“Plenty of food, plenty of cover,” Stivers said. “As long as they have those things, they will stick around—even if you’re hunting them hard. If you’ve got the habitat, hunting isn’t really a limiting factor if it is properly managed.”

During an hour or so of combing the hills, we neither saw nor heard another human, not even the rumble of a distant pickup truck. On one hill, we kicked up a flock of 20 sharp-tailed grouse, saw bald eagles wheeling overhead, and sighted perhaps 50 mule deer bounding toward the horizon. But not a single pheasant.

“So, where are all the pheasants?” I asked.

“Oh, there are plenty around,” Stivers said, discreetly toeing the ground with a scuffed boot, calling attention to the hundreds of bird tracks in the snow. After the long hunting season, the birds grow wary of anything on two legs. The brushy, low-lying shelter belts were doing their job, concealing pheasants while providing sanctuary from the harsh Montana winters.

The place also offered a refuge of sorts for people like Craig Roberts, founder of the Pheasants Forever chapter in Lewistown, Montana. In the old days, hunters could grab a shotgun and take to the hills after work with little concern about bumping into other people. But land ownership patterns have changed in recent years, with old ranches carved up into smaller ones, and new owners saving the hunting rights for themselves or banning the sport altogether.

“Access has become a bigger problem than habitat,” Roberts said by phone from his wintering grounds in New Mexico. “The demand for land simply outstrips supply, so that more and more hunters have to pay for access to private lands.”

By contrast, the Coffee Creek property is open, free of charge, to anyone who wishes to hunt there, which means that it gets plenty of action—virtually every day of Montana’s three-month pheasant season. “We get people from 41 states and one Canadian province,” Roberts said. “But that land can stand it. We already had good cover. We just keep adding new shelter belts and grain every year. That brings in the birds. It shows what one little local group can put together.”

Meanwhile, back on Coffee Creek, Stivers and I finally jumped one indignant-looking pheasant, loitering near a tractor shed at the center of the property. Neither of us was armed, but the gaudy rooster sprinted off nonetheless, making tracks in the snow and disappearing into heavy brush—there for a second, gone the next, just like Square Butte floating in and out of view on the horizon. Wind rustled the junipers, Square Butte glowed in the soft light, and Stivers offered a sort of benediction: “You come out here for a few hours with your dog. You do some hard walking. It’s quiet. You see old Square Butte coming out of the clouds up there, and you get a couple of birds—good food, good exercise, and a good way to reconnect with those people who were here before. They were looking across the hills for wildlife, just like we’re doing. We find their arrowheads all the time. They were hunters too.”