HUNTING Old bus used as hunt base

Hunters turn an old school bus into a camper, kitchen, troop transport and more.
By JOHN MYERS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
MOTT, N.D. -- In the middle of the old school bus, Jim Jaski and Paul Rust were whipping up a batch of Pheasant Marengo for dinner.
There was a bottle of chardonnay on the table and hand-parched wild rice simmering on the stove. Nearby was smoked duck and leftover grilled salmon from the night before along with some roast pheasant hors d'oeuvres and cups of draft German Octoberfest beer.
Our home away from home was tucked between a grain bin and a machine shed in a North Dakota farmyard.
Such is life aboard "The Bus"--a mix of prairie dust, damp Labrador retrievers, wafting pheasant feathers and gourmet meals.
And, yeah, there's also some hunting involved.
School bus flavor
The 35-foot vehicle is tan and brown now, not yellow, and its stop arm is gone. But "The Bus" still has the flavor of, well, a school bus, complete with the bi-hinged door that the driver pulls open and shut.
The 1989 Blue Bird touring coach served Hinckley, Minn., school kids well before being retired in 2000. The school district's mechanics said No. 19 had been treated with kid gloves.
It was exactly what Ron Kropf of Duluth, Minn., was looking for when he decided to convert it into a camper.
"They're easy to work on. It's kind of fun," Kopf said of his third school-bus conversion. The first bus was back in the late 1960s during his wandering years. The second was for a construction crew. This one's all for fun.
"It only had about 120,000 miles on it when I got it. It's just a kid," said Kropf, a Duluth firefighter who is handy around equipment. "These diesels will run forever."
"The Bus" is on its fourth year of hunting trips, mostly for ducks and pheasants in North Dakota. It chugs along at up to 65 miles per hour (downhill) and gets a respectable 10 miles per gallon.
The only hitch
The only hitch came last year, on the way home from a pheasant hunt, when the transmission went out in Hermantown, Minn., just a couple of miles from home.
"At least we weren't stuck in a North Dakota field," said Jaski, of Duluth. "And it was on the way home, not on the way out."
During last weekend's trip, "The Bus" performed flawlessly for Jaski, Rust, Kropf, Chris Anderson of Duluth and me. We also had two Labradors, Lexus and Burly.
When it's a 10-hour drive to the hunting grounds, the miles go by easier when you have room to get up and stretch along with a full-sized refrigerator for snacks and beverages. We even baked a pizza on the way in the full-size gas oven.
It's not the Ritz, but that's part of its charm. If a dog wants to curl up on the sofa, that's OK. If a little cigar ash hits the floor, no problem.
Enough room for six
There's just enough room for six single-bed bunks, three stacked on each side. Six gear lockers in back hold each hunter's clothes, shotgun shells and boots. There's also space for dog kennels with easy access through the rear door.
In the middle is an unfinished bathroom (maybe by next year) and the kitchen with a generator-powered chest freezer to store game.
Toward the front there's a dinette that seats four, four front-facing high-back lounge chairs taken out of an old conversion van, and a pull-out sofa-bed from a camper. All the windows have screens for plenty of bug-free ventilation. There's a cabinet for shotguns over the front seats.
The only original chair is the driver's seat. But that's on the way out.
"It's a work in progress," Kropf said with his customary smile. "That's what makes it fun."
Getting there is half the fun in "The Bus," but the point of the trip is hunting pheasants.
Mott is North Dakota's self-proclaimed pheasant capital and the fields around town lived up to the claim last weekend.
Our host, Dennis Hummel, farms 2,200 acres, and most of it was available for us to hunt.
As we entered the first swathe of grass, we saw dozens, perhaps hundreds, of birds pouring out the far end. Dozens still remained for our dogs to flush.
It was an amazing site for a hunter accustomed to more meager Minnesota fields. We saw as many pheasants in one look as a hunter in Minnesota might expect to see in an entire season.
"And you haven't seen anything yet," Jaski said.
He was right.
Saw many pheasants
Even though locals say the pheasant population is down some this year, we saw pheasants nearly every place we looked--in grassy ditches and dry swamps, along shelter belts and river bottoms, even in stubble fields--sometimes dozens at a time. Some flushed wildly long before we got within range.
But enough roosters, 31 in all, held long enough for the dogs to flush and hunters to shoot. We won't mention how many were missed.