Looking at the weather graph and confirming things with the radar, I had about two hours after lunch to sneak out for a grouse hunt before the weekend’s rains returned. Judging by the orange and red on the doppler, I’d have to hustle up and back to a well-known spot north of town just to get a quick hike in and to see how things were since I was up there scouting around in early August.

Upon arrival, I was dismayed to see the rolling hills of grass matted and mowed down, and the stands of sweet clover clipped and broken as some late season grazing had taken place since my late summer reconnaissance. There was barely a stand of knee-high cover remaining, but with the clouds rolling in from the south, my options were limited. Hitting the high points of buffalo berry bushes and other brush and connecting the dots of the public access acres now likely lost for the season on my mental map, my dog and I managed just under an hour of exploration with zero flushes of gray upland birds to show for it, but we put in our time and the miles we had available and finished up before the rain started up again in earnest.

Win or lose, it’s that extra mile in the outdoors that helps form a season. I can’t count how many times I’ve walked a set of school lands grazed to the nub, only to crest a hill and find an area fenced off where the grouse are bunched up in a tangle of untouched brome and forbs. A number of my favorite spots hold brushy rills and cattail-clad sloughs that are loaded with pheasants later in the season, but it’s a bit of a jaunt past the hard-hit grasses on the front end to find them well out of sight of the parking area.

It’s sweat equity that pays dividends in hunting. Wearing down the soles of one’s boots builds up not only resistance to the rise and fall of the landscape and the distances sometimes required, but also increases the number of opportunities for wingshooting and making that trek back to the truck feel both a little heavier physically, and a little lighter mentally, with the reward of game in the back pouch of a hunting vest. Each season and each walk within it presents that opportunity in many spaces: don’t back down from it.

Explore the next rise, reach out and connect those dots or those lines of habitat, and go beyond what one can see from the windshield at the entry point to a piece of public land. On the backside of those parcels and in those stretches that wind away often lies the sweetest success. Be it early season upland game under leaves turning gold and red, pheasants coming in the middle of the fall as things cool, or those opportunities for deer that close out a hunting calendar with the rifle or muzzleloader under the first flakes of snow, chances are that an opportunity will arise by putting in a little bit extra … in our outdoors.