Noon–high noon you’d say, since a sun like Joshua’s stood midway in the round of staring cloudless sky. But every man to his choice. We’d chosen this day of many Florida days for our sport; so here we were.
Across the open, the blurred landscape swayed drunkenly-sand and a waste of scrub pine, oak and palmetto wavering in the glassy heat flung back from the baked and arid earth. But who hunts in a half- tropic land like this suffers a penalty in days of just this kind. We hunted; and I think Bert and I each had a clear opinion of the other’s idiocy. And each of his own, as well.
Yet hope tempted onward. Beyond, and through a fringe of live oaks standing on the southward bluff, we caught a glimpse of blue, a strip of color gleaming like naked metal beneath the foliage that of itself was as stiff and fixed as bronze. There was the Gulf, and by and by, a landward breeze would rise upon its width, and for a while, wake to life again the dead world around us. So we drifted on, hunting shade, the silence broken only by the tires grinding along the road’s deep, sandy furrows; the steam-like panting of Mac and Doris under the wagon body, and our own patient, thoughtful sighing. But when the breeze came–
“Birds?” observed Bert, and grinned. “Oh, shucks!”
And I believe he was right, at the time. Birds? If there were any, we’d quite failed to locate their whereabouts. “Say, if you did find any birds today,” said Bert oracularly, ” I’ll bet a dollar they’d be squatting on a slice of toast.”
Which was hopeless of Bert, who was nominally hopeful.
“Cheer up,” said I hopefully, and utterly without hope, “we’ll cross over to the bayou heads for a while. We’ll find them coming down to the swamp to drink.”
Bert looked at me over his shoulder, grinning feebly, though it were benignly. “Unb bunh-oh, yeah,” he remarked distinctly. “Regular formula to find birds, isn’t it? You hunt ’em early in the straw oh, yeah! Fine! They’re all there just where they roosted. And afterwards, when they’ve moved, we find them all out in the pines, feeding on the mast. Sure! That’s it. And then a little later, they retire to shady nooks to scratch and dust. By ‘n’ by they go down to the swamp for a drink. Right you are. Hmph!” Bert sniffed lightly, and the sniff was voluminous with its scorn. “Only they don’t,” said Bert tartly. “Not on days like this anyway. They just dissolve. Hey!-get ap, you Dolly!”
Dolly, the mare, belonged to our friend the dominie. And a more thoroughly quiet and seemly Dolly no parson ever drove on godly ways. Times when the dominie carried the gospel afoot we exercised Dolly at his behest, and he was glad. But to exercise Dolly required as much exertion on our part as on Dolly’s; for Dolly owned to a kirkly repose equal to that of the dominie’s richest parishioner dozing in a pew corner. To keep Dilly awake was an art as well as a manual effort, A kind of progressive carpet-beating, only a little more dusty.
“Git ap!” said Bert, turning off the road into a piece of pineland strewn with down-timber. “Git ap, you!”
Accordingly, Dolly awoke long enough to rattle us over a fallen log, a jolt that was as if meant to remind us a buggy is not a steeplechasers. “Unb-whoa!” snapped Bert, and weariedly stood up.
“I’m looking for a way,” explained Bert, “and there isn’t any. I want to find a short-cut, because it’ll be the longest way to get there.”
“To get where?”
“Oh, down by the swamp heads where all the quail are drinking, ” said Bert coolly. “Wasn’t it there you said we’d find them?”
I stuck my gun between my knees and reached for the reins. “You give me those lines, Bert.”
“Willingly,” said he, and thrust them on me. “Hie away, bullies !” said Bert listlessly, leaning over to look under the wagon body at the dogs. ” Hie away, there! “
Doris, after a glance to make sure he meant it, linked away across the open, stretching herself in a hopeful burst of speed. But Mac-big, lumbering, clumsy Mac sidled off uncertainly, scuffling dispiritedly, and with a look almost of reproach in his wistful eyes, as if he had settled with himself that to hunt to-day meant only a waste of precious effort.
“Mac,” said Bert, addressing him pointedly, “you hie away there, or I’ll get down and say something real personal to you. Git! ” said he, and Mac got, picking up speed as he reached out across the open.
But one could hardly blame the big, blue-ticked setter. Beyond, the pineland thinned out again, and between the tree boles we could see what lay beyondanother waste of scrub, but scrub of a different kind than the desert of palmetto, oak and pine straggling behind us on the sandy plain.
“Blackjack!” snorted Bert, and lurched to his feet. “Hey, you, Doris–come out of that!” he cried sharply, and instinctively reached for the dog whistle strung from a button of his coat.
For we’d been there before; we were fully informed concerning that particular stretch of thicket-a desert of stunted oak sun-dried to a dingy rust color, square miles of it lying like a jungle and thicker than a summer woodcock cover, three weeks or so, on a December afternoon, the dogs had popped into that tangle before we could head them off, and there the two had hunted quail on private account while, for a sad two hours, we had hunted them.
Sad, I say, because the dry, rasping foliage gave off heat like an oven; sad, because we wandered blindly through the blind maze of it , hot, weary and futile and still sadder, hotter and more wearied because we knew that Doris and Mac must have found birds, or, long before they would have come in to Bert’s incessant shrilling, piped Pan- ike on the dog whistle. And then, when he had chanced on Doris frozen to a covey in the depths, we added a new vexation to our emburdening woe; for the birds, trod up from underfoot, whirred headlong against the wall of brown, rattling foliage and were gone at the first jump off the ground. So we had collared Doris, and Mac coming in at the crack of my ineffectual dose of No. 9’s, had been collared, too, and forthwith we fought our way out of the trap, growling our vows to the future. ” Don’t No. 1,” I said at the time: “Don’t go into the blackjacks before the leaves are off.”
So now–“Hey, you come out of that! ” muttered Bert again, reaching for his whistle, and, at the call, strident and commanding, Doris headed up again, quartering out into the more open ground of the pineland.
“And here’s ‘Don’t No. 2,’” remarked Bert reflectively: “Don’t go into the blackjacks at all. Not scrub like that, anyway. We’ll just stick to the open, I guess.’
But one might just as well have hunted birds in a picked cotton field as to look for them in the midst of these open pine fields at noon. Particularly in the midst of bland, glaring sunlight like this. I knew it and Bert knew it, too. “It’s about a mile to the heads,” he mumbled, settling back and half-asleep; “we’ll hunt along.”
But man proposes and-well, in this case it was Doris that shaped the way, disposing of our plans in a measure that left no other alternative. For, as the buggy turned, Doris swung with it, streaming up to our right, going at the pace of a quarterhorse and heading straight for the jungle of blackjack. “Hey, you come out of that!” yapped Bert again, and snatched swiftly for his whistle. “You DORIS!”
She was gone though, a flash of white gleaming an instant against the rusty edge of the scrub oak, flitting like a wraith. But as she plunged headlong into the thick of it, we’d seen her sharp head flung upward-seen her swerve and then ply onward with an added sign of making game in the way she flattened in her stride.
Bert’s whistle dropped from his lips. “Say, look at old Mac!”
Away along the blackjack’s edge, the scuffling, clumsy bigger dog-a dog keen and true in despite his seeming awkwardness-there big Mac had swung across the other’s line, and now, with his head outthrust and shoulders hunched together, he was stalking on in the train of vanished Doris, his eyes fixed on something unseen to us in the scrub. Pop! there he froze; and prodding Dolly into a trot, we rattled up toward him, tumbled out of the buggy; and, for form’s sake, if not for other reasons, we hitched the dominie’s dozing mare to a jack pine, and walked in to see what was doing.
It was Doris that old Mac had his eye upon, and there in the scrub oak’s edge we found her, fast on a beautiful point-beautiful, I say, though not one of the headhigh, upstanding points that fashion dictates. But Doris, cracking headlong into the thicket, had been left no chance to pose, for, stooping to trail, the full blast of the covey scent had caught her straight in the face as she swung. There she was now, crouched sideways, her head screwed back to her shoulder, all four legs propped together, and almost toppling over in the tense, guarded stress of that exquisite, anxious moment. One saw that the birds were almost under her, and the bitch’s eyes rolled slowly as we pushed our way into the thicket.
“Wait,” said Bert, eyeing the ground ahead. “Let’s try to drive them out into the open.”
“All right—but we can’t do it, Bert.”
Still Bert said we’d try, and try we did. Also I fail to recall a more complete and hapless fiasco–as it should have beenthis imbecile effort to herd the covey to our liking. Out in the clear we might have headed them one way or another after a fashion, but to drive them willy-nilly away from close cover like the scrub and out into the open pine-lands. Have you ever tried it ? But Bert, I suspect, knew fitly what would be, for, as we circled in ahead of quivering Doris, I saw him out of the corner of an eye, squinting backwards into the blackjack, and edging in sideways, a sure sign that he had no faith in the maneuver and meant to swing when they flushed.
And well, as might be expected. Hurrb-rrrb! I still have a clear, unfailing recollection of the way that covey burst out from underfoot and climbed scrambling, beating a way through the latticed. twigs. For the moment the air was full of birds, their wings whirred in my face as they rose, streaming overhead, and in that brief, disordering moment, I swung sharply about, a bird at my right shoulder battling clumsily against the boughs, and another plowing by straight overhead, so close that I could have reached up and clubbed it down with the barrels.
Yet, as I swung, the thicket seemed to open narrowly, a half-blurred lane seen beyond the length of gun rib, walled in on either side, but still open enough to show me that overhead bird hustling on his way. There was no time, though, to dwell on the scuttling fellow; in some respects it was like squibbing at longbills, a shot such as you get when you kick up a cock from among the birch poles; for the gun, pitched to the shoulder, cracked instantly the butt-plate found its rest. Bang! said Bert’s gun, and then again-Bang! Somehow you always see the other man’s downed birds when you’re drawing on your own—Bert had managed a right and left-and bang! I had him-and then bang! again, this time at a hen bird streaming off at the right. A nice clean snap at her, and—well, a nice clean miss.
We broke our guns and dropped in fresh shells. “Dead!-fetch, Doris-Mac. Three are pretty good, ” said Bert, and then added: “Hmph! three when we didn’t deserve any. Why, you’d think we were punching cows, the way we tried to round them up. Hey! where are you going?”
“After the singles,” I told him.
“And into that scrub!” protested Bert, peering into the thicket. “Hey,” began Bert, peevishly, and then halted with an exclamation. “Why, I declare!” he cried, “it’s almost open enough to shoot. Why, the leaves are nearly gone. “
“Come on, Bert.”
He took another look. “Hie away there, you Doris-Mac!”
Bert, with a look on his face of a Cortez exploring unknown worlds, plunged ahead into the jungle, Doris and Mac racing on before.
For, as Bert had said and, by chance, I had already seen, the leaves were almost gone. Looking at the scrub from a distance it had seemed to be as walled-in and as thick and blinding as before, as traplike and impenetrable as on that day when we had sadly hunted our missing dogs. But three weeks of year-end wind and weather had stripped the maze of its foliage; there was room to shoot now, even in the thickest parts-if one shot quickly-so Bert and I braved it again. But I’ll admit, we stuck pretty close to the dogs.
That venture proved to be a pretty lucky try for us, a full repayment of the morning hours’ blank and fruitless effort. And for many hours, too, when we had wandered far and near, wondering where the birds had gone. For here was their natural refuge, a place in which to hide and keep, and in that waste of scrub, that day, we found shooting to last us many weeks-covey after covey strung together in a way we’d never dream to find them in wasted, shot-over grounds we’d known before. And here it seemed to make no odds to our success whatever time of day we hunted-morning, noon and evening–it was one and the same; the birds were nearly always there-always I had almost said–always there when we hunted them.
“Steady, Mac!”
But the blackjack had its disadvantages, too–more than one, I can tell you. Out in the open, a bungle is your only chance to make a miss. Very nice and pretty, of course; you can drive straight up to your birds, if the down timber isn’t too thick; and the birds stand no chance at all, until sad experience has taught them to light out at the first jump for the cat-brier swamps along the head of the draws. And, if you don’t care to get your hands scratched, you can shy off from the cat-briers and hunt another covey in the open. Only you don’t always find the coveys in the open, though in the blackjack–
“Steady, Doris!”
A hundred yards within the scrub Doris dropped, and Bert nodded for me to take the bird.
Now, that particular cock quail was like a great many other birds we found in there-big, well-fed and strong, not at all like the weazened, half-hearted starvelings one finds so often on Florida’s sandy plains. For food in there was a-plenty, and these birds were like their Northern fellows because of it-stout and hearty birds, prone to lie close at any hazard, and then to rush from cover, bustling fiercely like a grouse. This bird I have in mind now, had squatted in a little bunch of tuft grass, verdure strewn with withered oak leaves exactly matching his own mottled tans and grays. And though I trampled the tuft to and fro, kicking gingerly in the fear of stamping him underfoot, he would not budge until I very nearly trod on him. Then, like his fellows, he burst from cover straight away—burr-rrh-rrb!–bent on departing forthwith and regardless of the way he went. Burr-rrb-rrb-rh! That first jump took him straight forward—not upward–and about on a height with my knee. Most disconcerting-bang! Prettily missed. Bang!-again. I’m not at all certain where he went after that, though I could swear to it that the charge of No. 9’s went elsewhere.
“Hmph!” said Bert consolingly, “he lit out along the ground just like a rabbit. But your shot hit the brush just where he was before he bounced upwards. If he hadn’t you’d have got him.”
“Thanks!” said I.
“You’re welcome,” said Bert. “Where’s Mac?”
And a moment later there was added to this question, its companion query–a question we were pouring always into each other’s wearied ears: “Oh, say, where’s Doris, too?” There was but one variation to the plaint: “Say, can you see either of the dogs?”
For, above all other places I have ever hunted in, this particular stretch of blackjack owned the ability of swallowing our dogs at odd moments, as if the ground had opened and sucked them in, or, as if they had run down an unseen hole. “Where’s Doris?” “Where’s Mac?” Conversation in the blackjacks was reduced inevitably to this form, querulously persistent–Doris and Mac hunted quail; we hunted them—and in nearly every instance when we’d lost the two and then found them again, one or the other was fast upon a covey.
So now, the beginning of that plaint : “Where’s Doris? Say, can you see Mac?”
Ten minutes later–and more by good luck than by good management—we found the two, each fastened to a bird. Mine skied, and clearly outlined against the sky, seemed too easy. But as I pulled, the bird ducked, stooping back to cover, so that it took a hasty snap from the left to pull him down. Bert’s bird was like that first single of mine, flushing close and skimming the earth like a rabbit, his bustling wings almost fanning the ground as he tore away. Furthermore, his flight took him under the lower branches of the scrub oak, a safe screen for him had Bert tried to crack away standing upright. But my friend knew a thing or two; I saw him squat on his heels, the gun cracked, and by the nonchalant, airy way Bert arose and broke his gun, I knew the bird was downed.
“Shucks!” he remarked, “it was just like shooting through a water main. I couldn’t possibly have missed him.”
But others could, I among them. I could have missed that bird with ease.
We picked up four other singles after that, and then again the setters disappeared. “See here, Bert,” said I, after a hot and wearying scramble to and fro, “we’ll never in the world be able to follow the dogs afoot. I’m going to get the wagon.”
“Hey?” Bert turned to stare at me with a fishy eye. “You going to try driving in this blackjack. Say, I guess Dolly will need a set of climbing irons if you do.”
But we tried, and the effort, I’m bound to say, was very nearly a success. Dolly aimed straight at the tangle–“Get ap, Dolly!”–Dolly, headed into the thick of it, ambled peacefully along. But not for long. “Git ap, there! ” chirped Bert, and to the staccato accompaniment of the oak staves rattling on the spokes, an earracking clatter like unto a small boy dragging a lath along a picket fence, we plowed our way into the scrub. But not for long, as I’ve said—“Unh! whoa there, you!” -and then again, “Unh!” as we brought up with a bang, wedged in firmly between two blackjack boles that disputed our right to ride them down.
“Don’t No. 28-say, I forget the rest,” drawled Bert peevishly, “but Don’t No. 28–don’t go into the blackjacks with a parson’s mare and buggy.”
I turned about, looking behind me for a way to back clear of the mess, and I caught another fishy gleam from Bert.
“Because,” said he, still petulant, “you’ve knocked about a dollar’s worth of paint already off the parson’s buggy, and you’ll knock all the hair off Dolly, too, and besides, I can see language coming not fit for a perfectly respectable parson’s mare like this.”
Nor was Bert wrong. I backed and then went ahead again, and it was Bert that supplied the language as a blackjack limb sprang back from the forward hub and rapped him on the knuckles. Somehow we plowed through the worst of it, learning a lesson by the way-the lesson that follows one’s dogs properly in any fieldparticularly in scrub like this–one must take to the saddle. We had the lesson driven home that day.
“Whoa, there! Look!” cried Bert.
We’d burst out into a little swale, an opening where the down timber lay hidden. in the thick, upstanding straw, and there in the center lay a little puddle, a hollow into which the drainage of past rains had flowed. On its edge stood big Mac, stiff and rigid like a statue, and off to the left, Doris, with one paw curved beneath her and her back to the other dog, hung quivering.
“Pretty, pretty!” chuckled Bert, as we tumbled out. “See old Mac backing Doris–why, it’s all of seventy yards.” But Bert had no sooner clucked his satisfaction than he cried aloud again. “Back nothing!” he exclaimed. “Each one has a covey!”
Which was true.
We walked in on Mac’s birds first, and as the guns cracked the other covey flushed at the sound. But we were looking for that; we marked their flight, and as they scaled along, hustling over the blackjacks, we saw them wheel and swing in ahead of the others.
“Gee! Come on-let’s hurry!” urged Bert joyously. “Two coveys down together. We’ll get some shooting now.”
But again man proposed and—well, there was the providence that disposes things to the advantage of the little birds. I’ve said we’d marked their flight, but in that tangle of sun-dried scrub, all of a hue of the birds themselves, there was no marking them down. Furthermore, we had not marked them far enough pure carelessness on our parts, for though the birds may be said to have gone away in a bunch, there were outlying strays-at least three or four I’d seen out of the corner of an eye to screw away from the main flight-and these I had not marked at all. But live and learn. We walked out with the dogs ahead of us, and then Bert and I began to grumble peevishly.
For we found no birds; the two coveys were gone as if stricken from the world about. About where we thought they’d dropped, we circled, and, running the circle home, drew a blank for our pains.
“Farther out,” said Bert reflectively, and ranging on, we tried it farther out. Another blank, and–“Oh, shucks!” said Bert. Afterward, we went still farther, drew another blank, and, the Gulf wind having raised itself, puffing gently, we hunted up that gentle whisper of a breeze, found nothing-turned-came back-and once more lost our dogs.
“I was looking straight at Mac,” protested Bert; “I had my eye right on him not a quarter of a minute ago. Where’s Doris?”
How could I know? I gave thanks only in that Doris was lemon and white-not a brick-red Irish setter or a black and tan Gordon, for if she had been we’d never found her at all in the cover of the blackjacks.
“What we need in here,” said Bert dispiritedly, “is a red, white and blue dogin stripes, too–something we can see. Oh, here we are!”
It was old Mac. He came slouching in out of the depths, took a look at us, and promptly plunged back into the blackjack again. “And there you go,” said Bert, sotto voce, as Mac dissolved from view. “Say,” demanded Bert, “did you mark where the birds went, anyhow?”
“No–did you, Bert?”
Bert protested he had been too busy marking down a dead bird dropped to his right barrel, and a cripple tumbled over at his left. The long and short of it was, that a half-hour later we found three scattering birds lying far out to right of where we thought the coveys had gone; the others we never found. But to find the dogs seemed enough to be glad for. Mac we stumbled over behind a fallen tree, and when we had cleaned up that single, Bert neatly wiping my eye after I’d missed with a right and left, Mac went on and picked up the two other singles.
But Doris, a swift and widely ranging dog, we saw nothing of for an hour.
“Catch me in here again afoot or in a buggy,” vowed Bert wrothfully, “and I’ll—”
But I never learned Bert’s provision for what he would do, for there in another little rift among the blackjacks, an opening carpeted with straw and the strayed leaves drifted from the scrub oak, we found the missing bitch, poised head high and outstretched, and holding fast to a smashing covey of quail.
Now, two shots may match each other, bird for bird, in the open, but in the close thickets like this sweep of blackjack, the man who keeps an eye to his p’s and q’s is the one that gets the quail. By that, I mean the one that walks in for the rise where there will be room to shoot–one that picks the likeliest opening in the brush. Every time, he will be the one to get the birds, and Bert and I—well, I think we bungled that covey handsomely.
For Bert and I, stumbling unexpectedly over the bitch, hilariously burst our way toward her, forgetting utterly how long she must have held the steadfast point before we came along. Indeed, the birds had long run out from under her, and as we crashed through the blackjack they got up almost behind us at the right, whirred frantically, and again, at the first jump, dissolved forthwith into the walled background of the thicket.
Bang! Bang!-then bang! Burr-rrb-rr! A stray bird, rising late-bang!
“Oh, shucks ! never touched him at all.”
“Same here, Bert.”
Four shells like votive offerings burned on the shrine of carelessness. “Oh, shucks!” mumbled Bert, more loudly than before.
Yet armed by past experience we made that covey pay for it.
“Mark!” snapped Bert under his breath. The blackjack was thinned out enough to give a view, and with our eyes, we followed, till with a sudden lift, the birds turned sharply to the right and were gone.
Bert grinned grimly. “Got ’em now?” he asked.
I nodded, and sending on the dogs, we walked straight up to that scattered covey as if there had been a sign post to show us the way.
There were many things we learned about–and all about–that day. One, in chief, was that it wouldn’t do to lift one’s eyes off the birds until the last bird was lost to view; then one must gauge the distance through the blackjacks to where they’d likely drop; and after that, to swing off both to the right and left in widening circles. For in that listless air there was no way to tell how they’d turn, whether on one hand or the other, and the only way, after all, to find them, was to hunt far and wide–if we missed them then, we came back to the starting point and hunted far and wide anew. For, in that close thicket, as I’ve said, there was no close marking of the spot; we must take their line–and take it closely, too—and then follow the formula of far and wide. In that way only we found our game-not always, I’m bound to say, but times enough to make it pay.
Evening dropped and found us still at it, a day big in doings, though not, perhaps, in the number of the slain. But we had birds enough and in plenty. At dusk we came out on the blackjack’s edge, and there in the straw of the rising pineland, we had a half-hour’s clear shooting in the open that was child’s play to what we had left behind.
“Oh, shucks!” said Bert, “it’s too easy. Let’s go home.”
So home we went through the dusk, leaving behind us a scattered brood piping its covey call, but taking with us more than had dropped to our guns-much more, in the memory of that day’s events in the blackjack.
“Well, well!” exclaimed the parson, peeping into the wagon box, “you’ve certainly had a day.”
“A day and a half,” promptly answered Bert, “and we owe you, too, for about nine dollars’ worth of buggy paint.”
But the dominie, busy pocketing the plumpest of our birds for the sick and needy of his flock, was too absorbed to hear.
