Secrets, subterfuge and paradises lost | Hatch Magazine

When I spied the fire number I’d been told to look for, on a squally October night when the rain was trying hard to turn to snow, I had to smile. The northern Wisconsin “hunting cabin” my cousin Dean and his pals from Tennessee had rented was, as I suspected it would be, a mobile home.

Live in Wisconsin long enough, and you learn to crack the code.

Cousin Dean, a rangy guy who sprung from one of the taller branches of the family tree, emerged from the trailer to greet me. Gesturing toward the makeshift wooden dog houses scattered around the yard, he said “We figured out that this is mostly a camp for guys who hunt bears with hounds. But all we had to go on was the description on the website.

“And before I forget: Don’t drink the water.”

Inside, Dean introduced me to his friends Matt, Jack, and Cowan. (He also introduced me to Tito’s vodka, but that’s a story for another time.) Along with their English setter bird dogs, they’d traveled to Wisconsin to hunt ruffed grouse and woodcock…but after three days of spotty action their mood was as somber as the weather. Part of the problem was simply finding a place to hunt: It seemed that whenever they located a brushily attractive piece of cover, a truck with dog boxes in the back was already parked there. Adding insult to injury, a preponderance of these trucks bore license plates from the same general part of the world they were from, viz., south of the Mason-Dixon line.

When this litany of woe finally petered out, I piped up, “Have you hunted the ______ Wildlife Area? It can’t be much more than a half-hour’s drive west of here.”

The name didn’t ring any bells.

“Well, it’s been a while, but the last time I was there I moved quite a few birds, grouse and woodcock both. Can’t promise anything, obviously, but I think it’s worth a shot.”

The proposal passed unanimously.

By the middle of the following morning, though, my plan was unraveling. We just weren’t seeing any cover that excited us. Then, where a sandy two-track dead-ended, I spotted something that snapped me to attention: a sizable stand of broomstick popple standing by its lonesome on the far side of a marsh. It would be a bit of a hike to get there, but if we detoured on a little ridge we could keep our feet dry.

A certain amount of “discussion” ensued—not everyone was enthusiastic about the idea of making a long trek that might prove fruitless—but ultimately the Yay vote carried the day. Thank goodness it did, too, because within just a few minutes of turning loose our setters and pushing into the thick stuff, we had a grouse in the bag. A few minutes later we had another, and then another after that….You can see where I’m going with this.

It wasn’t only that we’d found the ruffed grouse Mother Lode; it was that we’d found ruffed grouse that were behaving in a decidedly un-grouselike fashion. The bird’s usual m.o. is to roar up, dimly seen if seen at all, at the merest hint of danger. These grouse, in contrast, were letting us almost step on them before they flushed. It was as if they’d never encountered a hunter before, further confirming the hoary outdoorsman’s wisdom, passed down from generation to generation presumably since the Stone Age, about the desirability of getting “off the beaten track.”

In a little more than an hour, the Tennesseans tallied more grouse, by a wide margin, than they had in the previous three days. They also added a few woodcock to the bag. Their giddily euphoric mood carried over to the homey Northwoods café where we stopped for lunch—and where the eye-popping tip they left the waitress threatened to put her in a higher tax bracket.

Every hunter and angler—every one that I know, anyway—dreams of finding a place like that, one that’s overlooked, undiscovered, and teeming with
fish or game. The Secret Spot. The Hidden Hotspot. The Honey Hole. These are the places known only to you and your closest companions, and to leak their locations to anyone outside the circle is to commit the moral equivalent of sleeping with your best friend’s wife (see Frizzell, Lefty, “Long Black Veil”). You might as well put up a sign with an arrow on it and the legend “Fish/hunt here!”

These aren’t the places that are garden-variety good; they’re the places that are crazy good. And what makes them that way—and, more to the point, what keeps them that way—is the fact that they’re essentially unexploited. This is why those of us who are blessed to have them go to such great lengths to keep their locations, if not their very existence, a secret. If the word got out, it’d be the kiss of death.

If you read “The Tragedy of the Commons” in college, as I did, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The more people who are helping themselves to the pie, the smaller the pieces for everyone.

And while I’m sympathetic to Neil Young’s observation that there ain’t nothin’ like a friend who can tell you when you’re pissin’ in the wind, in my view the friend who shares a secret hunting/fishing spot is at the top of the heap. I’m thinking in particular here of my friend Pete, who showed me his favorite place to fish the Hex hatch close to 20 years ago and said I should feel free to fish it whenever I wanted to. I’ve landed some real bruisers in what I’ve come to call “Pete’s Hole,” including my all-time biggest brown on a fly, so to say I owe him one is to grievously understate the nature of the debt.

All outdoorsmen keep secrets but ruffed grouse hunters may be the most notoriously obsessive in this regard. A couple of buddies and I had a grouse cover up in the Peshtigo River country whose location we never divulged to a couple of other buddies. Apropos of this dynamic, we called it “Double-Secret Probation.”

One of the staples of the lore and literature of grouse hunting is the story of the fresh-faced newcomer who persuades a grizzled old-timer to let him tag along. The newbie hops into the old-timer’s truck—and he (the old-timer) proceeds to take such a twisty, turny, insanely circuitous route to his hunting spot that the newbie couldn’t find it again in a million years.

Which is precisely the point, of course. This gambit has pretty much gone the way of the dodo in today’s era of smartphones and GPS-enabled wristwatches, but it made for some good fun while it lasted. Forty-plus years ago, when I first moved to Wisconsin, I rode in the newbie seat while a guy I’d recently met drove us to his favorite grouse cover. I didn’t know the lay of the land but the third time we passed what I was pretty sure was the same dairy farm I began to suspect that something wasn’t on the up-and-up. Eventually I figured out that the spot lay about ten miles due west of his house although, having been schooled in a strict sporting ethic from an early age, I only hunted it at his invitation.

Duck hunters are no slouches in this department, either, at least if the great outdoor writer Gordon MacQuarrie is to be believed. One of his funniest stories, “In the Presence of Thine Enemies,” recounts the comical subterfuge employed by the members of the Old Duck Hunters’ Association to prevent a couple of tenacious interlopers from sniffing out their secret late-season spot—an unfrozen spring hole that, being the only piece of open water for miles around, sucked in every mallard and bluebill in the territory.

This brings up that even more famous organization, the Lower Forty Shooting, Angling, and Inside Straight Club. As told by Corey Ford, the members of the Lower Forty—Doc Hall, Cousin Sid, Mister MacNabb, and so on—were forever looking over their shoulders to make sure they weren’t inadvertently revealing a favorite spot to their sneaky arch-nemesis, the deliciously named Dexter Smeed.

Circling around to fishing, anglers who fish lakes and other “big” water are hard-pressed to keep their hotspots secret. They’re simply too exposed, although it’s possible to sneak under the radar for a while as long as you don’t tarry too long (and don’t make a big production out of fighting and landing your fish). It’s easier for us trout fishermen, who can park our cars a long way from the stream and disappear around the bend when we get there.

The closest thing I have at the moment to a secret spot, for hunting or fishing, is a certain stretch of a certain northern Wisconsin brook trout stream. You have to punch through a choking tangle of alders to reach it, which gives it a kind of through-the-looking-glass feel, and I guess I’m one of the few people stubborn or crazy enough to make the effort. In any event the brookies on this stretch are not only bigger and more abundant than they are on the rest of the stream, they’re more reliably willing to eat a fly, too. It’s a thrilling combination and I have to remind myself not to go to the well too often. So far I haven’t shared it with anyone although I may take my wife Joan there. Her application is under review.

Still, the sad truth is that no honey hole lasts forever, although an acquaintance of mine, now in his 70s, tells me that the fishing in an Upper Peninsula brook trout stream his dad showed him when he was a kid is as good as it ever was. Which is to say, damn good. (I’ve eaten some of the evidence.) This is easy to believe if you’ve spent any time in the U.P., a.k.a., the Land That Time Forgot. I keep hinting around that he can trust me to be discreet about the location but he just smiles the smile of someone who knows something you don’t (but wish you did) and changes the subject.

What I’m trying to say is that even when secret spots remain undiscovered, other disfiguring forces are often at work. Grouse and woodcock covers “age out,” farmland habitat for pheasants and quail is plowed under, grasslands that support sharptails, Huns, prairie chickens, and/or sage grouse are grazed to the nub. Wetlands are drained, freestone trout streams on our warming planet become smallmouth streams…The doleful list goes on.

To paraphrase Aldo Leopold, we who hunt and fish live alone in a world of wounds.

What may be the saddest cases of all, though, are the jaw-droppingly great spots you stumble onto but can’t find your way back to. Again, this scenario has grown far less likely in our tech-saturated age, but back in the day it was a distinct possibility. I remember—or at least I think I remember—a spot tucked back in the hills of western Iowa. Only a tiny piece of it was visible from the road, a shaggy brown spearpoint piercing the yellow rows of harvested corn. But when we hiked in to check it out (after obtaining permission at the farmhouse), we discovered a small pond surrounded by several acres of mixed grasses, goldenrod, and other stalky forbs. It had all the things that pheasants love—and the only way you could have wedged another rooster into it was with a crowbar. The number of birds in there was just silly.

Trouble was, it was so well-hidden that we could never find it again. We knew about where it was, but while we criss-crossed the area time and time again on those ruler-straight gravel roads, nothing we saw looked right. It survives in my memory as a kind of pheasant-hunting Brigadoon, here one day, then gone forever. I can’t believe I dreamed it but I grow less sure of that with every passing year.

You have to take it as an article of faith that such spots are still out there, somewhere off the beaten track.