I missed the chance for spruce grouse hunting up here. It's the closest thing we have to pheasants. You have to get them before the first snowfall when they're still eating berries and stuff. After that, they switch to spruce needles and taste like shit.

The last time I went with all of my friends, we started drinking before we started hunting and by the time we had a bunch of birds, no one felt like cleaning them. So we just ripped the breasts off and tossed the rest away. Probably 80% of the meat is on the breasts anyway, so it wasn't that bad.

The place we were hunting was a few hundred miles north of Anchorage and was technically a residential neighborhood with gravel streets. But it looked like the type of place where people go when the want to be totally off the grid. Some guy with a wolf-hybrid dog came out to confront us about hunting near his place but we told him to fuck off since we had guns and all he had was a big dog.