December 2022 - 46

WILD COUNTRY DISPATCH
The Zone
M
Story by Tom Reed | Illustration by L. Eslick
y first bird dog was
a black-and-white
mutt named J.D.
She was born in a dirt tunnel
under a house in Carbondale,
Colorado, the year I dropped
out of college to fish the Fryingpan
River, bus tables for
the rich and famous and ski
moguls in Aspen. She was the
daughter of a springer mother
and a rogue black lab, black
and white just like the label on
a Jack Daniel's bottle. Hence
the name. And she was one
hell of a dog.
Besides her ability to muscle over the vertical
sides of a swimming pool, fetching tennis
balls using agility and brute strength, she
was a pretty good bird dog. In the pheasant
fields you'd trot along behind her until her
tail started to wag fiercely, her nose pinned
to the ground and you'd know - she's in the
Zone. Get ready. Up would go a bird.
Later I upgraded to real bird dogs; setters,
big-charging males and delicate females
46 | December 2022
- genuine bird finders. The kind of bird
dogs that are born to it. I hunted them into
all kinds of wind after all kinds of upland
birds from pheasants in the tall grass of South
Dakota, Mearns quail in the oak savannah
of southeastern Arizona and chukar on the
cliffs of the Big Horn Basin. They'd ride
the breeze like a sailboat, nose up, pulled
into it, quartering back and forth and then,
suddenly, spinning, following a line of air
in one direction. Almost as if tugged by the
nose right to the bird. Zeroing in. In the
Zone. When this happened, you knew you
had better get ready. There would be birds.
They didn't make mistakes.
Humans, I believe, have this ability, too -
but it only comes with time. Lots of time. It's
something that is at once primal and surreal,
as if you are tapping back to a time when your
people etched the images of mammoths and
spears onto cave walls. The Zone.
Once, on a wind-swept high plateau in
the Wind River Range, I hunted elk with two
tags in my pocket. The game managers were
trying to keep the elk population down and
the bighorn sheep population up in this place
so I figured I'd help. I hunted all afternoon
without seeing so much as a track, moving
between clumps of limber pine, over a treeless
flat. Finally, as the sun tilted west, I prepared
to head back to camp, thinking about a hot
meal and a cold beer. But there was one small
escarpment of rock and pine just ahead of
me and for some reason, I thought I needed
to look over that little crag. I climbed up
slowly and carefully, drawn by something
without knowing it. There, on the lee side of
the rock pile, was a small herd of elk, cows and
one good bull. I was shooting a single-shot
Browning, a reproduction of the old, high
wall rifles of the late 1800s, chambered in
7mm Remington magnum. I put the crosshairs
on the neck of one cow and broke it.
The herd milled at the shot, confused, and I
reloaded and shot another cow through the
heart. The Zone.
The Zone is an intersection of timing,
ability and instinct. You are there or you are
not. It is that simple. It can happen at any
time and it is something that is neither learned
nor forced. It comes from the gut. It happens
in the shotgun fields of autumn when every
shouldered gun swings perfectly and every
shot patterns beautifully. If you don't start
talking to yourself about it, giving yourself a
verbal internal pat on the back, you can stay
there. It happens in the dark Douglas fir when
you step carefully and lightly and follow the
scent of elk into an other-worldly intersection
of man and quarry. And, it happens to me
fishing more than anything.
There will always be times when you are
off-kilter. When you stumble around, make
bad casts, get distracted by bugs, hot sun,
splashing fish or your buddy catching and you
not. But when you are in the Zone, it is as
if nothing else is in the world matters except
your pin-point precision and concentration.
Not long ago I fished in the Wyoming
Range south of Jackson. I was after fluvial
December 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of December 2022
