Pheasants and Tigers

 

I found some the other day out in the Oklahoma Panhandle a little southeast of Guymon.

I hauled a travel trailer out there and parked it in a RV park just west of town, set up, called Jack Test and his sons Bryon and Ben, put a pot of coffee on, and sat back to see what would happen. It was cold outside.

While Pam was battling ice and trees crashing down all over the yard back home along the Arkansas, our weatherman in Amarillo was calling for blowing and drifting snow out yonder along the wild Beaver River. Kiowa country in the old days, Jedediah Smith died not far from here surrounded by Comanches back in 1836. I have always liked hunting country smoked up by the gun battles of history.

I was about to the bottom of the first cup of coffee when Bryon called back with a set of plans to put some cock pheasants in the pan. Spike The Wonder Dog and I were to meet the Test boys and their dogs at Jack's upholstery shop on Fourth Street, and "caravan" outside of town to an ambush site reported to be swarming with more pheasants than any white man had ever seen.

The spot, about a 10-minute drive from town, was an irrigated wheat field grown over in late summer sunflowers and weeds. During the summer it had been irrigated with a center pivot sprinkler system that travels around the field in a circle and leaves the four corners of the field both uncultivated and unwatered.

Those corners become pheasant heavens because of the dense weed growth and untrammeled cover left there after the harvest of the irrigated portion of the field. The weedy corners provide the birds hiding cover right next to an unending food supply, waste grain on the ground, and are small enough for two or three men and a dog or two to work them effectively.

It takes an army of pheasant hunters to work the big, irrigated middle of a crop field. I have never enjoyed hunting pheasants with an army. Give me a small weedy corner and a dog or two any day.

My dog Spike is a lab, and while he doesn't point, he quarters close and vacuums the cover for birdy scent with a chokebore nose that puts the birds up well within range when he finds them. You need to watch his tail. That part of him gets "birdy" just like it does on a regular pointing dog. Watch the tail and be ready.

Pheasants will run out of the opposite end of any patch of cover that hunters enter if there is not something there to stop them. The standard method of stopping pheasants in cover so that they flush within gun range, is to place hunters at the opposite end of the cover being entered. That way somebody should get a shot at the birds trapped between the converging hunters. That's always the plan, anyway. It works often enough. A dog or two working the cover between walkers usually puts into the air birds that would otherwise be passed by.

Jack dropped Ben, Spike and me at one end of a weedy corner and rapidly drove to its other end where he and Bryon were to act as "blockers". Good plan.

I saw rabbits and hen pheasants moving through the grass ahead of me almost as soon as we got into the cover. There is a feeling of anticipation on a pheasant drive that I have always felt must approximate that felt on a tiger "shikari," or drive, in India. There is something in the grass just ahead of you, you just feel it, and it is going to jump up in your face any moment. If it is a tiger it could jump on you, bite you in the neck and kill you. It has happened. If it is a pheasant…. well, it probably won't, but none of us is taking any chances, and your finger knows exactly where the safety on your gun is located.

This is Kiowa country. Ol' Jed Smith bought the farm out here surrounded by Comanches. A man-eating pheasant? Don't bet against it.

Within 200 yards of the blockers, birds began to get up. Too far. Be ready. Rabbits, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, began to spring from the weedy corner on all sides. People were getting shots and were shooting. Nothing yet for Spike and me. No tigers, but maybe.

And then a bird was up, a long-tailed cock bird right in my face. There was a gull white ring around its neck separating its purple head from its russet-red body, and I saw that clearly, see it now, even, and that's what I swung the barrel of my gun ahead of and pulled the trigger.

The bird went down, killed cleanly within 40 yards. I don't often shoot that well. It hit so hard in the harvested wheat, it bounced twice.

Spike and I arrived and stood over it at almost the same moment. I cradled the bird in my hands and let Spike get a good snootful of its belly feathers. He seemed to like it, better than last September's doves, even.

To our left there was more shooting as the drive finished, and I turned in time to see two birds falling at once. But no tigers.

Oklahoma's pheasant season runs through January 31st. The limit is two cock birds a day. Check the regulations for specific applications. Be ready for…. anything.

Copyright © 2007 Conrad M. Vollertsen