Words Escape Me

Raise a good bird dog, spend some serious time on the sporting clays range, and if you hunt in good pheasant country, you’ll bag your daily limit of gaudy roosters often enough to have a body count to brag about back home. With these memories driving expectations, you might then naïvely expect to have a chance to shoot, during your bucket list prairie grouse hunt, enough birds to fill a buckboard, like Teddy Roosevelt and his brother Elliott did in 1880.

Today, though, hunt the heart of the Great Plains and you may see a wagonload of prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse, but good luck flushing enough birds within range to bag your three-bird limit. Only the savviest of these native birds, descended from ancestors the Roosevelt brothers and their contemporaries missed, have survived into the 21st century, which means their genes have had much more experience with the likes of you than your genes have had with the likes of them.

Now, let’s say you had a great hunt, and by that I mean that you experienced a part of the country you’d never before seen, with a big sky and wide-open spaces, showy native plants and thermonuclear-colored sunsets. You saw no other people except your buddies. You stopped to stare more often than you would have if you’d been hunting a cornfield fencerow. And when you looked out, you let your imagination run a bit, picturing a clustering of teepees surrounding the smoke of a campfire or a train of Conestoga wagons. When the trip was over, you bagged a few birds, but nothing like the number had you instead been pheasant hunting, or nowhere near the number your back-home friends did when they hunted during the same week at that South Dakota hunting lodge.

You may have a problem, especially if you’re a guy. People who study language tell us that many men communicate to exert dominance, while most women communicate … well, to communicate. If this is true, a guy sporting a five-day limit of South Dakota roosters is certainly in a more dominant conversational position at the water cooler than you, just back from your bird-every-other-day prairie grouse hunt.

If you can’t hold your own in a body count conversation, what do you talk about? You could, maybe, invoke a love of country argument. Did you know that:

• When crossing what would become eastern Kansas, Zebulon Pike (the Pikes Peak explorer) coined the term “Flint Hills” in 1806?
• The soil in the Flint Hills is so rocky it can’t be farmed, so instead this region has become the largest tract of intact tallgrass prairie in North America?
• Flint Hills ranchers use controlled burns that mimic natural prairie fires to renew the prairie grasses on which their cattle graze, which has created a welcome partnership between environmentalists and local ranchers?
• At almost 20,000 square miles, the Sand Hills of north central Nebraska comprise the largest sand dune area in the Western Hemisphere?
• Because it is so sandy, the only plants found in the Sand Hills uplands are specialized natives?
• Without invasive plants, there is no pressing need for controlled burns, which pleases the ranchers because fire removes the vegetation and destabilizes the dunes?

On the other hand, perhaps the armchair biologist in you would prefer to focus on the birds themselves: Did you know that to fly, both pheasants and prairie grouse alternate beating their wings and gliding, but while chickens sail during their glides, pheasants sink (with the implication that pheasants are therefore inferior)?

Or maybe you just give up, realizing that some experiences are meant for the part of you that is inside, while other experiences play better at the water cooler, and your chicken hunt doesn’t happen to fit this category.

Just because there are no words doesn’t mean there is no effect. In fact, the opposite seems to occur — the more significant the experience, the less able humans are to express it using language. There’s even a high-dollar word for this state of no words — apophatic.

So the next time you find yourself at the water cooler with body count guy, instead of playing his game and saying something inane, play your own game and offer nothing. When he asks how your trip was, reply “Great!” When he asks how many birds you shot, offer “Enough.” And when he asks for details, say, “You had to have been there to understand.” And the thing is, while appearing elusive, those answers come about as close to the truth as words will ever get you.