by Jay Cassell
Once in a while, in just the right place, blue quail can turn from demons to darlings, and after dragging us through the brush to make sure we paid our dues, David Schuster led us to the gate of heaven.
Not that it looked very heavenly—a fencerow-wide strip of scrub and cactus with a hundred yards or more of grass, sorghum and wildlife plantings on one side and a narrow, grassy on the other, leading off to the brush. Landscapewise, you wouldn’t give it a second look, and even then you wouldn’t necessarily recognize it as a splendid piece of habitat management. But it is. The blue quail move out of the brush to feed and use the fencerow strip for cover; flush them and they head back for the brush, crossing the sendero.
We were just three guns, David and Theresa Gregory and I. David took the far side of the fencerow, leaving the sendero—and, bless him, the best of the shooting—to Theresa and me. I moved out toward the edge of the brush to give Theresa first crack at the flushes, in part because I was raised on the concept of ladies first and partly because Theresa gets such a charge out of quail hunting that watching her is as much fun as the hunting itself.
I couldn’t begin to tell you how many birds were in that little strip. Hundreds, easily. Blues being blues, they went sprinting down the row, flushing far ahead in knots of ten or a dozen, winging out across the sendero and pitching into the brush. I doubt we shot at even one percent of the birds we saw, but we got plenty of shooting nonetheless, because enough of them sprang up inside the gun, as the English say, to keep us busy. The dogs kept pointing and repositioning in a steady buzz of wings and the whomp of Theresa’s 20-bore double.
It’s the only time in my life I ever pass-shot quail. By the time they got out where I was they were hammering on at top speed, crossing left to right, some still climbing, others slanting toward the brush. It was like a driven-partridge shoot turned ninety degrees, and it was wonderful.
The fencerow and sendero stretch on for at least a mile. The farther we went, the more it seemed that every blue quail on this end of the ranch must surely be in there. But then, going over to pick up a dead bird near the brush, I spooked up a big covey that no doubt had paused on its way to the cover-strip to let us pass by. There was no telling how many had already moved in behind us. I’m sure we could’ve had another good round of shooting had we chosen to work the same cover going back.
But it was late in the day, and we were near enough to filling our daily limits that a few more birds wouldn’t matter. David Schuster had brought the truck around to pick us up, and there was water for the dogs and cold drinks that came out of the cooler with chips of ice sliding off the cans, and my knees were just to the point of being pleasantly achy.
But first we had to have the daily lesson to prove that the only ultimately predictable thing about quail is their unpredictability. The fencerow ends with one low bush growing in a thick patch of grass no larger than a washtub. And while the four of us stood there talking, not twenty feet away, one of the little setters came loping by, swing around as if lassoed by the nose, and locked up solid on that swatch of grass.
We looked at this, then at one another, and came to an instant consensus: Surely a blue wouldn’t sit there so long with all of us so near. Surely. But something clearly was there, so I walked over and kicked the bush. Exit one blue quail brushwards, in a powerful hurry. It’s one of the pair I brought home for the taxidermist.
There is a certain moment in a quail-hunting day when time comes to a halt. It lies on the cusp between the hard-edged memory of wings and the anticipation of a warm shower and the cold, sharp taste of whiskey. It sounds like the sigh of a tired dog nestled in thick straw, and in south Texas it is the color of darkening land under a sky washed in outlandish pastels.
I was leaving Herradura next day, so I rode the high seat to get a last long look. As we rolled slowly down the ranch road toward the highway, the moment of suspended time broke and the brush country turned toward night. A pyrrhuloxia, the little Southwestern songbird that looks like a cardinal who had a parakeet for one of its grandparents, darted in front of us, heading for a roost in some mesquite or huisache. The javelinas were beginning to stir, mincing out of the brush on their impossibly tiny feet, stiffnecked and ill-tempered. I had earlier found the skull and jawbone of one of their kin, bleached white and clean and still bearing its quartet of sharp, pointed, two-inch tusks. Now, wired together and looking appropriately ferocious on the sitting-room mantel, it reminds me of the day and the country and quail among the thorns.
In Fields Near Home
VANCE BOURJAILY
Any autumn. Every autumn, so long as my luck holds and my health, and if I win the race. The race is a long, slow one that has been going on since I started to hunt again. The race is between my real competence at hunting gradually developing, and, gradually fading, the force of the fantasies which have sustained me while the skills are still weak. If the fantasies fade before the competence is really mine, I am lost as a hunter because I cannot enjoy disgust. I will have to stop, after all, and look for something else.
So I shan’t write of any autumn, or every autumn, but of last autumn, the most recent and the most skilled. And not of any day, but a particular day, when things went really well.
7:45 No clock need wake me.
7:55 While I am pulling on my socks, taking simple-minded satisfaction in how clean my feet are from last night’s bath, relishing the feel against them of heavy, close-knit wool, fluffed and warmed and freshly washed, the phone rings downstairs. I go down to answer it, stocking-footed and springy-soled, but I am not wondering particularly who the caller is. I am still thinking about clean feet and socks. Even 20 years after infantry training, I can remember what it is like to walk too far with wet lint, cold dirt, and calluses between the flesh and the matted stocking sole, and what it is like to long for the sight of one’s own unfamiliar feet and for the opportunity to make them comfortable and unrepulsive.
It is Mr. Burton on the phone.
“Hello?”
“Yeah. Hi, Mr. Burton.”
“Say, I’ve got some news. I called a farmer friend of mine, up north of Waterloo last night. He says there’re lots of birds, his place hasn’t been hunted for a week.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I thought we’d go up there instead.”
Mr. Burton is a man in his late 50s whom I’ve known for two or three years. He took me duck hunting once, to a privately leased place, where we did quite well. I took him pheasant hunting in return, and he has a great admiration for my dog Moon. He wants his nephew to see Moon work. The kid has a day off from school today.
But: “The boy can’t go after all,” Mr. Burton says. “His mother won’t let him. But say, I thought we might pick up Cary Johnson—you know him don’t you? The attorney. He wants to go. We’ll use his car.”
Boy, I can see it. It’s what my wife calls the drive-around. Mr. Burton will drive to my house; he will have coffee. We will drive to Johnson’s house. We will have coffee while Johnson changes to different boots—it’s colder than he expected. Johnson will meet a friend who doesn’t want to hold us fellows up, but sure would like to go if we’re sure there’s room. We will have coffee at the drugstore while Johnson’s friend goes home, to check with his wife and change. It will be very hot in the drugstore in hunting clothes; the friend will phone and say he can’t go after all. Now nothing will be holding us up but the decision to change back to my car, because Johnson’s afraid my dog’s toenails will rip his seat covers. Off for Waterloo, two hours away (only an hour and a half if Mr. Burton knew exactly how to find the farm). The farmer will have given us up and gone to town. Now that we’re here, though, we will drive into town to the feed store, and . . .
“Hell, Mr. Burton,” I say. “I’m afraid I can’t go along.”
“Sure you can. We have a date, don’t we?”
“I’ll be glad . . .”
“Look, I know you’ll like Johnson. That’s real hunting up there—I’ll bet you five
right now we all get limits.”
I will not allow myself to think up an excuse. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll be glad to take you out around here.” I even emphasize you a little to exclude Johnson, whoever he is.
“I pretty much promised my farmer friend . . . Oh, look now, is it a matter of having to be back or something?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, I told him we’d come to Waterloo. There are some things I have to take up to him.”
Not being among the things Mr. Burton has to take to his farmer friend, nor my dog either, I continue to decline. Hot damn. Boy, boy, boy. A day to myself.
Ten months a year I’m a social coward, but it’s hard to bully me in hunting season, especially with clean socks on.
8:05 Shaving: unnecessary. Shaving for fun, with a brand new blade. Thinking: Mr. Burton, sir, if your hunting is good, and you
get a limit of three birds, in two hours 2
& it takes two hours’ driving to get there 2
& an hour of messing around on arrival 1
& an hour for lunch 1
& two hours to get back and run people home 2
8
you will call it a good hunt, though the likelihood is, since you are no better shot than I, that other men will have shot one or more of your three birds. There is a shootas-shoot-can aspect to group hunts; it’s assumed that all limits are combined, and it would be considered quit boorish to suggest that one would somehow like to shoot one’s own birds.
Thinking: suppose I spend the same eight hours hunting, and it takes me all that time to get three pheasants. In my eccentric mind, that would be four times as good a hunt, since I would be outdoors four times as long. And be spared all that goddamn conversation.
Chortling at the face behind the lather: pleasant fellow, aren’t you?
Thinking: God I like to hunt near home. The known covert, the familiar trail. And in my own way and at my own pace, considering any other man’s. Someday I’ll own the fields behind my house, and there’ll be nothing but a door between me and the game—pick up a gun, call a dog, slip out. They’ll know where I’ve gone.
Thinking as I see the naked face, with no lather to hide behind now: I’ll take Mr. Burton soon. Pretty nice man. I’ll find him birds, too, and stand aside while he shoots, as I did for Jake, and Grannum, and that short guy, whatever his name was, looked so good. Moon and I raised three birds for him, one after another, all in nice range, before he hit one. Damn. That’s all right. I don’t mind taking people. It’s a privilege to go out with a wise hunter; a pleasure to go out with one of equal skill, if he’s a friend; and a happy enough responsibility to take an inexperienced one sometimes. Eight or 10 pheasants given away like that this season? Why not? I’ve got 12 already myself, more than in any season before and this one’s barely 10 days old. And for the first time, missed fewer than I’ve hit.
Eggs?
8:15 Sure! Eggs! Three of them! Fried in that olive oil, so they puff up. With lemon juice. Tabasco. Good. Peppery country sausage, and a stack of toast. Yes, hungry. Moon comes in.
“Hey, boy. Care to go?”
Wags.
“Wouldn’t you just rather stay home today and rest up?”
Wags, grins.
“Yeah, wag. If you knew what I said you’d bite me.”
Wags, stretches, rubs against me.
“You’d better have some breakfast, too.” I go to the refrigerator. Moon is a big dog, a Weimaraner, and he gets a pound of hamburger mornings when he’s going to be working. I scoop out cold ground meat from its paper carton, and pat it between my hands into a ball. I roll it across the floor, under his dignified nose. This is a silly game we play; he follows it with his eyes, then pounces as if it really were a ball, trapping it with a paw. My wife, coming in from the yard, catches us.
“Having a game of ball,” I say.
“What is it you’re always telling the children about not making the same joke twice?”
“Moon thinks it’s funny.”
“Moon’s a very patient dog. I see you’re planning to work again today.”
I smile. I know this lady. “I really should write letters,” I say.
“They can wait, can’t they?” She smiles. She likes me to go hunting. She’s still not really convinced that I enjoy it—when we were first married I liked cities—but if I do enjoy it, then certainly I must go.
Yes, letters can wait. Let them ripen a few more days. It’s autumn. Maybe some of them will perish in the frost if I leave them another week or two—hell, even the oldest ones are barely a month old.
8:45 I never have to tell Moon to get in the car. He’s on his hind legs, with his paws on the window, before I reach it. As I get in, start the car, and warm it up, an image comes into my mind of a certain hayfield. It’s nice the way this happens; no reasoning, no weighing of one place to start against another. As if the image were projected directly by the precise feel of a certain temperature, a certain wind strength—from sensation to picture without intervening thought. As we drive, I can see just how much the hay should be waving in the wind, just how the shorter grass along the highway will look, going from white to wet as the frost melts off—for suddenly the sun’s quite bright.
8:55 I stop, and look at the hayfield, and if sensation projected an image of it into my mind, now it’s as if my mind could project this same image, expanded, onto a landscape. The hay is waving, just that much. The frost is starting to melt.
“Whoa, Moon. Stay.”
I have three more minutes to think it over. Pheasant hunting starts at nine.
“Moonie. Quiet, boy.”
He is quivering, whining, throwing his weight against the door.
I think they’ll be in the hay itself—tall grass, really, not a seeded crop; anyway, not in this shorter stuff that grows in the first 100 yards or so along the road. Right?
8:58 Well. Yeah. Whoa.
The season’s made its turn at last. Heavy frost every morning now. No more mosquitoes, flies. Cold enough so that it feels good to move, not so cold that I’ll need gloves: perfect. No more grasshoppers, either. A sacrifice, in a way—pheasants that feed on hoppers, in open fields, are wilder and taste better than the ones that hang around corn.
The season’s made its turn in another sense—the long progression of openings is over: Rabbits, squirrels, September 15. Geese, October 5. Ducks, snipe, October 27. Quail, November 3. Pheasants, November 10. That was 10 days ago. Finally, everything that’s ever legal may be hunted. The closings haven’t started yet. Amplitude. Best time of the year. Whoa.
8:59: Whoa! Now it’s me quivering, whining, but I needn’t throw my weight against the door—open it. I step out, making Moon stay. I uncase the gun, look at it with love, throw the case in the car; load. Breathe cold air. Good. Look around. Fine.
“Come on, Moonie. Nine o’clock.”
9:00 I start on the most direct line through the short grass, toward the tall, not paying much attention to Moon, who must relieve himself. I think this is as much a matter of nervous tension as it is of regularity.
“Come on, Moon,” I call, keeping to my line. “This way, boy.”
He thinks he’s got a scent back here, in the short grass; barely enough for a pheasant to hide in, and much too thin for cold-day cover.
“Come, Moon. Hyeahp.”
It must be an old scent. But he disregards me. His stub of a tail begins to go as he angles off, about 30 yards from where I am; his body lowers just a little and he’s moving quickly. I am ignorant in many things about hunting, but there’s one thing I know after eight years with this dog, if you bother to hunt with a dog at all, believe what he tells you. Go where he says the bird is, not where you think it ought to be.
I move that way, going pretty quickly myself, still convinced it’s an old foot-trail he’s following, and he stops in a half-point, his head sinking down while his nose stays up, so that the gray neck is almost in a shallow S-curve.
A co
ck, going straight up, high, high, high. My gun goes up with him and is firm against my shoulder as he reaches the top of his leap. He seems to hang there as I fire, and he drops perfectly, two or three yards from where Moon waits.
“Good dog. Good boy, Moon,” I say as he picks the heavy bird up in his mouth and brings it to me. “Moonie, that was perfect.” The bird is thoroughly dead, but I open my pocket knife, press the blade into the roof of its mouth so that it will bleed properly. Check the spurs—they’re stubby and almost rounded at the tip. This year’s pheasant, probably. Young. Tender. Simply perfect.
Like a book pheasant, I think, and how seldom it happens. In the books, pheasants are said to rise straight up as this one did, going for altitude first, then pausing in the air to swing downwind. The books are quite wrong; most pheasants I see take straight off, without a jump, low and skimming, curving if they rise much, and never hanging at all. I wonder about evolution: among pheasant generations in this open country, did the ones who went towering into the air and hung like kites get killed off disproportionately? While the skulkers and skimmers and curvers survived, to transmit crafty genes?
“Old-fashioned pheasant, are you? You just set a record for me. I never dreamed I’d have a bird so early in the day.” I check my watch.
9:15 The device I was so hopeful of is not working out too well. It is a leather holder that slides onto the belt, and has a set of rawhide loops. As I was supposed to, I have hooked the pheasant’s legs into a loop, but he swings against my own leg at the knee. Maybe the thing was meant for taller men.
“Moon. This way. Come around, boy.” I feel pretty strongly that we should hunt the edge.
The dangling bird is brushing grass tops. Maybe next time I should bring my trout creel, which is oversized, having been made by optimistic Italians. No half-dozen trout would much more than cover the bottom, but three cock pheasants might he nicely in the willow, their tails extending backwards through the crack between lid and body, the rigidity of the thing protecting them as a game bag doesn’t.