Photo courtesy James FlahertyIsaac Flaherty, 13, took his first ruffed grouse with a little help from Liesl, the pudelpointer.

They called it Imna’s land. The word “ha” indicated land controlled by a chief. Thus, Imnaha meant, and means, Imna’s land, and a person that stands on one of those high ridges gets a sense of what the chief must have felt when he stood on a high place and looked out over his domain.

We stood on a high place and talked to a fellow who mans the fire lookout tower there. He told us that, in all his years at the lookout, this has been his second-quietest fire year since 1993 — “which was a wet year, with a lot of rain through the summer, not like this year — so dry and hot. It’s been quiet here, in my little corner of Oregon.”

My friend James Flaherty and his son Isaac and I were there to scout for mule deer, to sniff for tracks around water holes and look into the canyons with the long glass. But deer were hard to find and there were grouse in large numbers, more grouse than I’d ever seen before.

I mentioned it to the lookout and he pointed at his truck.

“See the droppings? That’s just from today. The grouse like to roost on the cab.”

They must have been blue grouse. Ruffeds, in my experience, are usually found a bit lower, down in the canyons.

By the time we’d talked to the lookout, both Isaac and I had three grouse apiece for the day. This was the 13-year-old’s first grouse hunt and it was shaping up to be one to remember.

Grouse hunts are not insignificant in my life. The first time Dad allowed me to tag along on a hunt, it was for grouse, and I was 3. The first game I ever cooked was grouse.

It must have been this way in Imna’s time. The kids in the tribe would have hunted grouse with slings and stones and bows and arrows. Once they had success and had brought some tasty birds back to the wickiup, they’d graduate to bigger game — deer and elk.

Isaac’s first bird came easy.

We arrived in late afternoon and had time for a quick hunt through a stand of alder at the head of a spring. Liesl, my young pudelpointer, locked up as soon as she approached the tree line. Isaac spotted the bird and walked it up and pointed his Remington 870. When the gun spoke, the dog dashed in and Isaac had his first grouse. It was the first grouse for the pudelpointer as well.

I had my chance to shoot a ruffed grouse over her in the morning. There were at least three in the covey and the biggest one blew out of a patch of berries. The bird crashed to a load of No. 7-1/2s at 35 yards. Liesl and I waded in to the head-high bushes and this time I found the bird before she did.

There were two other birds with this one, we heard them beat their way up into trees. When I was ready to walk away, Isaac said he’d hang back. He figured two in the bush might be worth one in the hand.

When James and I were 30 yards down the trail we heard the bird fly and heard the sound of the shotgun as Isaac made a difficult shot through the trees. He was proving himself. The boy and the dog made the retrieve together.

That evening, Isaac missed a difficult going-away shot on a blue grouse.

Stiff and sore from walking all day, we worked our way back to the cabin where I cooked seven birds over a propane stove. I wrapped three of the breasts in thin sliced ham, folded around mozzarella cheese.

The rest of the grouse we ate the way nature provided them, a taste Imna’s people knew well, up in those quiet mountains in the northeast corner of Oregon.

— Gary Lewis is the host of “Frontier Unlimited TV” and author of “John Nosler – Going Ballistic,” “Fishing Mount Hood Country,” “Hunting Oregon” and other titles. Contact Lewis at www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.