Rock In A Hard Place

On a Norwegian hunting trip in search of rock and willow ptarmigan, Jan-Peter Westad reconnects with his roots

- E.Todd

Skal vi gå på tur? is a question you often hear in Norway. A rough translation would be “Shall we go for a walk?” But this unassuming phrase is applied to all manner of pursuits, from popping to the shops to mountain hikes and cross-country ski trips.

So when my father posed the question to me earlier this year, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I was delighted to learn it was an invitation from his cousin Roar to a weekend’s rough shooting in the Hemsedal mountains, a four-hour drive north of Oslo. This was my initiation into the family shooting syndicate, which has been going since the 1950s.

There is a book I like to recommend to fans of field sports called Three in Norway by Two of Them, those two being J. A. Lees and W. J. Clutterbuck. It recounts a trip to Norway made by three English gentlemen in the late 1800s and, though not as widely read now, it inspired Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

The idyllic adventures the three men undertook were “in search of trout, reindeer, and the picturesque”. Our party of four was in search of ptarmigan. As for the picturesque, our home for the weekend — a tar-black log cabin with a traditional grass roof, nestled between Eldrevatten lake and a mountain ridge — did the trick nicely. Roar has had the cabin for some 15 years and he leases a surrounding area of roughly 13,000 acres for shooting for 10 years at a time. Save for a few other cabins, dams and salt licks, the area is clear and stunningly beautiful.

Like grouse moors

On one side of the lake the terrain is heather moorland similar to our grouse moors. On the other side, you climb higher into the mountains that split eastern and western Norway. The season lasts from September through to February.

With the two different terrains come two types of ptarmigan: the