by Jim Harrison
For a Handful of Feathers
For a Handful of Feathers
Guy de la Valdéne
Copyright © 1995 by Guy de la Valdéne
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De la Valdéne, Guy.
For a handful of feathers / Guy de la Valdéne.—1st ed.
1. Quail culture—Florida—Gadsden County. 2. Bobwhite—Florida
Gadsden County. 3. Game farms—Florida—Gadsden County.
1. Title.
SF510.Q2D4 1995 636.6’3—dc20 95-11907
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9632-3
DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH
The Atlantic Monthly
Press an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
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To Clippy with love
And you will go where the crows go
and you will know what crows know
After you have learned all their secrets
and think the way they do and your love
caresses their feathers like the walls of a midnight clock,
they will fly away and take you with them.
And you will go where the crows go
and you will know what crows know.
—Richard Brautigan, from “Crow Maiden”
Hunting with a Friend
by Jim Harrison
I’ve begun to believe that some of us are not as evolved as we may think. Up in the country, in my prolonged childhood, I liked best to walk, fish, and hunt where there were few, if any, people. After a ten-year hiatus for college and trying to be Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, and James Joyce, not to speak of William Faulkner, in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, I found myself back in northern Michigan walking, fishing, and hunting. There are a lot more people now, but there are still plenty of places where they aren’t. Tennis, golf, and drugs didn’t work for me, so for the past thirty years my abiding passions are still centered on upland game birds, fish, and idling around fields, mountains, and the woods on foot, studying habitat, but mostly wandering and looking things over.
On the surface, and maybe underneath, this may be regarded by some as an idiot’s life. In the very long struggle to find out your own true character there is the real possibility you’ll discover a simpleton beneath the skin, or at least something deeply peculiar. But then you slowly arrive at a point where you accept your comfortable idiosyncrasies, aided in part by a study of your sporting friends, who are capable of no less strange behavior. A few years back I tried to explain to a long table of studio executives the pleasures of walking around wild country in the moonlight. They nodded evasively, but I could tell they thought I was daft. The same tale told to two or three of my favorite hunting or fishing companions would be received as utterly ordinary, say on the level of drinking too much good wine. It’s simply the kind of thing you do when your curiosity arouses you.
In For a Handful of Feathers Guy de la Valdéne has written a splendid and compelling book about quail. There is a great body of information I didn’t know about in the book and certainly had no idea he knew about. It occurred to me after reading it that one reason you stick with a friend is because they are able to surprise and enliven you. In some respects For a Handful of Feathers is a nineteenth-century rather than twentieth-century book; in it you will find none of the shrill gunslinging, the otiose “how to do it to get the most out of it” attitudes of the contemporary hunting mainstream, an arena that has become so mechanized that you may as well stay home and fiddle with the Internet for all the good it does your soul. But herein we have an exhaustive sporting coda that doesn’t presume that we hunt in a vacuum, as if we could separate the land from the creatures that live there. The death of hunting will come not from the largely imagined forces of anti-hunting but by the death of habitat, the continuing disregard for the land in the manner of a psychopath burning down a house and then wondering why he still can’t live there. This illusion of separateness is maddening. We are nature, too, surely as a chimp or trout.
I first met Guy de la Valdéne back in the late sixties through my friend Tom McGuane. McGuane was living in the Florida Keys and I had come down from Michigan to explore the fishing, which we attempted to do on the severest budget with his old Roberts skiff and a malfunctioning twenty-horse outboard, none of which vitiated the pleasure of our first trips out on the flats. At the Sea Center, a hangout for the saltwater guides, we met this oddly formal Frenchman, Guy de la Valdéne, who was in the middle of a sixty-day booking with Woody Sexton, the pre-eminent Keys guide of the time. We thought this a little strange, not to say expensive, though later it occurred to me that after this first learning foray Valdéne was able to buy a skiff and guide himself.
The next spring the four of us, including Russell Chatham, fished in tandem for thirty days, and we have continued to do so for years, barring occasional absences for poverty, mental problems, divorce. McGuane threw in the towel first, recognizing the attritional factors of Key West before the rest of us were ready to, for all the various reasons of foolhardiness. Key West before its gradual and inevitable gentrification was a nexus, particularly in the seventies, for crazed and random hormones, free-flowing alcohol and pharmaceuticals, the kind of behavioral skew that requires some time to effect recovery, a euphemism for cold sweat and prayer. But the fishing was wonderful.
After that first full spring of fishing in 1970 Guy came to northern Michigan to hunt woodcock and grouse with me, and he has done so ever since, missing only two years out of twenty-five. The first time out seemed a little awkward, with Valdéne appearing in European hunting clothes, but he allayed the suspicions of two of my local friends by bagging fifteen of the sixteen birds he shot at, filling out the limits for the rest of us, who got only one or two. When you are younger you waste a great deal of time figuring out whether you are good or not. Later on you know perfectly well, good or bad or indifferent, and the problem drifts away. Valdéne is the best shot, and also the best saltwater fly caster I know, but I should add that this apparently isn’t very important to him. It may have been once, but it hasn’t been for a long time. He tends to think of such discussions as tasteless or impolite. When you both shoot at a particular bird at once he invariably says, “your bird.” This would get irritating if it weren’t sincere, though it is a decided improvement over those who claim every bird.
In the ensuing years we made a number of trips, including early ones when I was still a work journalist and Guy a photographer: the southern coast of Ecuador, where we first fished billfish on flies in the early seventies and Guy took the first underwater photos of fighting billfish (a bit perilous); and his home area of Normandy, where we followed a stag hunt. Later came Costa Rican fishing, but we mostly stayed in the sta
tes, fishing in the Florida Keys, fishing and hunting in Montana, and trading visits to our own locales for grouse and woodcock in Michigan and quail in north Florida.
Strangely, as you grow older, if you can’t hunt with any of two or three friends you’d rather hunt alone. Newcomers make the grievous error of talking to your dogs, which are confused by such breaches in taste, or they whine about the weather. Admittedly there are the odd miseries of the season, such as when one hunts on days where normally the idea of a mere short walk would be repellent. Once, in the Upper Peninsula, it began to snow so hard in the middle of a woodcock flight that we couldn’t see each other more than ten feet away, but my bitch Tess continued to point. Valdéne laughed at each flush while I began to brood about finding the car. He had on rubber boots and I didn’t, so he offered to carry me across a wide slough with at least a foot of water. He’s rather sturdy and didn’t seem to mind my two hundred pounds (a bit upwards of that), so we set off toward the car with me holding on like a papoose. It was even funny when we pitched forward, with at least the floundering and splashing getting the dog’s attention off the birds. She was very young then and you don’t want to call a young dog off active scent even if it means freezing to death. Afterwards, it was one of those rare occasions when a glass of whiskey actually tasted delicious.
Most of our hunting days are relatively wordless, a testament to the quality of attention the sport requires, the absolute absorption in the day itself. By midafternoon, however, the limited talk tends to direct itself toward what we’re going to cook for dinner. Since Guy is French and my tastes run in that direction too, we never settle for something simple. A couple of hours of cooking relieves the bone weariness rather than adding to it. In hundreds of meals we try to avoid repetition, so the imagination is fully engaged, even during the onerous chore of plucking birds (it is a sin against God to skin them). Another boon is that we are able, during bird season, despite up to six hours of walking a day, to gain weight. This cannot be humanly accomplished without night after night of eating multiple courses of quail, wild piglet, venison, mallards, sweetbreads, grouse, woodcock, lobsters, oysters, and crab. Out of respect for my gout we rarely eat beef during bird season. Over the years Guy has nobly and politely tried to adjust to American wines but prefers French, which is now about all we drink, even if it is simple Cotes de Rhone, though there are quirky sideroads into Tuscany and Australia.
Ultimately, For a Handful of Feathers is a portrait of a hunter and reminiscent of Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches. It is the effort of one man to completely understand the section of land on which he lives. Nothing is left out that should be there. Hunting can be a good experience for your soul, to the degree that you refuse to exclude none of the realities of the natural world, including a meditation on why you hunt, perhaps an ultimately unanswerable question. I have often thought the urge to hunt to be genetic rather than manly or heroic, whatever those characteristics mean in a world where the word honor itself is a joke. Unlike our forefathers or Native Americans we don’t have to do it, but then I suspect they also hunted when they didn’t have to, for the sheer joy of it. For a Handful of Feathers addresses these questions, but more so, it concerns itself with how we use our land, what we can and can’t do for the creature life upon it. There’s an old saw, certainly politically incorrect but a specific tonic in a bleak and weary age: “The predator husbands its prey.”
No bird soars too high,
if he soars with his own wings.
—William Blake
Prologue
I live on the outskirts of Tallahassee, Florida, on a farm in Gadsden County, eleven miles west of Coon Bottom and thirteen miles south of Booger Bay, Georgia. The region is referred to as the red hills of Florida for its abundance of clay and the rolling nature of its topography. All in all, a fine place to live, particularly if one has the means to travel every so often to a place where people speak the King’s English and where chewing tobacco is thought of in the same vein as messing one’s pants. A small price to pay, I might add, for an otherwise wild and as yet untainted piece of geography.
Shade-tobacco farming in Gadsden County (specifically, cultivation of the broad outer leaf used to wrap Cuban cigars) had enriched the local economy since the turn of the century. Until 1960 or so, the sweet fragrance of tobacco was carried on every breeze, coins jingled in men’s pockets, and life in the county was sweet and full of promise. However, as with most undertakings that rely on the poverty of one class for the benefit of another, there are always tiers of hungrier people with lower expectations who will work for less. This is how Gadsden County lost its hold on the tobacco market to the field hands of Central America.
A handful of long, rectangular barns, fashioned out of the hearts of tall slash pines, once swollen with stringers of curing tobacco leaves and the smoke from carefully tended charcoal fires, stand as silent witnesses. Resin lingers in the darkness of the few remaining barns, but outside the wood shingles are weather-warped and the roofs dull. They endure, unused except as occasional hideouts for children and as shelters for the mice and swallows that come and go through the wind tears of summer storms.
The county’s sudden loss of wealth (Gadsden was, for a moment in history, the richest county in the state) left a huge workforce wanting and unemployed, an undertow of penurious souls that never recovered economically. Thirty years later, at the end of every month, mothers send their children to public school on empty stomachs. Food swells the grocery shelves, but in many households the money has run out. I live in the poorest county in Florida.
My land lies between the sandy coastal soil south of Tallahassee and the flat piney forests of Georgia. The barrel-like clay hills, hardwood bottoms, and deep chasms that cut into the earth exist, I am told, because this is where the southern grade of the Appalachian mountain range falls to the sea, a romantic theory that explains some of the tortured gullies in which my turkeys strut.
This earth is not as rich as the tenderloin of grade-one soil that runs north and south between Thomasville, Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida, but then, neither am I, so my aim is to improve what I have as best I can within certain financial boundaries.
The farm was once part of a much larger plantation and, throughout its existence, has produced cotton and the slaves to pick it, cattle, shade tobacco, peanuts, corn, and a large, rambunctious Southern family. In 1990 I bought eight hundred acres of what remained of the homestead, changed its name and status to Dogwood Farm, and to the utter delight of my hunting dogs—Robin, the English springer spaniel who looks like a Stubbs painting; Mabel, the doltish lemon-and-white English pointer; and Carnac, the roan-colored French Brittany puppy who resembles a suckling pig—proceeded to grow birds: wild eastern bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus for those interested in the specifics of what things are and where they come from).
The woods, which comprise 50 percent of the property, are composed of second-growth loblollies, slash, a handful of long-leaf pine trees, thousands of white, red, and water oaks, gum trees, hickories, dogwoods, ironwoods, chinaberries, pecans, poplars, willows, sassafras, magnolias, and crab apples. A number of eighty-year-old live oaks round out the selection. Uniformity bores me senseless, and while some of the finest plantations north and east of me grow beautiful, manicured rows of plum-perfect pinewoods, no matter how straight and how old those trees may be (and I can attest that they are), a few hours under their homogeneous canopy make me long for the garish play of light that glances over the boughs of my hardwoods.
Our most eccentric tree, the live oak (Quercus virginiana), also named after the state of Virginia, spends its life draped in Spanish moss, a rootless epiphyte that the Southeast Indian women fashioned into skirts and which African slaves later used to stuff their mattresses. These are hugely reassuring trees, trees that define insouciance, poets among trees, and I feel a kinship to them, as I would feel a kinship to baobabs if I lived in Senegal. As luck would have it, bobwhite quail relish the bittersweet tast
e of acorns, and in plentiful years—about one out of every three—they march down to the bottoms, to where the hardwoods grow thick, where the deer and the turkey live, and where food falls from the sky.
The other half of the farm is given over to half a dozen fields and abandoned pastures. One such cornfield was so large—two hundred acres—that I didn’t know how to manage it until it was brought to my attention that quail, like most gallinaceous birds, are stalkers of edges. Because small openings yield more edges than larger ones, I broke this monotonous expanse into ten or twelve long, narrow fields with trees, food plots, and cover. The pastures yield Pensacola Bahia grass and to a lesser degree Bermuda grass, thick, mat types, savored by cows and by bobwhites during their nesting season, grasses that once established are difficult to get rid of. Two small wet-weather ponds stain both ends of the two-hundred-acre field, and a thirty-acre lake, teeming with brim and black bass, fills an old hardwood bottom. On the edge of this lake I built a cabin, officially a writing studio, but in reality the quarters I escape to as early as possible each day and inside of which I spy through high-powered binoculars on wood ducks and ospreys, martins, bluebirds, the quail and doves that visit my feeder, otters, snakes, and whatever other creatures nature pushes across my lenses.
In the South, a bird means a quail; a mess of birds, a bunch of quail; and a bird dog, a quail dog. To confuse the issue slightly, in some regions, while black bass are thought of as trout, bobwhites are referred to as partridge. However, regardless of colloquial designation, the history of the bobwhite quail is also the history of the men and women who shaped this continent, a broad spectrum of social, historical, and economic personalities, from the Creek Indians who snared quail to the market hunters who netted them, the sharecroppers who ground-sluiced them, the farmers, doctors, and schoolteachers who hunted up and down miles of multiflora fence rows, flushed bobwhites across bean fields, and killed them on the edge of the broom sedge, to the Yankees who, to this day, wear fancy clothes and chase after quail sitting high in the saddle of expensive gaited horses.