LEISURE RITUAL OF THE HUNT

I DID NOT know I hit the first quail I ever shot, but my daddy saw by the way it flew that the bird was down, a cripple that dropped short of the rest of the covey that scattered up before us. We walked to the spot where we had marked him down, invisible in the bent-over, pale South Texas grass, and watched our dog work. “Dead, deeaad,” we called to Old Matt, “hunt dead here, Matt.” And the old pointer, who coughed so hard some mornings from the heartworm that it made your chest hurt, put his nose into the grass and flushed up the crippled bird, then leapt and caught him in midair in his mouth.

Matt is gone now to where there are only 30-bird coveys and hunters who never miss. He got slower each year, but he lived to hunt, hunted so hard through the brush and thorns that by the end of the season the fur would be rubbed off the tip of his tail. We tried to breed him with Jenny, a little bitch with an underbite, but he was a tired old man and couldn’t seem to work up any interest. Right up to the end, though, he’d jump up on the roof of his doghouse and then onto the garage roof from where he surveyed the neighborhood. A newspaper columnist came by and took his picture and put it in the paper, but his memory won’t ever rest in a photograph. I remember him the time he dug for 20 minutes in a thorn bush so thick it didn’t seem anything could get in or out. He tunneled and dug on one side for a while, then moved to the other. “Come on, Matt, no bird there,” we called, but he wouldn’t leave. A bird dog is not obedient to a master, he is obedient to the hunt. The bird finally flushed, we shot him and apologized to the dog for ever doubting him.

The hunt binds dog, bird and man together. It exists in a mental space, not a physical space. The object of the hunt is to participate, not to manipulate. As soon as hunters bait animals or use recordings of calls or jacklight them by paralyzing them in the glare of the spotlight, the hunt is over and the object becomes the killing of the animals, the “harvest.”

Robert Browning understood this. In the poem “Caliban Upon Setebos,” he has Shakespeare’s earthy “natural man” speak the essential truth of the hunt:



I joy because the quails come, would not joy

Could I bring quails here when I have a mind.



Setebos is Caliban’s god, and the poem is a meditation upon the world as it is, not as Caliban wants it to be. In Shakespeare’s play, there is an “honest old counselor” who dreams of a Utopia where innocent men would receive food from the bounty of nature “without sweat or endeavor.” Caliban knows better. He offers to teach the shipwrecked Europeans how to hunt and fish; they offer him alcohol. It is clear who gets the better part of the deal.

The hunt is sport, not work; but it is different from games in which man creates all the rules. A dog will hunt birds beautifully one day and be off the next. Birds will be everywhere one season and rare the next, depending upon rainfall, the winter and food. A hunter will shoot well one weekend and terribly the next. Gradually he learns what to expect, but never fully. He knows, for example, that quails tend to congregate near the edges of roads and clearings -they seem to like the feel of dirt under their feet, and find it difficult to walk in grass. He can bait the edges of roads with corn and drive along without a dog and shoot what is no longer a wild bird, but a tame one. Hunters like that are called pot lickers; these are people who hunt only once or twice a year and want to have birds guaranteed.

Few of us get a chance to grow up with a shotgun in our hands. Dallas is full of country boys who made good in the city and still love to hunt. Some of them have $1,500 dogs trained by professionals and $900 featherweight Italian shotguns. None of them could get any more pleasure in hunting than a retired country storekeeper I know from Venus, Texas. He seems to know every farm within a 40-mile radius of his house and can remember coveys and dogs from 40 years ago. He shoots an old Remington automatic and can walk the legs off a man 30 years his junior. He always finds birds because he knows the land and he knows his dogs like a mother knows her children.

I have never been able to figure out why the farmers and ranchers don’t keep the hunting to themselves, but I suspect they work so hard on the land that they don’t have the time or energy to traipse around a field all day. For them, perhaps the comforts of civilized life -a warm, dry house and family and rest – are more important.

There was a time in American history when agriculture actually increased quail populations with clearings, hedgerows and ditches that provided cover and food. But now the land has become a kind of factory, and farmers and ranchers are called managers. Intensive agriculture has created thicker forests and foodless pastures. You can see places in South Texas that have been reclaimed from the brush, mesquite and scrub oak -immaculate, rolling pastures full of fat hybrid cattle, but quailless. There are still ranches, however, where the land is left pretty much the way it always was, full of cat-claw thickets and mesquite and thorns. The old red cows wear paths through the thick places, making it easier on the hunter. The ranchers cut swaths called senderos through the brush, and there’s a gas well or two and maybe a pipeline right-of-way, so you can get around in a pickup in dry weather and a jeep when it’s wet.

This land will never be written up in a tourist guide; it lacks the quality of the picturesque. But its harshness and flatness make it all the more beautiful to me. The sky is huge where nothing grows taller than 10 feet. You will almost always see a deer bounding away or hawks of various kinds solemnly perched on a dead tree or fence post, silent, unafraid. A reddish-orange coyote will trot across the road, turn and stare, looking all the world like somebody’s lost mongrel dog. On the opening day last season, hundreds of spiders stretched their webs from mesquite to thorn bush to high grass. We left the jeep in the field all night, and by morning one spider had confidently moved in, building in the corner of the cab. Long, tough strands of web streamed from the gun barrel as we pushed our way through the brush.



THE PROBLEM with opening day in South Texas during October is that the grass is usually too green and the weather too dry for the dogs to get the scent. Unlike hounds, the pointers catch the scent from the air. They stop and point their noses high, turning with the wind, hoping to find something. How many odors can a human being distinguish? Our world is visually complex, but poverty-stricken when it comes to smell.

The bird dog ranges out, not too far, not too close, weaving back and forth, systematically sweeping the field, stopping and looking back occasionally to make sure you’re still with him, his white coat with liver markings making him highly visible, his short hair enabling him to slip through the thorns and burrs that would make a longhaired dog miserable. When he gets birdy, the excitement is contagious. The hunter’s heart leaps as the dog’s tail wags more intensely and its nose drops to the spot where the birds are or have been; and when he comes down on point, his foreleg lifted and tail locked into a stiff arc, the other dogs will honor and freeze too, pointing toward him. Then, as the hunters advance, the tension increases. One hunter on either side, they step forward to where the invisible birds are held paralyzed under the dog’s nose. Finally one hunter must step up to the dog’s nose, and the birds explode out of the grass with a tremendous rush of wings.

The quail hits his top speed of 41 miles per hour when he is about three feet off the ground. To shoot the bird within 20 yards, the hunter has approximately six-tenths of a second to get the gun up, point – not aim -and fire. It’s done with both eyes open, and the tendency is to go for the easiest shot. Many a pair of hunters shoots the same bird and tears it to pieces while the rest of the covey flies to safety.

Once the covey has scattered, the hunters walk on and hunt some singles or doubles. The singles will never flush the same way twice; sometimes they will swing out left or right, straight ahead or directly behind, forcing the hunters to pivot completely around for a snap shot. It requires instinctive reactions; if a hunter thinks about it, he’ll miss. The quails always have a chance, and even if a good hunter can shoot out an entire covey, he will leave some behind for restocking.

Once he’s shot the bird, his obligation is to find it and eat it. Without the dogs, a hunter would find only a few of the birds he could shoot. He learns to mark where the birds have fallen as well as to watch the places to which the rest of the covey has flown. A dog with a tender mouth will never break the skin and will give up the bird readily if he’s been fed. If a hunter forgets to feed him that morning, he might lose the first bird of the hunt.



SOME HISTORIANS speculate that the manna sent from heaven to the Jews during their exodus was quail. Many Tex-ans swear that the only way to cook quail is to pan-fry them and make cream gravy. Others know how to stew them slowly or roast them quickly in a hot oven after brushing them with oil and mustard or wrapping them in bacon. I prefer to sauté them the French way and simmer them in a sauce of chicken broth, flour, finely chopped scallions, white wine and butter. Just remember that you didn’t hunt them in order to eat them.

You hunt them because of the friendship of the hunt, the stories of other dogsand other hunts. You hunt them for thefeeling of the land and the sky, for thesight of the animals, for the way the dogswork and the way your hand has rubbedthe gun bluing off where the trigger guardis mounted into the stock. For the feathersbrown and rust and slate and yellow, andthe crop of goat-weed seeds that tells youhow they’re feeding, for the pungent smellof guts when you dress the birds in thefield. You hunt them for the chance towhistle back to the covey call.