
Of all good places to nail a grouse, commend me to the old grown-up pasture land of long 
abandoned farms. 
Still Hunting the Ruffed Grouse 
By CHARLES B. MORSS 
“Shot of the wood from thy ambush 
low, 
Bolt off the dry leaves flying; 
With a whirring spring like an Indian 
bow, 
Thou speedest when the year is 
dying; 
And thy neat gray form darts whirling 
past, 
So silent all as thou fliest fast, 
Snapping aleaf from the copses red,— 
Our native bird on the woodland 
bred.” 
—THOREAU. 
LL sportsmen with whom the 
breech loader is the favored 
weapon love at times to look 
back over the years that are gone and 
dwell fondly on the high lights of sport 
that have fallen to their lot with their 
favorite game bird. Be it the frisky 
and nifty jack snipe of lordly Canada 
goose or any of the feathered clan in 
between, whatever our favorite has 
been, we all have stored up against the 
evil days when our hunting must needs 
be done before the genial warmth of 
the open grate, recollections of sport 
with the bird that shall live with us as 
long as life itself. 
To the writer it has always been a 
fact most gratifying and fortuitous in 
nature that he was privileged to have 
been born and raised in a land where 
the ruffed grouse was at home. I came 
518 
of a family of grouse shots and mem- 
ory harks back to earliest childhood 
and those conventions on cool fall eve- 
nings about the stove in the local gun 
shop where, ensconsed upon a tier of 
shell cases I listened entranced and en- 
raptured to the gossip of the partridge 
hunters. 
UITE naturally I early took to the 
gun and the pursuit of this noblest 
of all game birds and now after more 
than forty years of play with the gun 
I am convinced he is the most charm- 
ing and at the same time the most dif- 
ficult of all feathered game upon which 
the shotgun is used. 
The eternal law of change in a world 
of flux touches the sportsman’s world. 
Gunners increase, game decreases, or, 
holding its own, becomes more vigilant 
and wary. And sport of today de- 
mands more in time, energy and money 
of its devotees than the sport of yes- 
terday. 
ET such is progress. An open sea- 
son of one month is allowed on 
grouse in the state where the writer 
resides which is quite ample in which 
to secure to one the season’s bag limit 
of fifteen birds at the rate of three in 
any one day. Counting Sundays out 
and periods of inclement weather, the 
sportsman’s active shooting days in the 
uplands are thus reduced to about a 
Autumn | 
and the @ 
Ruffed . 
Grouse--- 
What More 
Can One ; 
Nee 
} 
Desire? se 
score and with the shortened time limit 
and bag per season and per day, there 
has gradually worked about a change 
in the method of pursuit. Under pres- 
ent conditions therefore in many sec- 
tions of the effete East one discovers 
that the large majority of partridge 
gunners do not find it expedient to 
maintain a dog to kill their fifteen birds 
a year over, and the last generation 
has seen develop and grow up, a new 
type of the follower of this bird, viz. 
the still-hunter of ruffed grouse. H 
O far as the writer is concerned he 
yields to no one in his admiration 
for the blooded bird dog and his work. 
To hunt the partridge with a well- 
trained canine assistant is to round 
out the perfect day and to pursue the 
sweetest and easiest (if any phase of 
grouse hunting may be said to be easy) 
course of bringing him to bag. But, 
and of course it is a big “but” where 
the average shot is concerned, the 
really first-class and finished grouse 
dog is a rare ’un, and high when found, 
in fact so high as to be generally out 
of reach and unless one’s four-footed 
companion is “up to snuff” as regards 
the game and business in hand, here 
a case where one is better off without 
one, and not a case of where a poor 
dog is better than none. 4 
Though I always vote for bird hun 
ing with a dog when I have one, when, 
