Ye Olde Trapper

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'Just to be here is enjoyable': On the hunt with 93-year-old Bud GrantWESTERN NORTH DAKOTA – Bud Grant had seen moons as full as the one that hung in the otherwise dark sky on a recent early morning, but few that were bigger, rounder or brighter.

Bouncing in his truck over a harvested barley field, the retired Vikings coach peered into the shadowy edges of the vehicle’s headlights for the wetland near which he and others with him would hunt.
Now 93 years of age, Grant has been retired from football for more than three decades. He’s lived longer than he thought he would, and all but a handful of his close friends are dead. But of regrets, he has none.
“I love every minute of this,” Grant said. “Just to be here is enjoyable.”
Alert and keen for the sun to bruise the eastern sky, foreshadowing the prairie’s first duck flights, Grant, with two fake knees and a cane-assisted gait that befits his age, is as happy, it seems, as the proverbial lark.
This was the opening of North Dakota’s nonresident duck hunting season, and Grant and his partner, Pat Smith, were guests of their friends, Mark and Penny Hamilton of Minot, N.D.
Kindred spirits, Grant and Mark Hamilton met in the mid-1980s when the latter asked Grant to travel to Canada to speak to the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation.
“I said I’d speak if I could go hunting while I was there,” Grant said.
In the years since, Grant has become a regular autumn visitor to North Dakota, where he is hosted by the Hamiltons, whose log home graces a convergence of tree-filled draws that divide the prairie starkly. With a museum’s worth of taxidermied mementos, the home’s decorating motif is hunting and more hunting.
Now, as night yields grudgingly to an unusually still North Dakota morning, a few dozen decoys have been spread into the field, and Grant, who sits in a type of lawn chair whose convertible top can be flipped open when he wants to shoot, has tucked in with Smith against giant barley bales that will nourish pastured cattle in the coming cold winter.
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Grant’s 2013 biography is titled “I Did It My Way.” A more recent retrospective is called “I’ve Been Lucky.’’
Both are true.
Except for the death of his wife and the passing of his son, Bruce, in 2018, Grant’s memories of his long life are almost entirely positive. Positive as well is his relationship with Smith, a good-humored partner who isn’t afraid to audible when she suspects the coach has made a wrong call.
Still, at 93, Grant bears the burden of a changed world. Football is alive and well, and he could watch a game on TV almost any day of the week, if he wanted to.
But he can’t look out his cabin window and see the purple martins that once returned to his yard every spring, or the bluebirds or the swallows or even the crows.
“I used to come to North Dakota and love the sound of meadowlarks,” Grant said. “Now I never hear a meadowlark. The blackbirds are also gone. I can remember when we had to wait until all the blackbirds left a slough before we could hunt ducks, there were so many of them. There were a lot of ducks then, too.
“Now, there aren’t many blackbirds or ducks. I don’t know if we’re poisoning them or what’s happening. The same with insects. They’re just not here. And that’s happened in my lifetime.”
On the second morning of hunting, a moon-brightened sky again welcomed Grant, Smith and Hamilton, along with local friends Scott and Trevor Tranby.
Ducks were again fairly scarce, but by 10 a.m., when the day had turned warm and the birds had stopped flying, the five hunters had somersaulted 10 mallards.
Grant was asked if he wanted to pick up the decoys and go for breakfast.
He said he was good where he was.
“I’m not a shooter,” he will say. “I can’t ever remember shooting a clay pigeon. That’s fine if you want to do it. But the part of hunting I enjoy is the anticipation, the planning, the participation, the birds you see and the company you keep.
“I don’t have to kill ducks to enjoy it. Just being able to participate is invaluable.”