A Lone Way For CHICKENS

It happened again last September what my father used to call Getting a hair.” And while Dad and I had never really discussed the phrase’s origin or implications, its definition lay somewhere between profane and esoteric, an action without much input from the mind the way he said I had always performed as a child.

- Alan Liere

“Getting a hair” means to act passionately without much forethought on an idea that didn’t exist until it existed. I heard it as a 6-year-old after digging a 20-foot tunnel from the sandbox to the driveway. Most recently, I applied it to an 1 800-mile round trip to Wyoming to hunt the grouse Wyoming natives call chickens” because I had hunted sage grouse there once before, and I still remembered the thrill of the booming flushes and the euphoric wet-sage morning aroma of the high desert.

True to form, I neglected to factor in all the data before making the determination to go back to Wyoming data that included the fact I was well into my eighth decade and that the other Wyoming trip had been during my mid-50s and in combination with a perfect antelope hunt. I had camped out of Atlantic City, Wyoming, just off the Mormon Trail on the high desert at about 9,000 feet elevation, setting up next to a dilapidated log structure rumored to be an old Pony Express station. Antelope and sage grouse were both abundant, and I was surrounded by history; I even found a nearly fossilized buffalo horn while crawling to a vantage point above a beautiful basin dotted with goats. Over the years, nonresident antelope tags had become difficult to secure in this unit, and I hadn’t returned, but in the summer of 2021, I convinced myself there would still be birds in the old spot close to Strawberry Creek.