For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  A decade has passed and my heart doesn’t race for quail anymore. I love them, but I know just about everything there is to know about them and that takes its toll. Now I hunt to distance myself from the presumptuousness of life and to enlarge the peripheries of my estate. Perhaps this is what happens to men when they grow older, because when I was young I would envy my neighbor’s shots and be annoyed over my missed ones. I would take questionable shots for the sake of making memorable ones, and keep shooting knowing full well I would lose more birds than I’d find. The list of my stupid behaviors is embarrassingly long, so now that I have lost most of the arrogance that breeds delusions and have given these matters a little more thought, I can only hope that just like an old whore I’ll make a good wife and finish my life a better hunter.

  Now that I know how to provide for quail and what it takes to improve their habitat in terms of both money and labor, when I hunt a new place I know how much of each has gone into the production. I look at the land as I would a piece of meat to be trimmed for the table, and in many ways that is sad, because I have lost the awe and wonder of innocence. The fairy-tale beauty of riding through the Southern pine-woods is tinged with critical curiosity, and in many ways that also is sad, in the same fashion as a moviemaker or a writer who watches or reads no longer for pleasure but to study the methods used by his peers.

  IX

  That plantations aren’t managing for quail but managing for bird dogs is a statement I hear from many biologists, referring to the preseason mowing down of heavy cover. Some plantations take this to extremes by running a Bush Hog every fifty feet or so and then cross-mowing so that the undergrowth looks like a giant checkerboard. While I acknowledge that some plantation owners fart higher than their asses, in this case the fact that they want to watch their dogs work and at the same time ease the hardships of plowing through heavy cover for their friends, many of whom are old and out of shape, seems perfectly normal to me, particularly as the removal of cover is amply made up for by the quantity of food these quail would not otherwise enjoy. In any event, who can blame a man for wanting to see his dogs work in a setting that is artificially inseminated to begin with? If killing is the real object, one should consider sending young men into the field in lieu of dogs, young biologists armed with maps, earphones, and telemetry equipment, and be done with it.

  To rely on the financially fortunate to look after the well-being of the bobwhite quail population presents some problems; problems generated by the limitless availability of money, blue blood, new blood, and self-indulgence. It is a situation I understand for being raised under that mantle. It was not atypical for me to shoot in France and Scotland, New England, Florida and Alabama in one season; a good year perhaps, but not so unusual as to be catalogued as special. I am amazed, looking back forty years, at how much hunting and fishing I have done and how much of it I’ve forgotten or tucked away in some mildewed and somewhat embarrassed recess of my brain. And therein lies one of the fundamental problems of men and women of means who readily assume that the real world is the one they live in, rather than being forever grateful that their world is an exceptional domain that only a minuscule percentage of humanity can even imagine, much less understand. In the case of stewardship, indulgence is paid for by those who benefit from its perpetuity. This suggests that the motivation behind a well-managed quail program is not always the quantity of quail produced for the posterity of the species but the number produced compared to the neighbor. Good management practices with social overtones.

  The generation before mine hunted big game in Africa, I hunted birds in Europe and North America, this generation hunts in Central and South America; God only knows where the next generation will be shooting. But one thing is certain: they will have to be wealthy to do so. The prices that are being paid early in this decade are already out of control: two and a half days of wild bobwhite quail hunting at a top ranch in southern Texas costs $3,000 a man, $2,000 to kill a white-tailed deer, $450 a turkey, and $16 a bird if one wants to shoot live-boxed pigeons. Needless to say, 80 percent of the guests wear the perky gray uniform of corporate monkeys. Driven red grouse in Scotland costs £50 a brace (two birds), and to make it worth the effort the minimum daily bag should never drop below 100 brace a day, for five days. Red-legged partridge in Spain run $50 a bird, and a good day’s shooting with a 12-gun line may produce 800 or more partridges. A three-day, one-wagon, four-shooter wild bobwhite quail hunt on one of the best Thomasville, Georgia, plantations, including lodging and pretty much anything else one’s heart desires, goes for $18,000.1 know of a 3,000-acre quail lease near Tallahassee that is being offered for forty dollars an acre for seven years (that price does not include the expense of burning, harrowing, mowing, planting, fertilizing, or any supplemental feeding). I also know of a turnkey 6,000-acre plantation with a fine old house, stables, dog kennels, outbuildings, and plenty of wild quail ready to be shot; the asking price is thirteen million dollars.

  That, unfortunately, is what top-of-the-line hunting fetches these days, and with more people and less available land, it is hard to envision things getting better. To all but the most affluent, the numbers and the lifestyle requisite for this form of sport hunting are inconceivable, even grotesque. Individuality, resolve, and improvisation are not part of the scenario. This is about guides, well-defined time slots, rules of etiquette, and pampering, lots of pampering. I was a shooter before I was a hunter and, being lazy as a cur, I understand the attraction of skies moved by ten thousand wings and I do enjoy feeling like a dandy in the whorehouse. The experience of that level of sport is memorable in every sense of the word, but I certainly understand how, to most hunters, spending that kind of money and displaying such a lack of exertion are at best farcical, at worst inequitable, and how poaching and revolutions evolved out of similar inequalities.

  However, there is management at least, and management on a grand scale, without which game in the Southeast would be nonexistent. The habitat is, of course, being turned into cement. And two hundred and fifty million dollars a year worth of game is being poached—not to feed hungry families, not even by a bunch of knaves like myself who shoot an extra limit of doves once in a while to make up for leaner days, but poached for illegal sale to restaurants that cater to the affluent ninnies, to the Orientals with waning libidos, to those honchos who want their names in the record books but can’t deal with the terrain, to the manufacturers of shoes and belts and women’s coats, and on and on. Who is at fault: Me, you, the rich guy next door, evolution, God?

  X

  February 14, 1992

  Winter was officially over for me today, Valentine’s Day. The temperature shot up to 76, frogs sang, swallows swept over the pond above the reflection of the first cumulus clouds of the year activated by the sudden ground heat. Small flocks of bufflehead, lesser scaup, and ringnecks have joined the resident wood duck, mingling and feeding on the corn scattered in the shallows. The pond is fulfilling its role as a roadside inn on a long voyage home. In the afternoon lightning ripped over the panhandle, visiting one cloud after the other, rarely reaching the ground but turning the landscape into a religious enactment; it had been six months since I’d seen anything like it. Later that night a second front, a cold one, moved south, pushing the cumulus clouds ahead of it and upsetting what had been a normal thunderstorm. Five inches of rain poured out of the systems, the worst of it at four in the morning.

  At daybreak, high winds hugged the farm and the colors of night barely changed from black to gray. Hawks and buzzards scoured the wind, heads down, looking for a storm kill. A great pine leaned over like a sailboat and never regained its balance, exposing its roots and a great slab of bleeding earth, a wedge of red clay that from a distance looked thin as a skillet. Later, I walked through the woods and counted 140 uprooted trees, trees that had at one time or another pulled my eyes to the sky.

  The sun burrowed through the clouds two days later, stretching forgotten reflections over the lapping surface of
the pond. From a distance the rafted ducks looked like little old men. The clay was slick underfoot. The dam was dark green. “Black grass,” Bill called it. He had fertilized the rye before the rain. Dozens of yellow-bellied turtles took refuge on the free-floating logs that had risen from the bottom. The small male turtles swam circles around the logs and in a post-storm titillation of tortoise nerve cells desperately tried to mount the females as they hoisted themselves out of the water. The purchase wasn’t there, and they kept falling back into the rough water. The females stretched their long leather necks to the brightening sun.

  This is the first serious rain we have had since the end of September, and I watch my pond swell into a different body of water, powerful because of the land it claims as it feeds on the runoff. The surface rises before my eyes and takes possession of the bowl we intended her to fill. The lake takes on the demeanor and abundance of a full-breasted woman. Four wild geese—two Canadas and two snows—plow out of the early-morning dew that clings to the window of my study. Not an exceptional sight in Texas but certainly one in Gadsden County, Florida. The big birds heel over, exposing their bellies before fading into the dreamy mystery that is fog. Soon a bald eagle begins working the pond, as does an osprey, four anhingas, and a pair of otters. The pond is fertile with storm-stirred life. “You must kill the otters,” they say, “or you won’t have any fish left.”

  The osprey looks cold diving feetfirst into the water and missing brim. It falls in three times, each time floating on the surface, its wings cupping, flailing the water, finally rising into the air. Gator bait. The bald eagle makes a clean, legs-extended pass and departs carrying a bass in its talons.

  The anhingas offer their wings to the wind. “Snake birds,” they tell me, “rake the scales off bass too big for them to catch. The bass die from the parasites. Better shoot them.”

  I say, “I can always buy fish, but where am I going to buy an otter, or a water bird that swims like a snake?”

  XI

  There is just enough rock and roll left in me to dance to the music that brings back the memories. I dance in the fields, where no one sees me except the sun, the trees, and my dogs, who get upset when I act crazy. When I urge them to dance with me and they jump up and down they are happy again.

  I dreamed the other night that I was back in Europe standing in the gravel courtyard of my parents’ home, talking with the gamekeeper who, when I was seven years old, taught me how to shoot a gun and skin a rabbit. As we talked, and for no apparent reason, he pulled a bottle of red wine from his game pouch, uncorked it, and poured us each a glass. While he poured the drinks, another friend I hadn’t seen in thirty years joined us, and he in turn was joined by another, and a fourth, and so on until the courtyard was full of people, all men I had hunted with during my lifetime, some faces stretching the extremes of remembrance. The men were my age and older, and as we stood together in the courtyard of my youth they raised their glasses, and I realized they were toasting me, and I didn’t know why. I looked at the blurred faces of these friends, each of whom I remembered as if it were yesterday, and while the dream continued I relived the hunts we had made, the wine we had tasted, the food we had shared, and the women we had courted. And still this assembly of old men said nothing, waiting in the courtyard of my castle with their glasses raised, and I knew that something had happened.

  Superimposed on these faces a new scene took shape. I saw through my dream a great red stag, chased by a pack of hounds and horses, feral men and women dressed in blue velvet uniforms, and me running alongside the stag. I ran so well, so flawlessly, I became a brother to this stag. And when my brother had swum the rivers and run his fill of fields and woods and was dark with sweat, and while he held the hounds at bay, I watched the flat, broad blade of a man’s lance touch his rib cage, and saw the terror and wonder in my brother’s eyes, alive and beseeching for an instant after everything else about him was dead. I felt the same, terrible glaze fall over my eyes, scalding my soul, and I knew someone had died, in the courtyard of my castle, and of course, it was me.

  XII

  A birder is a person who loves birds. Herbert L. Stoddard, ornithologist, naturalist, ecologist, and the most famous quail authority of the century, was known as a dreamer of birds; so was Aldo Leopold. These and many others loved and cared for birds passionately all their lives, and left behind the guidelines that we modest mortals have read, studied, and marveled at. Included in their reveries were the darker dreams of death and extinction that any caring lover broods about in the silence of darkness; in the case of bobwhite quail and a variety of other game birds, death would have included not only the birds necessary for their work, but birds shot from their own guns for pleasure. Stoddard and Leopold were bird hunters, and although they were hunters of a mindful kind, careful in the taking, thankful for the privilege of being alive and well in the woods at a time of year when the pursuit of game comes naturally, they nevertheless hunted with great enthusiasm and joy, pursuing a pastime they loved.

  As a hunter I mourn the decline of habitat and the behavior of my peers; as a human being I mourn the poisoning of the earth; as a father I mourn the disappearance of so many feathered things; and as an ill-tempered recluse I mourn the passing of the pillory. Most of us have bowed our heads and offered our souls to a religion with a god; some of us have fought for causes that didn’t include gods. Perhaps it’s time to endorse a religion that has for a god a cause, such as saving what is left of what was here before we even believed in gods.

  In a first time, I will hunt because I love to and I do it well; in a second time, I will do what all old men do: sit, drink, and reminisce on how it used to be; and finally I will pass on, leaving behind me the accretion of a few decades of a life, known in some circles as “a life of sport,” useless in every respect. Insofar as the future of blood sports is concerned, I have this nagging feeling that killing for the motives I have killed for will seem as barbaric to the generations that follow as the behavior of market hunters and number hunters seems to me.

  XIII

  By winter, the roan-colored Brittany didn’t look like a suckling pig anymore. He was thin and fit, the bones in his face had sharpened, his nose had swayed and lengthened, and his hindquarters had filled out. Carnac had graduated from looking like a pig to looking like a jackal, a twenty-four-pound jackal with a long nose, and at twenty-four pounds the perfect poacher’s dog, built to jump into a game vest at the first sign of trouble. At one year old he was a “balls-to-the-wall” puppy who enjoyed life to its fullest, at the expense of everyone else, particularly the bitches. Knowing nothing about kennels, shock collars, or leather whips, Carnac has had no contact with the darker side of a hunting dog’s life, so when I say “birds,” stretching the b’s and the r’s, he looks at me, sits up straight as an arrow, and tests the air. His cheeks puff and unpuff, his nose inspecting the azimuth, and his eyes follow his nose. He is stationary hunting.

  Carnac was a natural from his first day in the field. He loved the grass, the briars, the smells, and had been taught early that the sound of a gun is a moment to relish, beginning with the feral pigs that I sometimes shot in the ass with a .410 to move them out of the yard. Carnac hates pigs ever since the morning he and Robin ran out of the lake house into the legs of a sow and her four piglets rooting up the grass for worms. The sow cornered the Brittany against the side of the house and tried to eat him, scaring the stink out of both dogs—and me. I hit the pig over the head with a shovel, hard, until she finally turned on me, allowing the dogs to get away before rendering any meat, but it was close. Carnac does not have a problem with guns.

  He pointed a quail wing within a minute of watching it fly at the end of a fishing pole, but that doesn’t mean too much. A trainer once bragged, “Hell, I can get my wife to point if she wants something bad enough.” I bought some pen-raised quail, built a call-back pen, and began training the puppy. The only thing that didn’t work was that the quail that were supposed to return to their
plywood home before dark never did, choosing instead to join the wild ones. Can’t say I blame them.

  Carnac learned how to run through a field chasing birds that smelled good, and one day, just like my trainer friend told me he would, the puppy realized he couldn’t catch them and pointed. Pointed, solid as Excalibur.

  A week after that the dog pulled a check cord through the woods and learned to whoa, which he did only to please me. By late summer he began finding a few wild coveys and learned about the sound of a dozen wings. Carnac began to follow his long shovel nose, which rarely deceived him. If he smelled birds, he trailed them until he found them. The dog is stubborn.

  Meanwhile, my doltish pointer, Mabel, managed to fall asleep under a truck and, oblivious to the engine noise, allowed herself to be run over, dislocating her hip. Once it was mended she did what she had always hoped for: she never left her chair. So much for her vacuous career. Mabel has since moved in with a lady who doesn’t hunt but enjoys dressing her in Victorian clothes. The age of the big-going dogs is over for me. Now I sneak around with a tiny dog that walks on its hind legs to see over cover, cocks one of them to take a piss, and looks goofy when the smell of feathers passes his way.

  I introduced a blank pistol into the picture a few weeks into fall and the dog is now convinced that life is one big bowl of food, boners, and birds. When the sounds of wings and gunfire became inseparable entities in Carnac’s mind and I was able to hold him on point through the flush without raising my voice, I started calling up friends, praising the poacher dog’s abilities. I lied a little too, just to make sure they knew what a fine animal had graced my jubilee year, the dog that will hunt me to my sixties.