The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  “Well, hello, Jeb. How’s my man?”

  Jeb emerged, shakily, and found a small shrub that served as a tree.

  “He acts like the one who had the heart attack,” Ted said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “He’ll be fine in the morning.”

  We drove west into the sunset. The highway was flanked by hard-looking rangeland where cattle grazed and the occasional oil pump worked monotonously away. The motel was expecting us, and because there were no signs saying pets were not allowed, I assumed they were. I made a bed for Jeb on the floor of my room and left him there while Ted and I joined another man, named Jeff, who would be hunting with us. We were in the dining room when Todd Rogers arrived.

  An oil-field hand by profession, Todd had been moonlighting as a guide for turkey and deer hunters when he got the inspiration to branch out into quail. He negotiates with ranchers for hunting rights to their land and then takes hunters out for a fee. We were his first clients of the season.

  Todd was lean, built like a rodeo cowboy and stingy with words. But friendly. He shook hands and made sure he had all of our names; then he told us that he’d been around that week checking on the places we’d be hunting.

  “There’s birds,” he said. “Plenty of them. It’s supposed to be hot tomorrow. But no wind. So that’s good.”

  He stayed around for a beer, and we asked a few questions. After he left, we ordered dinner.

  “You check out the parking lot of this place?” Jeff said.

  “What about it?” I said.

  “Well, it’s the biggest motel in town, and there are two kinds of vehicles. Trucks that belong to Halliburton or one of the other drilling companies, and SUVs pulling trailers that are full of bird dogs. I saw one with Georgia plates.”

  “Opening weekend in Oklahoma,” Ted said. “Some guys will crawl out of bed after a heart attack and come all the way from Vermont with a 12-year-old dog just to be here for that.”

  “Can you imagine?” Jeff said.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “in the morning the invalids and the old dogs are going to shine. Just you watch.”

  It was about two hours after sunrise when we parked at the junction of two section roads next to a stock tank and an old windmill. The ground in front of us was covered in tall, tawny grass that Todd called “love grass.” This flat, open stretch ran for a half-mile or so and then rose to a slight ridge covered with scrubby-looking stuff that I took for oak or maybe locust.

  When I asked, Jeff said, “It’s called ‘shinnery.’”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Shinnery. That means thick, worthless little stuff that will tear up your clothes and scratch your face and turn you every way but loose once you get in it.”

  “No particular tree then?”

  “Nope.”

  “Just shinnery.”

  “You got it.”

  Todd had ridden out with another man, Roger Slife, who raised pointers and had brought a couple of his best dogs. They asked if I’d rather start out hunting Jeb by himself.

  “Nope,” I said. “We aren’t proud—neither one of us—and we need all the help we can get.”

  So we crossed a fence and got started. Three hunters, two guides and two pointers. And in less than 15 minutes Todd said, “I believe we got us a point.”

  My legs weren’t even limber yet, but my pulse picked up the way it always does when I see dogs on point. My heart, anyway, was in fine shape.

  No way to say which dog had located the birds and which was backing. They may have located the covey more or less simultaneously from different angles. Anyway, they both were staunch, noses aimed at the same point in the undifferentiated grass. Jeff, Ted and I fanned out and walked in briskly.

  The birds hadn’t dispersed very much from their tight roosting formation, so they seemed to come up in a single ball and then angle off in separate trajectories, desperate to put some space between themselves and whatever had provoked their flight. It happened with the usual startling suddenness, and I shot before I was ready and while the birds were still in range. My typical opening salvo.

  But damn. We weren’t 200 yards from the truck, and already we were into birds.

  “I believe I’m going to be glad I came,” I said to Ted.

  By midmorning we were halfway to our limits, the sun was up and bearing down hard, and we were stuck in the shinnery chasing singles. It was hard on the hunters and the dogs. Some of the thickets seemed to swallow us, and we would have to push through them by main force with our guns held tightly across our chests at port-arms. Sometimes a bird would get up, almost at our feet, or behind us. No chance. None at all.

  Still, we were having a wonderful time. The country seemed epic by bird-hunting standards. We had walked for more than three hours and never cut a road, crossed a fence or bumped into another hunter. The dogs had found 10 coveys and made good points on most of them, even though scenting conditions were anything but ideal.

  “I believe I heard the noon whistle,” Ted said after we’d broken out of the shinnery and given up on the singles.

  I checked my watch. It was a little after 11.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  The dogs went along with the ruse. They were hot and tired, too. Especially Jeb, whose age was beginning to show.

  We watered both dogs lavishly when we got back to the truck and drank canned sodas while we stood around and replayed the morning. No one was in a hurry to get on with the next thing. It felt good not to be moving.

  We drove to a barbecue place where the ribs had been slow-cooking for so long they almost fell off the bone when you picked them up in your greasy fingers. The fried okra was also excellent.

  “Can you imagine what your doctor would say about this lunch?” Ted said.

  “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  With great restraint and self-righteousness, I passed on dessert.

  We scattered a flock of turkeys on the way into the next section we would be hunting. We lost sight of them as they sailed off toward a little rise grown up in shinnery.

  “Pretty,” Jeff said.

  “Yeah,” Todd said. “I believe I’ll see them again in the spring.”

  Jeb was tired, but when I tried to leave him in the truck and hunt with Roger’s fresher, younger dogs, he began howling like he was being put on an airplane. Without sedation.

  “All right,” I said, and opened the dog box. It’s hard to deny a willing bird dog. The drive is so pure you feel like it’s cruel not to let him do what is in his blood.

  It won’t kill him, I thought. The worst thing that could happen is . . . we’d have a tired, useless dog in the field with us.

  I was wrong about that. But it came later.

  The afternoon was better than the morning. It seemed like we were never out of birds. As soon as we had finished with the singles from one covey rise and decided to move on, the dogs would go on point and we would be into another covey. It may, actually, not have been that good, but it was about as good as I’d ever had it.

  The day had cooled some, and even though they were tired, the dogs put on a good show. We even got a little comic relief when Jeb went on point 300 or 400 yards ahead of us in the middle of a field grown up in love grass.

  “Strange place for a covey to be this time of day,” Todd said.

  “He’s tired,” I said. “Probably false-pointing so he can rest.”

  But Jeb held the point until, finally, I had to honor it. It was a long walk, and the love grass grew in clumps, so the footing was tricky. I called to Jeb a couple of times, but he stayed staunch.

  “I can’t believe you’re making me come all this way for a false point,” I said. I almost could touch him, and no bird had flown. “Let’s go hunt birds.”

  About that moment a turkey came out of the grass 20 steps ahead of us. Jeb watched the turkey until it had set its wings and was sailing away in the distance. Then he turned his head and looked around at me. I’d seen the loo
k before.

  “My bad,” I said. “I apologize. Now let’s go hunt some of those little birds.”

  We quit a little before sunset, three or four birds short of a limit and wearily happy with the results of the day. We stood around the bed of the pickup in the cooling evening air. There was some canned beer on ice, and no pretentious microbrew has ever been so gratefully gulped down.

  “Tomorrow should be better,” Todd said.

  “I don’t see how it could be,” Ted said.

  “Not so hot. Dogs will work better.”

  “I’m not arguing.”

  We drove back to the motel, where I fed Jeb. He stayed awake just long enough to clean his bowl, and then he lay down on the bed I’d made for him and dropped into a deep, almost comatose sleep.

  “Rest up, Bud,” I said. “You get to do it again tomorrow.”

  He didn’t move when I left or when I came back from a robust Mexican dinner and fell into an equally deep sleep.

  Good as Saturday had been, Sunday was even better. It was cooler and there was some wind. We were all—men and dogs—a little slow getting started, but we warmed up quickly and got down to business and began to see those things that linger in a bird hunter’s memory between seasons: clean doubles on a covey rise, birds staunchly pointed and backed, flawless retrieves. The country stretched out ahead of us, flat and uncluttered, so we could watch the dogs work, and it was, as it always is, a heart-stopping moment when one of them hit a point and firmed up on it.

  “Look at that.”

  “Nothing prettier.”

  The morning passed quickly. After lunch Jeb was so worn out that I tried, again, to leave him behind. Nothing doing.

  “Dog has plenty of want-to,” Todd said.

  Which is about as high a compliment as you can pay another man’s dog.

  Jeb had a hard time keeping out from underfoot, but it didn’t make any difference. There were plenty of birds, and he still had enough in the tank to find them. With an hour of daylight left, we were three birds short of limiting out.

  “I’ve got another place,” Todd said. “Close to here. Let’s run over there and see if we can find one more covey.”

  I had to lift Jeb down from the bed of the truck, but he insisted on coming.

  “He’ ll be OK,” Ted said. “He’s got all winter to rest.”

  The last covey we needed was tight in a corner of a big field with dense shinnery on two sides. The light had changed, the air was much cooler, and it felt like November on the plains. The dogs stood their ground as we approached and then walked by them. The covey got up and flew toward the shinnery, framed against the orange sky. We all shot, and three birds fell.

  “How many coveys did we flush in two days?” Ted said. We were standing around the bed of the pickup, getting after some beer.

  “I’m not real good with numbers,” I said. “More than enough to make me want to come back to Oklahoma.”

  “We ought to do it again, then,” Jeff said. “Next year.”

  So we made the date, right there, on the side of a clay road while we drank the last of the beer and watched a little buck slip out of the shinnery and into the field where we’d just put up the last covey.

  “You think old Jeb will still be up to it then?” Ted said.

  “Count on it,” I said. “Unlike me, he’s indestructible.”

  I’d been thinking that all weekend, but as it turned out, neither of us was.

  Jeb was too tired to eat when we got back to the motel. This was something I’d never seen before. He’d eaten every evening of his life, and if I’d been late getting around to feeding him, he’d let me know about it. He’d still eaten his supper after I’d pulled 50 porcupine quills from his tongue, gums and face and thought he’d need to sleep it off. No way, he’d indicated firmly—by barking—he’d wanted his groceries.

  But those two hard days in Oklahoma had put him off his feed. I felt the old twinge of admiration and regret. He was a 12-year-old dog, but he wasn’t ready to quit yet. Nothing wrong with his heart.

  He didn’t eat in the morning, either. And he slept in his crate all the way to the airport. I thought about skipping the tranquilizer this time, but it was going to be a long flight and I didn’t want him to be distressed. A tough call.

  I broke a pill in two and gave him half the usual dose. He was sleeping when the crate disappeared into the baggage-handling area.

  An hour later I was waiting at the gate to board the plane when I heard myself being paged. I went to the desk, where a man from the airline asked me gently if I had checked a dog for travel on this flight.

  “Yes,” I said. And thought . . . Dead.

  “Did you medicate him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s not good with flying.”

  “Well, he’s barely responding to the handlers, and I took a look at him. If he were my dog, I wouldn’t put him on this flight. I’d wait until he’s more alert. But we still have a few minutes. Maybe you’d like to come see him yourself.”

  He led the way down into a busy area with concrete floors where the baggage was sorted. Jeb’s crate was by itself in a corner. I opened the door and looked in.

  Jeb was lying in a ball, with his face toward me. He didn’t open his eyes when I said his name. Or when I put my hand on his flank. It rose, just slightly, and I could tell he was breathing. But it seemed like a long time between breaths.

  “I’m sorry, old buddy.”

  So Jeb and I spent the entire day in the Oklahoma City airport. He slept all morning. By noon he was opening his eyes and drinking a little water. In the middle of the afternoon I took him outside to a small patch of grass, and we lay there together. Cars went by, and the people inside looked at us and tried to figure what we were about.

  “You feeling a little better, old man?” I said.

  I rubbed his ears, and he finally managed, feebly, to wag his tail.

  “You’re going to be OK,” I said, with the same kind of relief I’d felt when the doctor had said the same thing to me.

  “We’ll be back out hunting birds in a day or two.”

  We left on the last possible flight that night.

  I cursed myself for an idiot all the way home, and I tried to ease the guilt by feeding Jeb some hamburger when we got back to Vermont. He had his appetite back and cleaned his bowl. I gave him some more. He ate that too, and then he went to his familiar spot in front of the woodstove. He plainly felt better. But it was nothing compared to my sense of relief.

  In a few days I was remembering the better parts of our trip to Oklahoma, and I like to think that Jeb was, too. And I was thinking a lot about something that might be called the “law of diminishing opportunities.” Time passes, and we all get older. Dogs and men. Next time Ted calls, I won’t ruminate and equivocate and wait to be talked into doing what I want to do.

  As for opening day in Oklahoma . . . I’m there. Me and Jeb. Long as our hearts hold out.

  Showing the Way

  CHRIS MADSON

  “Well, I’m about to make your life more complicated.”

  Bill pushed back from the table after his second plate of stew and grinned. “How are you fixed for dogs?”

  He knew, of course. Britt, my old male, was snoozing in his dog box, marshalling his energy for next day. Bill was the reason Britt and I had gotten together. He had called me when the litter was whelped, and eight weeks later, I’d made a 500-mile drive to check the pups. The dam was a beauty, with dual champion credits for three generations on each side of her pedigree. About all that could be said for the sire was that the A.K.C. certified him as pure Brittany. He was tall and rangy for a Brit, and he looked as if a pit bull had sneaked into his mother’s kennel at a particularly delicate time.

  Still, pretty is as pretty does, as the Kansas farm ladies say. Both sire and dam were superb quail dogs, the pride of a small-town banker who had the run of farms in three counties and spent more time minding the birds than computing compound interes
t. Bill had followed the careers of all the pups in the first two litters this pair had made, and he swore there wasn’t a bad dog in the bunch.

  I had my pick of the males in the third litter. There were five, as I recall, all of them as cute as eight-week-old puppies always are, a wriggling mass of warm tongues and floppy ears, led around already by inquiring pink noses. When I patted the ground and mousesqueaked, one little male kept wobbling over to see me. Bold and curious for such a youngster, he had an interest in humans as well as other dogs, so we went home together.

  I would like to believe that my flawless training brought out the best in him, but it would be fairer to say that he was talented enough to overcome the obvious shortcomings of his handler. We started on pheasants, but before he was through, he hunted bobwhites and cottontops, chukars and huns, sage grouse, sharptails, blues, and ruffs. When the water wasn’t too cold, he retrieved mallards, and one November afternoon, he chased a crippled Canada goose a quarter of a mile over a Wyoming marsh and brought him to hand while my daughter and I watched. After eleven years, he was still following that unerring nose wherever the birds led, a little slower but no less enthusiastic.

  Bill waited for me to bite.

  “Alright, alright. What’ve you got?”

  “I was talking with Jim the other day. He says the daughter of one of your dog’s littermates just had a litter of her own. Nine weeks old next Tuesday.”

  “Geez, Bill.”

  “I know, I know—there’s never a good time to start another dog. . . But, you know, we’re driving right past there tomorrow. Jim wants to look ‘em over.”

  “Well,” I granted, “spose there’s no harm in looking.”

  We met Jim the next morning, his pick-up loaded with a homemade dog box and a little female Brittany, rock hard from a season of bird hunting. Since I was heading the other direction at the end of the day, I followed in my own rig, Britt standing at the back window, whining softly.

  Ten miles out of town, we pulled into a farm yard. The master of the spread had gone to pick up some lumber, but his wife told Jim to take us out to the kennel anyway. As we walked across the lawn toward the kennel, the dog house emptied out, the female watching us with just a touch of concern while nine puppies fell over each other on their way to the gate.