I'm just running my dogs!

The season has been slow. I’ve only shot a handful of birds since the Sept. 1. opener.

It isn’t for a lack of trying.

More days than not I’m hunting, so often in fact that I’ve quit telling people I’m hunting and instead say I’m just running the dogs.

The birds simply aren’t there. All my favorite places have been busts, but I’m too old to find new favorite places, so I hunt them anyway.

I’d heard there were birds around the grain fields, but my preference is wilder country with sagebrush and shortgrass, not plowed ground and tightly strung barbed-wire fences.

It was so dr...