First Time "Grousing"

The author and Tony South

I have lived in Michigan for almost ten years, and today for the first time I went grouse hunting with my friends Tony South and Vaughn Prior in the Allegan State Forest.

Probably I am being optimistic about the hunting part of our expedition. What we really did was walk through the most impenetrable briar patches in the woods and get soaking wet by cold rain (we would rather have snow) with childlike anticipation that we would flush a bird that proved too smart for us.

In reality I don’t think that any grouse would be dumb enough to be out in the kind of weather that we had this morning, and they were probably comfortably reading a Burton L Spiller or George Bird Evans book about their own reputation as the greatest of all upland (or better said, briar jungle) birds, and having a nice hot chocolate with marshmallows and a bit of cognac in it and having small talk about the three stooges that were getting wet and cold out in the woods.

Even if we never heard a grouse, there was enough conversation about them to keep us going.

Since Tony’s dog could not manage the camera, Vaughn was kind enough to take the picture above (although he tried three times before succeeding). But since he was so kind as to buy us breakfast we will not comment on about his mechanical inclination or other technical abilities.

In any way there are some lessons learned from this first outing after grouse this morning: first, start hunting earlier in the season next year; second, buy some good chaps and better rain gear; and third, good friends don’t care about the weather to take you out.

By the way, I tool the picture below in much better weather while bear hunting in Ontario last year and basically had to chase the grouse away from the two-track so we did not run over them with ATV. Did they know that grouse season was not open at the time?

Sightseeing during closed grouse season

Small Size, Big Surprise

The Bearcat and "mission specific" diet

I am very traditionalist in general and regarding guns in particular. Side-by-side shotguns are my passion and the only plastic gun that I admire is the Remington Nylon 66. But even being so traditionalist, I have a hard time finding a single action revolver that I can shoot well. I really have a hard time with the standard hog leg grip and I had a Ruger Single-Six Convertible that I trade off because I just could not shoot it well.

But besides being traditionalist, I am also very stubborn and some months ago I bought a used Ruger Bearcat single action revolver for my wife to give it to me as my birthday present. It is better than getting new pajamas that I would not use anyway.

The Bearcat is probably the smallest revolver ever made by Ruger and it is based on a Remington design, so the grip shape is somewhat different than that of the Colt style, and for some reason they just fit me better.

Also, this particular revolver was made in the year that I born and has never received the Ruger safety upgrade. The hammer must be brought to half-cock to load the cylinder and it must be carried with an empty chamber under it in order to be safe.

Due to my working and travel schedule I had very limited opportunity to use the little Bearcat. I shot it a bit at 50 feet at the Southern Michigan Gun Club outdoor pistol range and at 20 feet or so in my basement. In the later case I used Aguilla’s Super Colibri 22 ammo that uses only its primer mixture to shoot a very light 20 grain projectile at around 500 feet per second, with minimum noise and no recoil.

Although we have snow today, yesterday we had a beautiful sunny “Indian Summer” day in Southern Michigan with temperatures in the mid forties, and I went back to the SMGC outdoor range. In such a nice December day the pistol range was packed and since I wanted to sight-in my 375 Holland & Holland rifle and went to the 50 yard range where I met George who was alone shooting some of his pistols and avoiding crowds.

Since there is just so much fun one can have with fully loaded 375’s we transitioned to pistols and started shooting at a full size deer target. First I shot his Ruger 45 cowboy gun and then I gave the little Bearcat a try.

The tiny Bearcat 22 outshot its bigger 45 brother by a large margin and I was able to keep almost all shots in an area equivalent to a deer’s lung or the size of a letter page. A big surprise!

I intend to use the little 42 year old pistol a lot more and just taking it to a walk is a good reason to be outdoors.

Holiday Relaxation

As most of you should be aware by now I travel a lot, mainly for work, and therefore spend a lot of time away from home. I love my work, but a lot of time it is quite stressful. Therefore, holiday season is time to stay at home and relax.

From now to 3^rd January 2012 (the day I get back to work) I plan just to “do nothing” and enjoy my family.

Some of the “do nothing” includes one or two afternoons out for antlerless deer with Greg, taking my son pheasant hunting at least once, revising a book for future publication and a lot of indoor air gunning. The picture above shows my basement air gun range, and it was inspired by the ranges of Chris Martin (a.k.a “20 Cal”) and Tony South.

I used an old bookshelf to hold multiple targets. The big box at the top shelf holds two “letter-sized” targets and was presented to me by Chris. Currently it has reduced “Mini-Snipping” (.22 LR) targets.

The shelf below it has a number of reactive targets: in the lower part there are nine golf T’s that support brass pistol shells for precise shooting” or shotgun shells for rapid fire with my Crossman 3357. On the upper part, from a heavy gage wire, hangs a set of silhouette animals and from paper clips rang playing cards that only show their edge. When you hit the playing cards properly you can actually cut then in half. It takes a bit of practice, but it is very fun. This is the domain of my Walther LGR and Hammerli AR50, both Olympic grade rifles with scopes to compensate for my middle aged eyes.

Finally, on the bottom shelf I have another reactive target and some precision pistols targets, the later for my much cherished Feinwerkbau Model 65.

I also have a Gammo “Running Deer” moving target that is very fun.

It is important to mention that I only shoot soft lead pellets and there are appropriate target backers that will not allow them to ricochet, and I have a poured concrete all behind the bookshelf. In any case, I always use eye protection.

From my basement TV room I can shoot at about 10 meters, and this is the perfect set-up to relax during the holidays (my children will often join me), endure the cold Michigan winter nights or the humid and uncomfortable summer days, and the fact that my “wine cellar” is just a couple yards from my air gun range motivates some friends to visit for the after shooting “discussions”.

Life is too hard not to have fun!

P.S: My “macaw” and toy car are not targets!

About my book "A Wild Beast at Heart"

I always enjoyed stories, either as a listener or as a teller, particularly if I was one of the characters, but this is not reasons that I wrote this book.

Everything started with a one-page thank you note to my friend Bob Scott of Kalamazoo, MI, for helping me to take my first whitetail deer, which I tried to get publish in the form of a very short column without success. Then, I went dove hunting on a magic misty morning and knew I had to share the communion with nature and traveling in space and time with other people and show that are no limits for our dreams.

My father had been telling me and everybody else that he would one day write a book, “Contos Rurais”. I even gave him pen and paper but he passed way in 2009, some year after the publication of “A Wild Beast at Heart” and before writing down a single word, although the pen and the notebook were always on his nightstand. Although unwillingly, I may have stolen some of his stories.

The decision to finally write a book came on a sad Sunday morning in January 2006, when I was in a train from Amsterdam to Hannover, staring at the wintry fields between the Netherlands and Germany and mourning over the death of a most dear friend, Chileno, and I felt that even if my train was about to reach the “bend of the world” I would like to leave at least one story behind.

Conceived in the Netherlands, this book was lived and written in bits and pieces, in Michigan (USA), in the Winterberg range (Republic of South Africa), in several farms in Brazil – Taboa (my real birth place), Buriti do Retiro, São Jorge Preto, Ronda – and other places around this “mundo velho sem porteira”. I revised it in Shanghai (China) and wrote its final words on my home’s deck, on a most beautiful spring afternoon.

I am not sure how many copies were sold, but I am happy that I was able to reach many people with my stories, and some of them wrote back to me with positive reviews, and that was the biggest reward that I could have hoped for.

If you are interested, you can (for the time being) get my book “A Wild Beast At Heart” (ISBN-10 1424147212) at http://www.amazon.com/ or other on-line bookstores.

As you may have already realized, I love hunting and the outdoors, but even if you do not enjoy the trill of the chase and hunting of game I hope that you enjoy these stories, and urge you to hunt your dreams.

Virtual Hunting

The author and Signor Vito Benevelli
(Photo by Maria José Camargo Meirelles)

Since last Thursday I am touring Torino (Italy) with my wife, just taking it easy, walking a lot, enjoying the sites, meeting some friends and sharing a good time with each other.

This does not mean that hunting is very far away from my mind, as the hunting tradition is deeply rooted in the Piemontese culture.

We visited the Palazzina di caccia Stupinigi that as the hunting lodge for the kings of Savoia. Stupinigi encompasses a luxurious palace that is heavily decorated with hunting art and is crowned by a bronze statue of a royal red stag. Tours are guided only, and at the beginning we are greeted by superb marble statues of Diana, goddess of hunting, and Actaeon, the hunter that Diana turned on a deer after he saw her nude, bathing on a stream, and was then killed by his own friends and hounds.

However, Stupinigi today houses a XVI and XVII century furniture exposition, and the hunting trophies are now at the Museo Regionale da Scienze Naturali at Torino’s quadrilatero (the historic city center). The zoology collection is very nice, displaying animals from all continents. The main room is inspired by Noah’s Arc and just after that there is an impressive display of all species of bears, except pandas.

Currently the museum is featuring an exposition on the history of taxidermy, starting at ancient Egypt with mummification and discussing the evolution of this art. It is impressive to compare XIX century and current animal mounts and understand how much taxidermy has evolved in its ability to portray life-like animals.

The Armeria Realle provides an evolutionary overview of personal weaponry from the Stone Age to the early XX century, including a reasonable amount of hunting firearms.

But the highlight to this virtual hunting tour was the visit to my friend Signor Vito Benevelli in his Ristorante Frandin. As we arrived we were greeted by Vito’s wife, Signora Luciana and soon after we were in the kitchen admiring the beautiful Beccaccia or European woodcock that were aging in cold chamber in the proper way, undisturbed with entrails intact.

Vito selected a nice bottle of Nebbiolo and my wife and I started a marvelous culinary adventure over eighteen different antipasti, among them the terrine di coniglio (rabbit) and paté di selvaggina, a most wonderful dish made of small game and wild truffles. At Frandin main dishes include pheasant, partridge, rabbit, boar, roe deer and other wild game depending on season.

After dinner we talked about hunting, how Vito is coaching his nephew on hunting the Italian alps, the diverse animals that he hunted during this season (roe buck, chamois, pheasant, partridge, capercaillie and of course, woodcock), the need to hunt foxes during January to minimize predation of roe deer fawns next spring, and some aspects of Italian law that only allows hunting four days a week, an individual hunter to be out only in two of those days.

Who thought I couldn’t get my wife hunting?

Feeding my Dreams

I had a very close and special relationship with my grandfather João Alfredo Tardelli, Vô Tô, and although he is gone for over ten years I still feel him close to me.

Although I was raised in the farm and Vô Tô was a most urban man (although he raised song birds in his back yard), he helped shaped my life and my love for nature and adventure.

The only hunting story that I know from Vô Tô was when he was a boy in Ribeirão Preto, now a big modern city, but back in the 1920’s a much more rural community. At that time all the boys of the same age built themselves muzzle loading “pistols”. Basically a wooden plank sawed or carved into a stock, a barrel with an end hammered down to form the breach, black powder from fireworks and a toy gun paper primer. The bullets would be anything that went down the barrel.

Vô Tô and a party of likely minded kids were “exploring” the outskirts of town when they located an inhanbu (Crypturellus tataupa), a ground dwelling bird from the Tinamou family. They surrounded their prey, cocked their pistols and fired on command like a firing squad. The white smoke from the firework powder completed clouded their views, and a couple seconds later the inhambu flew away not missing even a feather.

When he would visit us on the farm he would build me bows and arrows from a bush that we had in our garden that had very straight branches. I remember that once I used an umbrella casing as a quiver. The handle was very short and I could only slip it through one arm and the arrows hurt me badly.

On another occasion he made me a stone ax. It never really worked, but I was very proud of it.

There was also an endless amount of story telling and very important conversation, a lot of it centered on Tarzan and adventures in dark Africa. Along the same lines I inherited from Vô Tô the love for books and reading. There was the natural history and animals of the world collection, the 1960’s Tarzan comic books, the “Tesouro da Juventude” and “Trópico” encyclopedias, and the “Dicionário Práctico Illustrado” from where I first develop an appreciation for firearms.

On the Christmas of 1979 he gave me two Jules Verne books, “The Light House at the End of the World “and “School of Robinsons” and those opened a complete new universe for me. Adventure, guns, hunting, savages and pirates. Later I discovered “O Caçador”, a first Portuguese edition of John A. Hunter’s “Hunter”.

But the greatest things that he would make to me were Tarzan knives. He would carve the knives out of wooden planks reclaimed from fruit boxes. Many times they had different patterns that he first would draw on paper, then cut the profile and transfer it to the planks. He used an old folding knife that his grandfather brought to Brazil when he emigrated from Italy to carve the wood.

I don’t remember how my Tarzan knives Vô Tô made, especially because there were other grandchildren that would compete for them.

After Vô Tô passing in 2001 my mother collected all his knives and gave to me. The folding knives, including my great-great-grandfather one, came insight a soap boxes that belonged to my grandmother Flamínia, and the last known Tarzan knife came carefully wrapped in gift paper.

This treasure will be kept for many generations to come.