Posted on Sat, Jan. 12, 2008

The snow was gone, and barren crop fields, frozen iron-hard only days before, had gone mucky with the turn to milder weather.

Skeins of geese traversed a sky of patchwork blue and scudding clouds.

Hardly anything better can be imagined than to be out on such a morning, with good men, following good dogs, prospecting for quail in the closing chapter of the season.

The terrain was an appealing mix of tilled ground, wooded draws, winding creeks and slanting grassy meadows.

By chance, that happened to be the very country in which my wife’s mother spent her girlhood. From atop a rise, I could see across a little distance — a mile, or possibly two — the town that, more than a century ago, she’d claimed as home.

The going was a bit hard afoot, especially in the harvested fields. With every step, boots sank away in goo, leaving proof of passage alongside the ankle-deep prints of dogs.

Actually, although the others walked, in deference to my seniority I was allowed to cover ground the easier way — in an ATV piloted by the man who farmed that ground, a veteran hunter and fine new friend, Jim Evans.

Age does have some compensations, after all.

Deer we saw quite often, bounding out of brushy cover and up across frost-burned hillsides the color roughly of a cougar’s hide. Now and then a single wild turkey — never a flock of them — would flush and glide away into the trees.

Quail, as it happened, were not especially plentiful. That didn’t much matter. Not to me, and not so greatly, I think, to the others.

And if the dogs — my Cyrus, grandson of long-gone old Rufus; Jim’s slick pointers; Greg’s Brittany; and Gary’s German wirehair, Gussie — were disappointed, they didn’t speak of it.

Cottontails were an abundant diversion, responsible for some splendid tableaus: one dog frozen on point, three or four others stylishly honoring, pretty as a calendar picture.

Then the furred temptation would go scurrying away through deep grass, and occasionally there would be the start of a pursuit. But being well-trained ladies and gentlemen, at least the dogs did not give tongue.

All of one day we had, and part of another. Two fine breakfasts, lunch in a good country cafe in the town, and one grand steak supper at the cabin, with well-aged fluids to wash it down.

In all, during the two days, I fired exactly two shots, both misses — the second of those just before stumbling, going down and wallowing in the mud.

And in spite of that, I cannot remember many more satisfying hunts.

To anyone who supposes that the measure of such an outing is in the number of birds bagged, I have to say you’ve entirely missed the point.