For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  The dogs investigate beneath the wax myrtle bushes, the briars, the boundaries of fallow fields, and the edges of wet-weather ponds, where they startle an occasional snipe. They mouse in the grass like puppies because this is the first week of the season and I’m not carrying a gun. Sorting out game-bird smells from the distractions of an undergrowth as yet untamed by frost is not easy and at best requires a limbering of the muscles, a sharpening of the senses, and the remembrances of years past.

  The coveys we flush stretch their wings on a free ride to safety, profiting for having survived the encounter. Compared to walking down a city street, the vegetable hindrances, the vines, and the amateurish dog work is good stuff. In my strange and unyielding domain I fall, as I do every autumn, for nature’s seductive solicitations.

  A family of coyotes howls at the moon. My wife runs outside and gathers her baby white cat in her arms, scared for its life. Two years ago, a similar commotion turned out to be a wild bobcat pacing the length of the swimming pool into which it had convinced my wife’s old cat to swim or be eaten. The bobcat ran into the night while I dragged the old cat out by its tail, sleek and hissing. That afternoon I took it to the vet’s, where it was put to sleep; the cancer growing in its colon, I was told, had spread and nothing more could be done without adding insult to its pain. I buried the cat next to the pond but, reflecting on the irony of the bobcat’s timing, I dug the grave too shallow. A week later a hole in the earth was all that was left of the cardboard box that had served as a coffin. I convinced myself that the wildcat had found the burial site and enjoyed its meal after all.

  A rain shower later, I found a perfect spearhead inches from the empty grave. The white flint stone was two and a half inches long, two inches wide, and shaped like a sagittate oak leaf. The hunter who had carved it four hundred or so years before had used a deer antler to shave and shape each facet before lashing it to a hickory shaft. The tip on this specimen was intact, which led me to guess that the spear either found the soft tissues of a mammal that got away or rode the wind and landed on a blanket of grass. In either case the flint stone remained hidden, and, like a seed, lay dormant for centuries waiting to be disturbed by the rain and me. I have found dozens of Indian artifacts since I moved to the farm, mostly from the Lower Creek tribes that lived in the area, but also from Appalachees and the nomadic Cherokees. There are half a dozen springs on the farm, and that’s where I go looking for the past after it rains. Finding an unbroken arrowhead is akin to finding a perfect seashell after a storm; to muse about the man or woman who carved it adds weight to its beauty.

  XI

  No matter how much I enjoy raising, feeding, and tending to birds during the year, the time comes each fall when the urge to shoot them drives me out the door, gun in hand, shells in pockets, and dogs running amok. It will take a couple of weeks before I shoot with any degree of certainty, but that doesn’t deter me from heading into the woods with a minimum of mercy in my soul. Whatever notions of farming linger have shifted to the harvest mode. Hunt them, shoot them, and cook them are the entries on my agenda.

  A gun in hand alters the nature of any walk. Hunting requires a target; walking doesn’t. I have spent most of my life hunting empty thickets, convinced the next one would contain a windfall of birds. Forty years later I still follow the trim footprints of quail into the brushy Braille of their hiding places, but now, for reasons of age and time, I differentiate between a quest and a promenade. If I am carrying a weapon it is because I want to use it; otherwise I’d rather carry my binoculars and watch birds behave like lizards.

  As far as my dogs are concerned the wavering predator in me has finally approved of their time in the field. Dogs, like young men, need as much field time as they can steal. I remember with nostalgia and a certain envy the years I wouldn’t sleep the night before the opening of the hunting season. They were good years, driven years, when the only reason I gave a damn if the sun rose or not was for it to shed enough light on a stretch of river or marsh or corner of woods to shoot or fish by. A sacred fire burned like a beacon up my ass and I cannot begin to explain how much I miss those fires and all the other fires that pushed the young man in me in search of adventure.

  I have shot wood pigeons out of tree houses, red grouse over lavender moors, and thrush in cherry orchards; I have lost black ducks to sharks, snipe to alligators, and quail to snakes, and in each case I reveled in the moment just as I reveled in the far more numerous moments of my sporting life when I never saw a thing. In one respect I am lucky to have lived during an era when game was thought of by all but the scientific community and a handful of blue-haired old ladies as plentiful, if not unlimited, and if it has taken me all these years to inquire further into the matter it is because it took that long for my callous eyes to soften and my manly heart to bleed.

  I now wish fewer birds had flown over the barrels of my guns, but twenty years ago I sincerely wished for more. Birds were targets, and in those days targets were the tangibles that differentiated one man from the next—vanity shooting prevails for many to this day—and, being a streak shooter, I took my good days for granted and raged at my bad ones. In the betting man’s world of target shooting my temper always got the better of me, but from one day to the next I was a good predator and killed my share of game.

  Shooting well is the result of a repetitive process, beginning with a long apprenticeship and culminating in the ability to kill well. Crippling is anathema to all who care about the sport, not to mention the irrefutable argument of those who are against it. I still take stupid, vain shots inspired only by the passing fancy of my ego. The bird that takes shot and lives through the dog work is not going to die a pleasant death. I usually shoot a 28-gauge, but there is a lot to be said about a light, open-bore 12-gauge that throws a broad pattern and a lot of shot out of a short shell. The point is to lay down what one aims at, to get the killing over with as expediently as possible and move on.

  My shooting motivation has come full circle, from relishing the hard shot to looking for the easy one, the one that doesn’t cripple. When I hunt quail by myself I defer to my dog’s point and watch the covey disperse through the trees without raising the gun. I shoot at what we refer to down here as the sleepers, the laggards that get up after the fact. First and foremost I want to see a mess of quail get up in front of the dogs, but I kill sleepers because they are the weakest birds in the gene pool and the easiest to hit. There is a chance that by picking such birds I am culling genetically inferior quail—certainly the slowest specimens in the covey—but the truth is that this game allows me to stretch my pleasure while doing the least amount of harm to the population.

  When friends visit and we are three, I stand twenty yards behind the point. Again, I get to watch the dogs, the rising covey, and the shooting. More often than not a quail breaks back and offers an interesting shot. The first year I was here I only shot at cock birds, a frustrating exercise. I don’t see as well as I used to and cannot pick a white mask out of a covey well enough to be consistent. Also, the concentration required to find the right bird dampened the rhythm in my normally instinctive shooting. So the pot remained empty.

  When two of us are hunting the procedure is standard, except in rough cover, when I’ll often send the spaniel in to flush. The pointing dogs don’t seem to mind and it allows us to position ourselves for the best shots. Neither my friends nor I kill very many birds; we walk too slowly and talk too much. My shooting ability has waned along with my concentration, which has decreased proportionately with my desire to kill. Pulling the trigger is now the least important word on the page and the best excuse I can think of for shooting poorly.

  XII

  I believe that, discounting those who hunt for survival—and there are many in this country who still do—and those who are new at the game and hunt on young legs and jacked-up glands, the rest of us, and certainly those of us who have shot and shot and shot again over long lifetimes, should consider spending more time hunting with bin
oculars or a camera or, better yet, with the grace of a teacher. When killing is no longer imperative to the success of the endeavor, the natural progression is from hunter to teacher, from player to coach; the hunter becomes mentor, storyteller, a shaman to the following generation. The hunting I have known was better than my children’s will be but not as good as my father’s, and that holds true for most quests. The conditions under which we hunted and the conditions under which we are going to hunt in the future must be explained to the young if we are to pass on any legacy at all. The original goal of the hunter was to gather food to survive. One could argue that the goal of the modern hunter is simply to enter the arena, an arena dwindling in size and population, but an arena that holds all the beauty and mystery of our heritage.

  At a time when the wings of migration are beating against the black clouds of man’s follies, at a time when 80 percent of our rivers are too polluted to swim in, at a time when garbage bags suffocate our reefs, wise men and women are needed to teach those who no longer care or understand how exquisite it once was.

  The only true aristocracy is the

  aristocracy of consciousness.

  —D. H. Lawrence

  Winter

  I

  Two inches of hard rain, followed by three mornings of heavy frost, drove the remnants of fall underground. The color green vanished from the landscape except where wheat and clover pushed out of the brown earth in rectangles and rivers of summer intensity. The saturated ground had rotted all but the hardest seeds, stretching the feeding range of the bobwhite quail. Pinecones fell when the wind blew and the damp Spanish moss waved like molted snakeskins from the bare branches of pecan trees.

  The deformity of trees, their growths and fungus-related bulges, their scars, burns, and deer rubbings, stand starkly against the gray skyline. At times, confused by a breath of warm gulf air, a riot of yellow butterflies emerges from its cocoon and dances above the benumbed weeds only to die at sunset. The bands of summer crickets have buried their vocal endowments for the winter, and except for a deadly complaint or two the nights are silent.

  Profane as it may sound, one can create beauty with a chainsaw. The chaos of a Southern underbrush slowly growing into a hardwood forest has its visual merits, and more practically acts as a refuge for game seeking temporary peace. Accordingly, half a dozen areas on the farm never feel the heat of a spring fire, but from other areas I have removed thousands of trees, cutting those on the slopes—leaving the stumps to fight erosion—and pushing the rest over, roots and all, with gigantic steel machines.

  I opened my woods in accordance with an immediate interest in diversification and a subjective twenty-year vision of its future. Young trees with potential are encouraged to grow old and good old trees are given room to expand by removal of the competition. To keep things visually interesting, I leave those trees that have struggled and won their contorted fight for sunlight. The manner in which this land is shaped allows me to see across one, two, sometimes three narrow valleys, on the shoulders of which we plant brown-top millet, sorghum, or corn in rows and at angles one from another to take advantage of as many crooks and crannies as possible. These winter meanderings of food planted under a hot summer sun shed seeds until winter is almost done.

  The plots are planted thick to provide cover as well as food. When Jim Buckner taught game management courses, he would tell his students to lie on their stomachs in front of, say, a patch of sorghum, and ask them to describe what they saw, which was exactly how a quail saw things. Kneeling, they saw through the eyes of a turkey; on their feet the students were apprentice managers again. But in the interim they had gained a certain depth of vision. Looking down on another species’s lot is not conducive to empathy. Not surprisingly, just as with humans, survival usually comes down to the basics: groceries and shelter.

  The work to produce wild quail is in itself artificial—just as artificial as everything else we do to “improve” nature, a presumptuous concept if ever there was one. In the case of bobwhites, I overfeed and overprotect a population that would otherwise balance itself within the natural habitat. On the other hand, the management gives my life a certain meaning, and creating habitat makes me feel good. In the long run, what I do with these birds will amount to nothing; interest will wane, the land will be sold, the earth will split open, and the floods will come. In the meantime, there is a similarity between my encouraging a population of quail to explode and the socially funded overpopulation of humans in cities. Quail, like urbanites, subsist on allocations.

  For a month, late one winter, two large Caterpillars labored through my woods pushing over trees. The first one was a D-6 bulldozer preceded by a glistening, king-sized blade, a gladiator on steel tracks that traveled the softer bottoms devouring shade as it went. The second was a 762 loader guided by a bucket large enough to bury an elephant and propelled by four tremendous rubber tires, each one moving independently. The rubber-wheeled monster’s job was to push the trees over and the crawler’s to herd them into piles; the artistry of the operators was to skin as few good trees as possible in the process. The loader would raise its bucket, rest it on the trunk of its victim, and apply a force the tree had never envisioned. In the case of some black gums and iron-woods the loader would get up on its hindquarters shaking and snorting, occasionally falling back to earth where it would hunker down like a sumo wrestler, regain its breath, and try again. Some hardwoods won the war, returning from battle with scars on their trunks, but most times the tree would give, suddenly, and the monster would rip and snort and dance over its vanquished foe. All this was frightening, both in its physicality and because of the insolence it took to tamper with trees that in some instances were saplings when my children were born. On the other hand, where the machines passed, light followed, and scenes emerged like Dutch paintings appearing from behind the brown lacquer of time, in this case emerging from behind a tangle of fruitless trees.

  The man who sat in the cab of the 762 loader was especially quick about moving around stumps and debris, choosing the trees he wanted, planning his shots like a pool player, visualizing the angles of fall and projecting three or four moves ahead. Both operators worked from seven-thirty in the morning to noon and from twelve-thirty to five-fifteen, stopping only for repairs. The man who worked the 762 was kind and cheerful and broad as a beer keg. He drove forty miles to and from work five days a week, and made less money than a city maid. At the end of the day when I’d ferry him back to his truck he would play with Robin and scratch her head with a huge finger, as gently as if she were a baby. “I just love dogs,” he’d say fussing with her ears. “Come to think about it, I love all animals.”

  “How about trees, do you love trees?”

  “Trees?” he repeated, smiling down at the dog licking his wrist. “You bet I do; they keep my kids in clothes.”

  Sculpting the land is not unlike sculpting the body, making it do something it wouldn’t do under normal circumstances. But while the body can gorge itself back to obesity in a matter of weeks, thinning trees mandates a long hard look and some serious planning. Thanks to Bill and the operators I got lucky. The machines worked a total of sixty hours, awakened the forest to sunlight, and disturbed acres of legume seeds waiting for such an occasion to assert themselves. Creatures large and small took advantage of the windfall, and two years later (it takes two years for the earth to heal from such an operation) the understory is clean, the trees are strong, and it would be hard to find a scar.

  In a few seasons the pine trees I have planted will take on an air of respectability. The fields will grow old and worn from my fires, the fluctuations of weather, and from hunting in them; the live oaks will assume even greater bearing from standing alone uncrowded. In the meantime, I will continue to push over the poor specimens and plant younger and straighter ones. There may or may not be an artistry to all this, but one thing is certain: the mistakes are memorable. The odds are that when everything looks right to me, I’ll be dead, the rest of
the world will be straddling the fence, and all the trees a man could want will sprout out of petri dishes for a lot less trouble.

  II

  I don’t believe that the earth can support the weight of too many more souls, dreamless and blinded by the anguish of life, any more than it can support the poisons man invented for the betterment of his pocketbook. There are solutions, hundreds of solutions, but no way of implementing them because they have become, out of necessity, just as radical and painful as the practices that produced them. The farmer is not going to re-establish hedgerows until his bank loans are paid up, any more than the urban working class is going to stop eating guts and eyeballs ground into patties from cows that graze the burned-over rain forests of the Amazon, just because scientists jabber on about biodiversity, ozone craters, and rising seas.

  A question then arises: How do we save our wildlife habitat when more and more parking lots are needed to house the cars that transport the parents to buy the food to feed the children who have never even dreamed of those beautiful places where birds sing?

  One obvious answer, and one that concerns those of us who hunt, is the strength we can wield through our numbers, the symbiotic link between the natural world and the man on the street. Hunters are twenty million strong, twenty million voices, twenty million votes, twenty million bridges between business and politics, between material comfort and the decimation of our resources; a decimation that is no longer a moot point but a very real act of diminishing returns.