Dove Season Already?

 

I am training yet another dog. At my age. I’m talking about the new German Shepherd pup.

Things are coming along “famously”, as they used to say. House trained, pretty much. Heel, in the works. Comes when called, usually. Beginning to sit on command. Not even Pam does that. Kennels, when you throw a treat in there for her. Pam will do that.

She likes to fight copperheads, the dog I mean, and has been bitten twice for that, a punishment of its own sort, and I, personally, find it hard to discipline a dog with too much spirit. Pam fights them with brooms. I pretty much leave her alone as well.

I’m working on her not wandering from the yard. The dog, I mean. That habit will eventually get her in trouble. All kinds. Most females are not too bad about “wandering”; males are, and get in trouble for it all the time. Ask Roger Bowman about Leo some time, a lab I gave him years ago that established quite a reputation for himself “on the road” without a guitar. The dog, I mean.

Anyway, I called a friend the other day I knew to have an electric collar, a sure way to improve a dog’s memory. Yours, too, if you try it. I’m sure it would’ve helped Leo’s. Maybe.

Not a problem, all I had to do was get it back to him by dove season. Whoa. Wait a minute. Dove season? Why that’s less than a month away, right? Jeeminy Christmas. I’ve got some work to do with the dog’s memory. Mine, too.

My friend’s cautionary note about having to use the collar on one of his own dogs before dove season, jogged my memory about dove hunts past, as it were.

There was that dove season maybe five years ago when I had a vision, really, that told me that I needed to leave Spike The Wonder Dog, the marvelous black lab I bought from the late Eddie Seals, at home that year when the season opened out west of Interstate 35. Really, a vision, and if not that at least a very strong intuition that I needed to leave Spike at home, much as he and I both loved shooting and fetching doves in that dry, dusty country.

If memory served me right, it was the first time in over forty years of opening the dove season in that wild Comanche country that I had seen the sun come up over a feed field without a lab sitting right next to me. That day I had a great shoot over the only water for miles around in that blisteringly dry country.

The doves came to water as they always do at about 9:30 after their morning feed. They came loafing in on sibilant whispers, calm, thirsty, and unafraid. I sat in the airy, open shade of a mesquite tree growing out of the pond dam’s bank, watching the birds come in in singles, doubles, and darting, juking triples.

I picked my shots to make the hunt last. I didn’t really need a dog, as the birds, chosen carefully, fell right in front of me at the pond’s red dirt edge. When I finished up my limit, I casually looked over my left shoulder just in time to watch a four and a half foot diamondback slither slowly right through the shaded spot Spike would’ve been sitting in had he been with me.

Life, they say, is full of funny little coincidences

One other time, Bryon Test and I were shooting midday doves along the salt cedar bottoms of the Palo Duro River, way out yonder in the old, wild Oklahoma Panhandle. Buffalo country if there ever was any. You can still see their wallows, and hear their grunting when they roll and dust themselves, if you have an ear for it.

There was a surprising amount of knee high cover, cheat grass mainly, mixed in with salt cedars and cottonwoods of the white, sandy river bottom. The doves loved the place to loaf and flutter around out of the main heat of the surrounding uplands. If you dropped one in there, you had to mark the exact weedstalk where it fell, and stride immediately for it, or you would lose it if you took your eyes off the spot. Doubles were out of the question.

I did that once, and marched right to a single sunflower stalk I used as marker, saw my bird, and reached down to pick it up when I noticed right next to my bird a cottonwood leaf that was hiding just the head, only that, of an eighteen inch long prairie rattler. My hand almost touched the snake when I reached down to pick up the bird. Because of the leaf over its head, it never knew I was there. Because of my shotgun, a twenty gauge, Winchester model twenty-three double barrel (just the facts, ma’am, just the facts), it never did know.

One other time in that same country, Clint Hladik of Mannford, then eighteen years old and right out of high school, and I were shooting flight birds along a knee high, spike grass, water course the birds were using as a wind tunnel between feed fields. We were separated by two or three hundred yards, with no trees between us.

The birds didn’t seem to care that we were sitting on stools, hunched over, right out there in the wide open with nothing between us and Mexico on one side, and Canada on the other, except barbed wire fences. The wind talks to you in that country. Calm days in the Panhandle make the natives nervous.

About midway in the shoot, I saw Clint drop a bird, crippled, maybe, out in the middle of the water course. I watched him walk out to retrieve it, and then jump straight up in the air and shoot straight into the ground before I thought he had reached the spot the bird had landed. I was afraid he had blown the bird into smithereens, but I saw him reach down and pick it up and return to his stool and finish out his limit.

When we met at the truck for a cold pop, and a quick recount of our birds at the end of the shoot, Clint waited ‘til the very end to pull out of his game bag a fifty-two inch long (minus the head) prairie rattler. We measured the snake right there at the truck.

It had struck him in the leg as he waded the grass for the cripple, and only one of its fangs had struck him, hooking the outside, knee high, seam of his hunting pants. That’s what had caused him to leap into the air, shaking the snake loose, and then shoot into the ground.

Clint has an eighteen year old son of his own now, Ky (short for Kaiser), a pretty good catcher for Bethel High School. This past winter, Ky made for me a hand braided, nylon cord lanyard for my duck and goose calls. It easily has a hundred dollars worth of labor in it, but it’s not for sale.

They say life is full of funny little coincidences, right? What if that rattler’s aim had been an inch more to the right? Would I have gotten my lanyard, twenty years later?

Clint, by the way, preserved the rattler’s hide. He still has it.

I still have the memory, or that one, anyway. I plumb forgot that dove season is just a month away.

Have you?

Copyright © 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen