Hunting for the holidays on the Kenai Peninsula

I piled my gear next to the door while the coffee brewed Christmas Eve morning. The last-minute rush to get ready felt like those moments when you pack for a week of travel and inevitably forget something. Only, I was packing for a morning bird hunt, and I couldn't find my gloves.

My mental checklist included a dog collar, hunting license, snowshoes and a shotgun. Ten dogs ran around the house clattering their claws against the floor in excitement, except for one. Colt, a 2-year-old English setter, sat proudly at the entrance to the kitchen. He had one of my gloves in his mouth.

The holidays are usually a time spent with family. For several years, I've hunted small game in the morning and still made it home for Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve dinners. The morning part of the day makes the holiday for me.

I don't have children, my family is composed of 10 sporting dogs, and we spent the holidays celebrating outdoors.

On Thanksgiving morning, my partner and I took Cogswell, one of five 2-year-old English setters, on a grouse hunt. Shooting a spruce grouse was not the objective as much as getting outdoors. Spruce grouse eat spruce needles this time of year, and the meat takes on the taste of spruce. Some hunters soak the meat in milk or salt water to remove the needle taste. I've never noticed a difference except that they are best when eaten soon after the hunt.

Wrapping the breast in bacon or marinating it doesn't obscure the bitter taste to some palates. Wild game often has a wild taste, and spruce grouse in winter tastes like a Christmas tree. But I would rather eat a holiday spruce grouse than a fruitcake.

Cogswell didn't find birds, but we watched the sun rise together. The trumpeting announcement of their intentions lent a holiday flavor to an almost-magical flight of swans rising off the misty Kenai River.

As we headed home, a musher grinned at us from behind the wheel of his heavy-duty truck and trailer being pulled down a desolate road by 18 anxious and happy sled dogs.

And we walked through an area where the 2014 Funny River Fire burned birch trees so that they were black at the bottom and covered by hoar frost at the top against a blue sky. We were grateful.

On Christmas Eve, we drove for two hours even though we weren't sure what conditions we would find on the mountain. A winter storm was forecast, and the avalanche advisory had kept us out of the area. We figured we could hunt the low-brush patches for willow ptarmigan as long as the wind didn't come up and the temperature stayed low.

Willow ptarmigan are better to eat year-round than spruce grouse; they avoid spruce needles. White-tail ptarmigan are always good, and the sight of the all-white bird rising out of a cloud of snow is nothing short of haunting. Unfortunately, we would not be able to get to higher elevations populated by the white-tails.

Hugo, a 2-year-old English setter, leaped out of the truck like it was Christmas morning. The snow was deep and dry. We watched him make the first tracks in puffs of snow. His snow-covered face made me wonder what it would feel like to break through the soft, pure, white ahead of us. We could never run so fast or so far or be so keenly aware of our world.

Looking up, the mountain suggested our chances for finding willow ptarmigan down low was small — the windblown snow up high offered plenty of food to keep them at elevation.

The avalanche danger was too great for us to hunt any higher. Hugo didn't know this, and we watched him run and hunt the way we felt we ought to. At the end of the day, I had missed some of the holiday festivities, but I felt good about taking Hugo to the field.

We didn't hunt Christmas day, but we took two of the dogs — Boss and Cogswell — out for a morning run along the river at sunrise.

One thing that impresses me most about a bird dog is the physical change that happens between the way they are indoors and the way they are outdoors. They are more enlivened and aware when they are hunting. And they hunt whether or not we have a shotgun.

Inside the house, Boss is the overeater and loafer of the family. The other dogs are lean by comparison, even while they lay around the living room like soundly sleeping cows. Boss has a softness about his muscles and fur that makes him more family pet than a hunting dog. I wasn't sure if he would prefer an outdoor Christmas to helping out in the kitchen.

Watching him run along the river, I noticed his physique changed into that of a hunting dog more suggestive of his breeding. My partner and I marveled at the difference in him, as we did every time he took to the field. Something about the outdoors filled him with confidence and a carriage he could never access in the house or the yard.

It was something I could identify with in human terms. When he pointed songbirds, he was as assured as any of us are when we've found our purpose.

A holiday is an escape and investment into what we value, and I can't think of a better way to spend the holidays than hunting.

Christine Cunningham of Soldotna is a lifetime Alaskan and avid hunter. On alternate weeks, she writes about Alaska hunting. Contact Christine at cunningham@yogaforduckhunters.com