Head West

 

I hunt doves in western Oklahoma because that’s where the doves are. The doves are in western Oklahoma because farmers in that country still grow wheat, milo, and millet. Throw in thousands of acres of naturally occurring nesting cover in the form of mesquite thickets, and you’ve got the place where doves want to be in the first place. 

It’s not hard to figure out, just hard for some, not me, to act on. 

There are places around here where you can find doves to shoot at (note the choice of words), the problem is everyone else will find the same spot you do. Opening day, likely 100 hunters will surround a 50 acre feed patch. Will someone get shot accidentally? Likely. Will more than one hunter claim to have shot the same bird? Probably. Sooner or later. Will there be an argument? Predictably. I go west, young man, west; every year. 

I start “loading up” for doves about a week before the season opens. I run oily rags over oil-slicked guns; clean barrels that haven’t been dirtied since I put them up last year; run down the Danners in the garage, knock the mud dauber nests out of them, and buy a case of the cheapest twenty-gauge shells I can find advertised in the paper. 

Daylight the morning before the season opens, the front of the pickup is pointed west. Late that afternoon, I’ll be cruising dusty backroads out yonder “searching in the sun for another overload” as Jimmy Webb once put it. I am a dove hunting lineman, and I drive the back roads. 

Doves like to concentrate on electric lines right next to the fields they are feeding in. Find a line that looks like it’s going to snap from the weight of the doves perched on it, and you have found the place where you need to take your shotgun out of its case. Sure, you asked permission. You don’t want to go to jail, do you? 

I hunted doves one afternoon near Altus this past week. The truck’s thermometer read 101 degrees when I stepped out next to a burned-over wheat stubble field that bordered a sizeable mesquite patch. The wind was howling out of the south, stripping the mesquites of some of their leaves and flinging them downwind where they joined the rising red dust of the wheat field on a merry chase across the baked plains. 

The doves, hundreds of them, were already flying, those coming with the wind whipping by me like Nolan Ryan fastballs; those coming at me into the wind did so like Tim Wakefield knuckleballs. Holy mackerel: I’m a .200 hitter at best, but I was here for the fun of it, not the record books. 

I missed the first 14 birds I shot at, all fastballs low and away. Forget that. By merely changing the direction of my feet, I could take a swing at a few knuckleballs. I never had to move me, just my feet. I hit the next five in a row. A grin broke out across my dusty, red face. Then I missed the next three in a row. $%##*!! 

I walked back to the truck for a bottle of water out of the cooler, checking the ground for rattlesnakes all the way. I had better go ahead and dump another box of shells into my game belt while I was there, so I went ahead and did that, too. Doing that, for no apparent reason, I was reminded of Custer’s last known field command, a hastily scribbled note handed to a wide-eyed courier that said, “ Benteen. Come quick. Bring packs. Come quick. Gen. GAC.” 

I had just reached my shooting stand when I heard the low rumble of distant thunder. Horse’s hooves? Sure, it was going to rain, now. Far to the northwest of the wheat field, I could see the a squall line, bruised and purple looking, coming at me across plains now mixed with gray veils of rain as well as dust. It is such a strange country, all wet and dry at the same time. 

I think about getting struck by lightning all the time. It is one of my greatest fears out of doors. Bears and snakes don’t bother me. Lightning? I could tell you stories. Long, metal guns? Graphite fishing rods? Waving around up high in the air? Let’s get out of here. 

Across the back side of the mesquites I was shooting out of, the brush thinned, turned into good, high pasture, and there at the edge of the grass sat an old, abandoned house place that was closer to me than my truck by two or three hundred yards. Any port in a storm. The purple cloud now had streaks of thin, gold lightning in it, and the shredded mesquite leaves were now flying across the plains in completely the opposite direction. Come, on. Let’s move. 

I stepped up onto the front porch of a place you could tell hadn’t been lived in for at least 60, maybe 70, years, at exactly the moment the hail started banging on the tin roof. The old porch boards creaked under me when I did so, and, strange, but I heard a child’s giggle, a little girl was my impression, when the wind rattled the loose tin on the roof. Well, maybe it was the wind along the roofline, or water racing along and down ancient gutters. 

The storm blew through in a little over 15 minutes, I stayed dry and unstruck by anything other than my own ineptitude, the skies brightened, and the doves cranked up and started flying again. 

Glory be, the wind stopped completely, from any direction, and just like that I became a one thousand hitter: Seven straight. I finished up a 15 bird limit as prettily as I have ever done it, and made a mental note to go online when I got home to see if it was too late to enter some of those professional pigeon shoots they hold over there in Italy. I could use the money, to buy some more shells. 

Did you hear somebody giggle?

© 2010 Conrad M. Vollertsen