another, and another, there were seven plump birds pecking and poking their way along a hill side that annually attracted birds.   Loading my brush gun, a .410 double over and under I set of in pursuit.  When the first bird went down I went to it. Taking the legs I looped them in a yoga cross and hung the bird from a willow branch.  I have lost dead birds in the past, they meld better than camo clothing into the browns of a fall forest floor.  Soon four birds were hanging and I had my fifth in hand cleaning it.

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            I skinned the birds, gutted them, and cut the entails out so that the legs stayed attached to breast and back of the bird.  Partridge legs browned in butter and simmered in gravy goes exceedingly well with rice, pasta or potatoes.  A little care must be used with children because of the many small bones.

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            As I cleaned a bird I would drop the feathers and guts where I stood.  Nature would look after clean and quickly.  That day Mother Nature was really on the job.  I was starting to clean the birds in reverse order back to the road when I heard rustling from where I had cleaned the last bird I had shot.  It didn’t sound like a partridge.  I peered through  the willows toward the gut pile twenty five feet away .

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            A fox was at the entrails wolfing down the still warm feast.  What I had turned down the fox thought of as caviar, if foxes knew about caviar. I watched as the tidbits disappeared.  When everything the fox wanted was eaten he sat down and looked straight at me. The plump rosy breast meat and legs went into a plastic bag as I moved to the next hanging bird.  The fox moved toward the gut pile I had just vacated at the same rate that I moved away from it.  He was enjoying the second course of his afternoon meal as I started to clean the next bird.

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            From the corner of my eye I noticed movement.  A second fox had arrived on the scene.  As no fight ensued I presumed that they were part of the same family.  When I left that gut pile two foxes got up from where they had been watching me.  They followed me from bird to bird.  They would finish first then they sat down staring in my direction almost as if willing me to be faster.  What the foxes had left I had no doubt would be soon claimed by other furred and feathered occupants of the forest until only a few feathers would mark the spot of the kill.

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            It turned out that the pickerel fishing was equally good as the hunting.  A different group of animals cleaned up the gut pile from the fish after I left.  That day I enjoyed to the fullest as I am sure the foxes and others who helped me keep the land north of Superior clean.

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