The wild rice is from the home office, grown and harvested by members of the Ojibway Nation near the farthest reaches of our ruffed grouse hunting. Soaked overnight, the black grains now simmer in chicken broth under tight security of a heavy lidded cast iron pot.
Just the right number of filleted dove breasts rest in a sweet marinade, and the vegetables are diced and separated into bowls that allow for a fast stir fry. Two bottles of Hypothesis wine are posed on the sideboard, a rich cabernet sauvignon that earned four thumbs up last summer from the Gil and Vicki Ash’s OSP Shooting School and Late Night Institute of Wine Tasting.
The freezer bags of dove breasts in the top of my refrigerator are all labeled in Magic Marker. Usually, it's a date and a count of dove breasts. Sometimes there's the name of a dog that had a particularly stellar hunt. The bag I pulled for tonight’s meal read "One Perfect Day. Jim’s Elk story. Juan, Boots, Loretta. Wind. Hawk. Double."
I peer out into the gathering winter’s dark. It’s an hour before my guests are to arrive. I am glad for the time, because I want to go back there for a bit, back to that One Perfect Day…
The patch was played out. Between the doves, turkeys, deer, and finches, most of the seed was gone from the long stretch of sunflowers planted in May . I’d disked it lightly a final time, preparing for a winter cover crop of wheat. That ancient John Deere disc had exposed a fair bit of seed. Over several days, doves had sifted back on to the hilltop, swooping in to vie with chatty hordes of finches for one last big feed.
I’d put a call in to my friend Juan (registered name “John C. McGaughey, III,” call name “Juan”), then headed back outside to move gunning stands below the patch, opposite where we’d set up in the early season. Resident birds had made us there, establishing flight lines at the very edge of shotgun range as the season wore on. We’d had almost no shooting the last time out.
This overcast day with chilly winds and light rain spread vicious rumors of winter. For the past week, there had been an almost palpable quickening to the rhythms of the old farm. New scrapes were appearing along the fence line as whitetail bucks staked their territory. Every night now, there were deer in the gnarly stand of volunteer apple trees, cleaning up windfall, stretching to reach fruit still on the tree. Both grey and fox squirrels were almost manic, gathering what had been a heavy mast crop.
I am gathering gear when the call comes in from Montana, our old blue grouse hunting friend Jim Stein sharing hair-raising tales of his successful elk archery stalk. Besides being a working cowboy and elite fly fishing guide, Jim is one of the most hard-core and athletic Hunter’s Hunters I’ve known. Since his last English setter passed on, he has turned more to big game, especially with the ultra-fast compound bow he shoots year ‘round, foiling the deep Montana winters by joining a very competitive “TechnoHUNT” league that shoots indoors at a baffling array of sporting clays-like hunting scenarios. He sounds almost relieved, with the freezer finally stocked with wapiti. “Now I can relax and concentrate on pronghorns,” he crows, reporting in from a ranch where he hoped to fill his antelope tag. I tell him he needs to be here for the final dove shoot, but the phone cuts out, Jim’s pickup probably headed down along a coulee where the deer and the antelope play.
I ring off feeling an urgency that isn’t usually part of our dove shooting, mostly because we have traditionally left these spike-tailed rockets for the ruffed grouse woods or pheasant fields by now. Jim’s call was a reminder that the shank end of our hunting season was hurtling past like doves in a tailwind. Today would be our last go at what has become our favorite shooting challenge.
Reluctantly, I leave the less-than-six lb. 16 gauge I’ve used through the autumn, the spiteful little loads of ¾ ounce English 7’s accounting for nearly all the doves I’ve taken. Juan has been shooting a 20-bore Guerini Magnus; today, to take birds as they come, most at some range, both of us will have 12-gauges in the gunslips, his a Beretta Onyx with 28” barrels and after-market Briley tubes in Modified and Light Modifield. My choice will be my regular sporter, the redoubtable “Loretta Beretta,” a 30” over-under choked the same way. We are both nearly out of the fine one ounce RIO Elites we’ve shot so much; today, we’ll mix them with the very good light-shooting and nice-priced Fiocchi Shooting Dynamics numbers, one ounce 7and ½’s.
It is nearly 4pm when Juan and I park the truck well away our hunting spot. We slip through the woods to our stands in the hope of not flushing birds already feeding. As I settle the dog and arrange my shooting kit, I notice that the few birds in the air are, as we say in track and field, “wind-aided.” They also seem “winter-addled.” They stream over the patch as if the thread-bare food plot isn’t even there.
Juan grasses the first mourning dove with a fine crossing shot, well-out. His wingshooting passport boasts Argentina and Uruguay stamps over a representative pile of whitewing feathers. When Juan is on, he simply is the best of our local cadre of dove gunners.
That this is to be one of those stellar days becomes apparent a few minutes later when two birds get the jump on him overhead and from behind. They are going away screamers, rising over the patch. Juan is more than forty yards downhill, a difficult angle. I see his hands start to move, but I am sure the birds are lost…just as the report from that good Beretta rolls along the hillside. The left hand bird folds high over the patch and bounces in the dirt. Under my breath, I count the paces as my friend hikes out for the retrieve; I will not embarrass him by reporting how many he stepped off, but I can say, given speed, angle and conditions, it was one of the great shots I’ve ever witnessed on mourning doves.
There are long lulls between birds in flight, making a cold late afternoon on stand even colder. My attention span wanders. I consider checking my cellphone. I wonder if there is college football on TV this night. I look down at the gun across my lap and remember the trip to Orvis in Manchester when Jack Dudley took me into the wood drying room and let me pick out the stock blank with the deep sensuous whorls of figure that would become the soul Loretta Beretta. She's a Swiss Army Knife kind of gun that came with 20-gauge barrels on its 12-gauge frame, a configuration popular at the Orvis Shooting School. Later, I’d have 26” and 30” fitted to that same chassis, making her the all-'rounder those of us of a certain bent think we "need." Once upon a time, a tight fiscal pinch and a pitcher of margaritas had me selling the gun to Juan who had always admired Loretta. I regretted more than the hangover the next day, only to be relieved a year or so later when another pitcher of margaritas and a fit of New Gun Lust claimed Juan.
As the Beatles once crooned, “Get on back home, Loretta.” Since then, she's been all over the country and to Mexico for game and clays; her receiver is silvered from all the handling she's had, and the 30" barrels are shot slightly loose. Now that we've retired from sporting clays, Loretta is best-loved along the late-season dove patch here at the farm.
Boots, the affable black Labrador inherited from the man who planted the first dove patch on this hill, has lost faith, abandoning the eager, “ears up” sit that is his usual pose on a dove peg and choosing to lie beside me. I lam no better, losing chances on a couple of hot wind riders, only because I am not ready.
Disgusted, I regroup, urging the dog up and beside me. Our routine is for me to croon “bird” when a dove hoves into sight, putting him on the qui vive so that the shot, when it comes, won’t be a surprise.
Boots came to us a gun shy basket case, the only dog we’ve successfully brought back from that heartbreak. It took a spring and summer, hundreds of pigeon flights, boxes of blank cartridge rounds and live shotshells, Juan at the trigger, me on the leash. Ultimately, the blood of generations of British gun dogs and a Labrador’s unquenchable burning passion to fetch and please were served. Boots works with an intelligent verve, the line he takes to a fall, absolutely uncanny.
Loretta Beretta folds a couple of what we call “dummy doubles”: birds that come like lagged sporting clays “report pairs.” Boots makes short work of the first of each. He’s worked only singles through the fall, and this lack of background has him just slightly off the mark on the second birds. But he is smart about circling to come back into the wind, using his nose to parse scent and make game.
When Juan kills a yet another really deep dove, it falls out of sight, well over the hill. I long down and see the dog’s laser focus. My old mentor Bob would have walked him at heel downwind of the fall, then sent him to hunt dead, conserving Boots’ energy and keeping the dog under a tighter rein.
Maybe it’s confidence; more likely it’s hubris. But I am going to send him from here on a chance for the longest retrieve Boots has been asked to make in his life. At his name and sweep of my right arm, he’s off like a black freight train, steaming further, further, further than I think he’s willing to believe the bird fell, plumb-line straight, disappearing over the rise.
He is gone longer than I think he should be. I am imagining the far side of the feed plot, the rough of uncut milo and sunflower and fox tail overlaid into a matted mess, and thinking I should go to him to help when Juan quietly says, “Well I’ll be damned.”
Boots come galloping over the crest of the hill, head high, dove cradled in that soft black mouth. Juan and I make fools of ourselves as we root him home. We know he has figuratively come a much longer way than just that hilltop to make a brag retrieve that will mark the day.
Toward the end, five shapes quarter in toward my stand. Boots sees them and sits taller as the trailing bird accelerates and suddenly lunges at the dove below. It’s the Cooper’s Hawk who has haunted this hillside for the past several weeks, and he just misses, banking high and wide as the four mourning doves break formation.
Rattled now, I try to get on the dove the hawk was after. Somehow I manage not to hurry the move, for once keeping the bird behind my gun barrels, my hands in sync with the flight. The shot comes without thought, the bird tumbling out of my vision.
Two doves pitch down with the dead one. The fourth twists almost straight up before arcing left to right. I have it now, slowing the bird in my vision just as someone else, it seems, pulls the trigger and makes the top barrel kill.
I break the gun, toss the empties in the bag and line Boots out for the retrieves. We are up against our self-imposed stop time, always anxious to “leave ‘em flying.” I look up to see John already folding his stool and scouring the grass for his empties. Back at the truck, we take stock. Combined we are one bird shy of a single limit, but we remember each shot, a perfect bridge from autumn into winter…
From his bed in the toasty farmhouse kitchen, Boots hears the first vehicle well before I see truck lights on the lane. It is Juan, early as usual, and the black dog whines to be let out. I open the storm door and stand waiting as Boots windmills his tail down the sidewalk to welcome his friend. In his wake is the frozen edge of a early winter’s night, an edge that will soften when Juan is inside, shucks hat and coat, and settles into his favorite chair to toast One Perfect Day.