Eric Atherton | Great hunt has grand finale in South Dakota

The rooster flushed 100 yards to my left, and the two shots that rang out a second later didn’t slow its progress. I shouldered my 20-gauge and began tracking it, and when the colorful pheasant was 40 yards out, my finger went to the trigger.

But I didn’t fire.

I was in the middle of a slough in South Dakota. I had two roosters in my vest and birds were flying everywhere — but I was down to my last shell on the last day of the hunt, and I couldn’t afford to waste that shell on a Hail Mary shot.

This grand adventure had begun about a month earlier when David Lowe, a Rochester physician, invited me and my 3-year-old Lab, Roxie, to join his family and friends on their annual trip to AJ Acres, a hunting lodge near Aberdeen. It had been nearly 10 years since I chased roosters in South Dakota, so this was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Middle of nowhere

We made the journey late Thursday, driving through darkness to a part of South Dakota I’d never visited. How far off the beaten path were we? So far that our destination had no address. The nearest town, Onaka, had a population of 15 in the 2010 census.

I awoke Friday in pheasant heaven. The lodge — a converted farmhouse — sat in the middle of more than 200 acres of prime habitat, including food plots, evergreen windbreaks, tall grass and an enormous slough. Before legal shooting time arrived, I let Roxie out to stretch her legs, and she immediately flushed two hens and a rooster less than 50 yards from the house. I figured that with four hunters, we could shoot our limit of 12 birds before lunch without driving anywhere.

But that wasn’t the plan.

Our party on Friday included me, Lowe, his nephew Guy Augenstein of Waynesville, Mo., and Tim Theisen of Rochester. Lowe had brought three Labs, and our host, Don Vetch, had one, so with Roxie, we had five retrievers in the field.

Vetch leases land all over the area, and he has a 1988 GMC Suburban that he’s converted into an all-terrain personnel carrier. It can carry a half dozen dogs and at least nine hunters, provided four of them are willing to stand on the flip-down sideboards that Vetch has installed.

So, with Lowe’s workhorse pickup also in the mix, one vehicle would haul dogs and hunters to one end of a slough, food plot or tree-lined fencerow, and the other would take hunters to the other end to block.

I’ve hunted pheasants for 20 years, but this was my first significant experience with driving birds, and I had some learning to do.

"If Roxie starts running a bird, just let her go," Lowe said. "That’s why we have blockers down there."

That was tough advice for me to follow. Roxie wears an e-collar so I can keep her within 30 yards, but it soon became apparent that with three hunters and five dogs trudging through thick cover, the hard-hunted, wild roosters weren’t going to hold.

My first shooting opportunity caught me totally off-guard. Roxie had taken off on a full sprint down a tree line, and when I went after her, a rooster got up behind me from an adjacent field of picked soybeans.

It wasn’t a particularly difficult chance, but I rushed the first shot, then panicked and rushed the second as well. I sheepishly reloaded as the bird sailed away.

When the blockers were within 100 yards, the action heated up. Lowe, who was walking to my right, dropped one bird, and Theisen, who was blocking, dropped another that came out the end of the timber strip. I kept on moving, but Vetch called out to stop me.

"You guys need to slow down at the end of these strips," he said. "Sometimes a bird will hunker down there and won’t flush unless you stop."

As if on cue, a rooster erupted between Lowe and Theisen, and despite a hail of gunfire, it sailed off.

"It dropped a leg!" Lowe called. "I think I know where it went. We should be able to find it."

I was pleased to learn that while Lowe was very passionate about shooting our 12-bird limit that day, he and the entire group were just as dedicated to not leaving a wounded bird in the field. So we drove a quarter-mile to a strip of grass and trees that we’d already hunted and loosed the dogs.

Ten minutes later, Roxie’s pace picked up. "I think Roxie’s on a bird," I said. "Watch her." Seconds later, she stuck her nose into some heavy grass and came out with the wounded rooster, to my great relief.

If I couldn’t hit birds, at least my dog could find them.

The rest of our first day produced some very good hunting, by Minnesota standards at least, but Lowe was puzzled. "Where are all the birds?" he asked repeatedly, to no one in particular. We were picking up a bird here and a bird there, but so far we hadn’t come close to finding the mother lode.

The highlight of my day came on a bird that got past a couple guns before I dropped it in a picked soybean field. With one broken wing and two good legs, it did its best to escape, but with four Labs in hot pursuit it had no chance.

"That was fun to watch," Theisen said. "It’s great when the dogs can actually see the bird they’re chasing like that."

As sunset approached, we had 11 birds in the bag but needed one more for our limit. As we approached the end of a big CRP field, a bird came out of a nearby cornfield and sailed high. A half-dozen shots rang out, but the rooster didn’t slow down.

Then a rooster flushed directly behind Lowe, who wheeled around and got off two shots without touching a feather.

"Noooo!" he howeled in disbelief. "One minute left, and I do that? No!" (I should note that Lowe had dropped every bird he shot at prior to that moment.) To console all of us, Vetch informed us that in 15 years of guiding, he’d never seen a group shoot that many birds without losing one.

Bad weather

Day two of our hunt brought a steady rain/sleet mix, but it didn’t slow us down. We’d added another hunter — Ken Lowe, David’s brother from California — and with him was his English cocker spaniel, aptly named Hunter.

We hoped that the bad weather would concentrate the birds, but we were disappointed. We were in and out of the trucks at least 15 times as we drove from slough to slough and foodplot to foodplot.

But we were getting birds. On one drive, Augenstein and Theisen blocked the end of a narrow strip of standing corn, while I, the Lowe brothers and five dogs pushed toward them. One rooster got out the side almost immediately, then two shots rang out in quick succession.

"Yes!" David Lowe called out. "Two birds down!" Both Theisen and Augenstein had connected on high-flying roosters — and suddenly another rooster made the fatal mistake of flying Theisen’s way.

"Four roosters get up, and we get three of them?" a happy David Lowe said. "That’s about as good a drive as you’re gonna get out here."

But much to Lowe’s chagrin, at sunset, we once again were one bird shy of our limit.

The boot dryers got a workout that night, but when Sunday dawned with neither wind nor rain, we were ready for a strong conclusion to our hunt — as well as some comedy.

In it for the long run

At the end of a long walk through a slough, Roxie suddenly got birdy and took off at a dead run through some short grass. With me in hot pursuit, all of the other dogs excitedly joined the chase, with the rest of the crew gathering around the Suburban to watch the fun. Roxie was zig-zagging through the grass at the head of the pack, and I was desperately trying to reach the end of the field, where I expected the rooster to flush.

But then Roxie turned on a dime and headed back into the slough. I’d run 300 yards in hunting boots, and I was breathing so hard that I couldn’t have hit an elephant at 20 yards anyway, so I gave up the chase. The rooster finally flushed out of range, and I bent down to catch my breath.

"Rooster!" I heard the call behind me. Wheeling around, I saw that a bird had flushed seemingly from underneath the Suburban and amid the five men who surrounded it. After giving the bird time to clear the vehicle and the other hunters, Ken Lowe calmly dropped it, as he’d done to pretty much any bird that came within range that weekend.

I staggered back to the truck, where everyone was enjoying a good laugh at my expense.

"You know, Eric, Ken’s a phys ed teacher," David said. "He can give you some drills to work on your endurance so that won’t happen again." I couldn’t think of a good comeback, and I was too winded to speak anyway.

We had five birds in the bag at that point, and it was noon. We’d be doing well to come close to our 15-bird limit by sunset, and then we had a seven-hour drive back to Rochester. I got tired just thinking about that.

The next slough was one Lowe and his crew had never hunted before, and it was so huge that Vetch didn’t think there was much point in trying to block it. We simply spread out on one end and started walking.

Before I’d taken 10 steps, I knew that something was different. Hundreds of yards ahead of me, roosters were flushing wild, then settling back into the slough. I saw 10 birds, then 20, then stopped counting.

"Get to the end, Ken!" I heard David holler to his brother, and Ken immediately took off on a dead run.

A grand finale

Then things got crazy. As Ken skirted the edge of the slough, guns began blazing and birds started coming my way, flying fast and high. I dropped down low to hide, then popped up to shoot. Two clean misses. I reloaded, dropped down, then popped up again as another rooster sailed high over my head.

Two more misses.

After another bird got past me, I counted just four shells in my pocket and decided that I was done shooting at birds the other guys and other dogs had flushed. Instead, I focused on Roxie.

She seemed to realize what I was up to, as she stayed close, found hot scent and popped up a rooster in easy range. One shot, one bird.

One minute later, she got hot again, and again it was a rooster. It went toward the middle of the swamp, so I had to wait for it to clear some other hunters, but I again dropped it with one shot. That bird took Roxie a bit longer to find, and there was so much scent on the ground that the moment I took it from her, Roxie was off to look for another bird.

As it turned out, that was a problem. I stuffed the seemingly dead rooster into my vest, only to have it suddenly come back to life and escape out the other side. I had broken my gun open to reload, so once again I got to provide comic relief as I chased a rooster through the swamp while trying to reload my gun. I finally got a shell in and stopped the bird’s mad dash through the grass. When I put the rooster in my vest for a second time, I realized I had just one shell left.

As it turned out, I didn’t need it. A half-hour of fast action in the huge slough had put nine roosters in the bag, and fittingly, a few minutes later it was David Lowe who dropped our limit bird at 1 p.m.

"That’s what South Dakota is supposed to be like!" he said.

It had been a spectacular final day. I saw more pheasants in three hours than I’ll see in the next three years in Minnesota.

We’d worked hard for our roosters — the health app on my phone said I’d walked 25 miles in three days — but it had been well worth the effort.

My only regret is that I never did get to hunt the field right next to the farm house.

Maybe next time.

Don Vetch, owner of AJ Acres near Aberdeen, S.D., hosts a half-dozen groups of hunters each year. All birds are wild, and hunts are usually Friday through Sunday, with a minimum of five hunters. 

To learn more, go online at ajacreshunting.com or email Vetch at vetch4@abe.midco.net. 

1/2: From left are Guy Augenstein, Tim Theisen, David Lowe, Ken Lowe and Don Vetch with 15 rosters they shot Sunday in sloughs and CRP fields near Aberdeen, South Dakota.

2/2: Don Vetch, who operates AJ Acres near Aberdeen, S.D., draws up a plan for the third day of hunting with the help of David Lowe, Ken Lowe and Tim Theisen. The party’s five hunters bagged 40 roosters in three days.