WAWAWAI

I don't chase chukars anymore, but from the time I was 16, chukar hunting had been my favorite bird hunting endeavor.

- Alan Liere

My last chukar hunt was in the Yakima Canyon of Washington State when I was 75. On that trip, I finally had to admit that bad knees, peripheral neuropathy and diminishing lung capacity on slippery steep slopes and loose basalt were a certain recipe for an eventual debilitating fall. I only shot one bird that day, a beautiful mature male that I decided on the spot to have mounted. Sadly, I left it overnight in a cooler that my dog nosed open, and he reduced "the last chukar" to a few feathers.

My favorite place to hunt chukars was always in Wawawai Canyon, a rugged piece of the vast Snake River breaks in southeastern Washington State. The name Wawawai, means talk-talk or council grounds in the Nez Perce and Palouse tongues. I had hunted chukars in Idaho and Oregon, too, but Wawawai Canyon was my "home turf," a two-hour drive from my residence in Spokane. With slick cheat grass and scabrock-covered slopes reaching from the Snake River to the sky, Wawawai Canyon was an intimidating but beautiful place. Mostly it was steep, but narrow benches of relatively flat ground dotted with sumac and balsamroot would sometimes entice me to abandon my painful uphill trudge and seek easier going along the side of the mountain. Invariably, these benches caused me to either backtrack or foolishly venture on. I then had to compromise life and limb by climbing hand over hand up near vertical walls of basalt - hard to do while toting a shotgun, and a good way to lose your dog.