Don and the Devil

I had a stepbrother named Don. He died many years ago, young and missed now. I was thinking about him recently, having just been Chukar hunting with my Dad. His memory sticks in my mind. I don’t want to make of Don something good or bad, something that he was or was not; Don did that for himself, as do we all. Rather, I just want to tell you about him, and maybe, just for a minute, bring him back to life to enjoy his company.

Don was the son of my Dad’s second and current wife. He was a man of opposite contrasts. He was a tall, lanky sort. He was very strong for a man who was so lean. He stood over six feet, and I would be surprised if he broke 175 pounds. He was energetic, yet remarkably lazy at the same time. You would not say he was smart, and he did poorly in school, but he had a sort of sense about things that let him do all that he wanted to do. He was often unemployed but seemed able, whenever he wanted, to get a job. He could be infuriatingly obtuse, coarse, and uninformed, yet he was lovable and good-hearted just the same.

Perhaps the most important and telling thing you could say about Don was the one thing upon which he was a rock, like Peter to the Church—Don liked beer. Don without a beer was a like an ocean without water: unimaginable.

This is not a morality story about the evils of beer. Benjamin Franklin said that beer is proof that God loves us. God surely loved Don.

Let me quit setting the stage about Don and set the other stage, the one where he met the Devil and how Don vanquished him.

Chukar hunting for the Wilson clan for a number of years involved a trek into Lesley Gulch in the extreme southeastern corner of the State of Oregon. Most people in the United States do not realize that 2/3 of the state of Oregon is high desert, consisting mostly of rocks, sagebrush and sparse tracts of seemingly uninhabitable space. Lesley Gulch is a canyon running east and west whose terminus at the end is the Owyhee River Reservoir, a lonely, long narrow body of water backed up for 30 miles or more, winding its way through steep canyons and narrow ways. Its purpose is to provide irrigation water for the farmers further downstream where the land levels out. At the point where Lesley Gulch joins the reservoir, the mountains and ridges are particularly steep and rise up in sheer and long slopes to high rocky ridges on both sides of the river. They are barren ridges, full of rock cliffs, sloping mountain slides, filled with loose shale debris, and cut infrequently by twisty-turny little canyons through which the occasional rain runoff water flows. Of course, being a true desert, the water does not flow that often. Over the millennia, Mother Nature has carved the rocky spine of the hills and ridges into spires and cathedral-like spaces. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful places in the world, as far as I am concerned.

The other thing to know about the place is there may not be an electric wire or working telephone within 40 miles or more in any direction. It is truly remote.

Chukars are a partridge. They are native to the Himalayas and mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Naturists and sportsmen introduced them into the high deserts of the West a hundred years or so ago. They thrive there.

The Chukar is in league with the Devil.

The Chukar is an evil bird. It can run uphill on near vertical slopes faster than a man can run down. They laugh at you in a very loud voice heard for miles. This is usually when they are on top of the mountain and you are laboriously climbing it and about to burst an aortic valve or two. Their call goes “chuck chuck chuck chuck….chukar” in a pitch that drives hunters mad.

The Chukar will wait until you are precariously balanced on one foot on a piece of crumbly rock on the edge of a 100 foot precipice, at which time 10 or so of them will take wing at your feet, sounding like a squadron of P-51s taking off all at once. The shock of the sound of their flight alone is enough to cause you to fall off your perch to a bloody, smashed up mess below. Just in case you are still in hunter mode, and did not fall as they planned, they will fly in such as way as to require you to aim your shotgun over your left shoulder while twisting on your poor abused right ankle and shoot at a vague shadow passing behind you at the speed of sound. As all of this happens, you are praying the recoil of the shotgun does not throw you off your perch to an untimely demise on the rocks below.

All Chukars deserve to die.

We used Dad’s boat to roam up and down the reservoir, pulling into canyons we knew. We would hike up the canyons, and eventually to the tops of the mountains at their end. Chukar hunting naturally involved many hours of climbing steep mountains, filled with a few seconds of terror, followed by hiking back down, lunch and a few beers, all repeated in the afternoon.

I can remember the first time I did this with Don. We all set off, each of us going to the left or right or middle, to give us each our own zone for hunting. Spread out this way, we climbed the ridge, shot at Chukars and missed along the way, and climbed some more. Finally, I had climbed so high that I could look back down to the reservoir and see our boat pulled up on the shore. It looked like a little ant boat. What did I see when I looked back? Little ant Don walking down the last little bit of ridge, eventually to the boat, climbing in and settling down to rest.

Don, you see, had turned back, being very thirsty, after climbing less than a third of the way I had climbed. He had apparently found no comatose or otherwise imbecilic Chukars standing very still on a rock that he could shoot without having to aim. Upon discovering the lack of such easy targets and considering the circumstances, he felt justified in returning to the boat to drink beer. The rest of us climbed until we were ready to puke. We chased those devil Chukars without success until we seriously contemplated calling in an Exorcist. Finally, it being lunchtime, we hiked down off the mountain.

There were four of us and we had put three beers each in the cooler. Don sat in that boat and drank all 12 beers before noon. We got none.

So it would go.

There was this other time when, while travelling up stream in Dad’s boat, a large 22 foot long 7 foot wide river sled, we came upon this measly little Shovel Bill duck. It was swimming in the reservoir just minding its business. As we came motoring along, it dove under the surface. Don became very excited and insisted he had to shoot that poor little duck. Dad obliging slowed down and stopped the boat near the spot where the duck went under. Sure enough, it resurfaced for air, but some 30 yards or so from where it went under. Don blasted away with his shotgun, missed, and the duck dove under again.

Now a shovel duck is not what you would consider a prime waterfowl. They have a shovel-shaped bill, hence their name, so they can scoop mud and yuck from the bottom of the river or swamp and strain out the edible bits. They tend to take on the smell and taste of what they strain and eat, if you know what I mean. Not only that, while they look something like a mallard, with a green head and yellow eyes, they are runty, more like the size of a teal or bufflehead. Still, Don had the proper licenses, waterfowl stamp, and it was duck season, so…

The chase was afoot, or afloat, as the case may be. Don was obsessed. We could not help being entertained. The little duck would pop up, Don would blast, miss, and repeat. It was amusing in a twisted, you had to be there sort of way. Of course, it came to a bad end for the duck. He popped up at the wrong place eventually and Don did not miss. But, Dad was firm. “You shot it, you eat it!”

Later that night, Don cooked the duck over the fire, occasionally basting it by pouring some of his beer over it, and then ate every scrap, declaring it the best he had ever had. I was never sure whether he was talking about the duck or the beer, but I have my suspicions.

Enough of that. To the Devil.

One year we were in our camp early in the morning, with coffee made and the breakfast cooking. It was a small campground at the end of the gulch near the reservoir. Campground is too generous a word, it merely being a space the BLM had graded level, threw some gravel on and put in two outhouses at one end. We liked it just fine, even if there was no running water. We would carry in all the water we needed in five-gallon cans, and when we ran out, we knew of a sweet spring 5 miles up the road where we could replenish.

Those of us in tents were working out the kinks of sleeping on hard ground in the cold desert night. Dad was not so poorly disposed. He had an old, abused, but comfortable Winnebago that none of us would sleep in on account that he snored something fierce (but so did we, so the score is even). A pickup came down the rough dirt road and pulled in next to our camp. Two men got out and asked if we could spare some coffee. It was a neighborly and thoroughly Western desert meeting. The fact that they had driven 25 miles and more than hour from the main road meant they were not just passing by. We were happy to share. They were properly appreciative. We made introductions all around, sipped our coffee and chatted about chucker hunting and the weather and so on.

What the two men were interested in was asking us about any Big Horn Sheep sightings we may have made in our Chukar hunting adventures. There were Big Horn Sheep in the area, and the State of Oregon had recently issued, for the first time in a very long time, perhaps 50 years, a half dozen tags to hunt them. One of our new friends had been successful in receiving a tag in the drawing held among thousands of applicants. His companion was helping him with the hunt. They were nice guys and, encouragingly if somewhat chauvinistically, were locals from Eastern Oregon. The tag owner owned an irrigation supply business in Ontario, Oregon. We would not have been so welcoming to a Los Angeles millionaire.

We chatted and told them what we knew. We did see Big Horns quite often in our hikes, and were able to give them not only a lay of the land, describing how the ridges, canyons and ravines ran, but where we had seen this herd or that.

Did I mention that it is rough, wilderness country?

We departed with them promising to let us know how they did and asking if we minded if they stopped in for supper and some beer if the opportunity arose. We did not mind and were quite happy at the thought. As I said, it is neighborly and friendly.

We thought little of it later that day. We hunted and for once were quite successful. I was semi-unconscious, which is the only way you can explain how I shot four birds that day. Everyone else did well and had at least a couple birds to his credit. We ate well that night; I fried the Chukars we had bagged with a lemon pepper and flour coating. Served with a gallon of cheap red wine and/or beer, they were a big hit.

The next day we did even better. I believe I bagged eight birds all by myself that day. Forget calling in a Priest, I started thinking that I was the Exorcist. The evil birds were finally feeling the wrath of the righteous. Everyone else had a good day, too

At the end of the long day, we finished it off by scouring the shoreline for several miles up and down the reservoir for driftwood for our campfire, which we loaded into the boat and offloaded to the pickup for transport to camp. That night we had plenty of firewood, lots of cold beer and wine, and ate like kings on Chukars grilled over the fire. Replete and intoxicated, we settled onto our stools or camp chairs around the fire and contemplated just how good life could be.

The night came down and was as dark as only the wilderness can be. Except that, when the sky is clear in the high desert, it is not that dark. The Milky Way is so bright in the sky that on a clear night it is almost possible to read a book by the starlight. If you have not seen it, you have no conception of just how much the heavens are on fire.

Still, when you are drunk and sitting looking at a large fire, your night vision is not the best.

Just as we had reached that sleepy state of rosy, warm belly from the alcohol and warm front side from the fire, the Devil came to take us.

The first notice was the dogs started to whimper. Both belly crawled under Dad’s Winnebago and hid. Don, who was sitting opposite me, looked over my shoulder, exclaimed, “What the fuck!”, and then seemed to freeze in place, his eyes the size of a beer can bottom’s diameter. I spun out of my chair and looked into the darkness behind me.

Coming out of the night were two glowing eyes. They shifted from glowing red to an eerie green fire and back. They stared straight into my soul. As bits of starlight and firelight caught the apparition, and my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out the Devil’s horns arcing around those eyes. He was walking upright, very tall, more than six and half feet at a guess, and I dared not look down for sure I would see his cloven hooves striking sparks from the ground.

The thought of all those Chukars we had killed that day came over me, and I will admit I wondered if now it was time to pay the Devil his due for killing and eating his minions.

His otherworldly, strangely intoned voice swept over us and echoed through the canyon.

“Have you got a cold beer there?”

I won’t say I was the first to figure it out, but I can attest that Don and the dogs, and I am not sure in which order, were the last.

It was not the devil, but our sheep hunter’s companion. He was carrying the cape and head of a Big Horn Sheep on his shoulders; in fact, the head was resting on top of his head, the easier to carry it. The eyes of the sheep were stuck open and reflected the fire and stars in weird ways.

I have never seen a man drink a beer so fast in my life, not even Don.

As he explained, during his third and slower beer, they had stalked this large sheep for a day and half, before getting a good shot. They were miles and miles from their truck, once they were able to come up to the dead creature. They debated what to do, and agreed that trying to take the sheep back to the truck was not possible. The solution was to pack it down the long canyon to a place where they could get the pickup close. They were sure that one canyon they were looking at culminated in our camp next to the Owyhee. The plan was for the friend to hike the skin and the head to our camp, while the hunter would hike back to the truck and drive around to meet up.

Sure enough, within half an hour the pickup with the hunter pulled into our camp. We offered up more beer.

They explained that they hoped to enlist our help to pack the remainder of the sheep’s carcass out, and if we could not help, at least they would have a base to do it one bit at a time, now that they knew where the canyon ran. Without a second’s hesitation, Don said, “I’ll help you.”

He was deadly serious and would brook no entreaties of, “Are you sure?” and “It’s a very long hike.”

Don said he had never been involved in a sheep hunt, nor seen one taken, and he was determined to have the experience. He meant every word. He might be a lazy Chukar hunter, but when something intrigued or stimulated him, you would best get out of his way because no constraints could hold him back or deter his course.

They agreed to pick up Don around eight the following morning, which they did. We all shared coffee and then wished them luck. There was a third man involved but I do not remember him so well and some of details seem a little fuzzy now. They were fuzzy then, too, owing to my drinking my thanks to God for not letting the Chuckars’ Devil take me.

The rest of us hunted most of the day for Chukars, and as I recall, we did not do so well. We knocked off a little early and were back in camp around 3 pm. It was just in time to see Don coming down the canyon towards camp, pack settled high on his shoulder and high stepping it the whole way. He marched into camp, dropped the pack with half a sheep carcass in it without ceremony on the ground, and grabbed a beer out of the cooler. The beer took two gulps. He tossed the empty and grabbed another. That one took three gulps. The third beer he actually nurtured for a few minutes after settling himself into a camp chair.

Twenty minutes later, the other two packers came into view around the bend a quarter mile up the canyon. Don had beaten them into camp by nearly half an hour.

All were clearly exhausted and near the edge. It turns out the hike was nearly 7 miles, over rough terrain and few trails to follow. Gratefully it was mostly downhill, but the two sheep packs weighed nearly 80 pounds apiece. Their strategy was two men would carry a sheep pack, while the third carried a pack with beer. After 30 minutes or so, the third man with the beer pack would take a sheep pack and pass the lighter beer pack on. After another thirty minutes, the second beer pack man would take a sheep pack and the remaining sheep pack man would take the beer pack. In this way, each man got 30 minutes relative rest carrying the lighter beer pack for each hour of carrying a heavy sheep pack.

Of course, the third man was not without a burden, for these crafty carcass packers had foreseen the need to have plenty of beer along for the hike. They put a case of beer into the third pack at the outset, along with some frozen ice packs to keep it cold. In the beginning, the beer pack was not light. But, during their periodic half hour stops, each had a beer, and the weight in the beer pack went down steadily.

They made commendable progress off the mountain in this way over the hours. Until, at last, they ran out of beer.

One of the packers put it this way:

“It was the most awesome thing I have ever seen. We were worn down, tired, and nearly at the end of our strength. We collapsed on the ground after the last half hour hike when it was time to switch packs. I knew we were still a long way from the camp, but I was just about done. Don had been carrying one of the sheep packs for an hour and it was his turn to trade off and carry the beer. As we sat there, he asked me to pass him a beer. I looked into the beer pack and discovered we did not have any more. We had drunk the last of it on the last stop. We were so tired no one realized I was carrying a pack with just empty cans.”

“What do you mean there’s no more beer,” Don demanded.

“Once he looked in the pack and realized the truth, he said ‘Fuck this! I’m going for a beer!’ He got up still wearing the pack with half the sheep in it and started down the canyon at double quick time. We tried to keep up, but he was just gone.”

As the man explained, “It was like he had the devil in him for a beer.”

I do not know how better to say it.

Don beat the Devil that day, and will be remembered with awe by those sheep hunters for his packing exploits.

Don is gone. We won't talk about how or why that happened. None of us really no the truth, only Don does, where ever he may be.

Vaya con Dios, Amigo.