This story, “The Lost Covey,” appeared in the November 1948 issue of Outdoor Life.
When we drove back around to the southeast corner of the big farm and put Jake out of the car, Cap told him to go on out and locate the fence-line covey. Then we counted our quail and put them in the car.
Now, if anybody had told me I would walk around a farm with an eighty-year-old man and shoot with him on two coveys and come out a bird behind, I’d have laughed at him. Yet there I was with six birds in my bag, while Cap had seven. And the funny part was, I didn’t feel a bit humbled. I thought I was doing all right. For I was hunting quail in the hill country of Texas for the first time in my life. And besides, Jake and Cap (who was once a Texas Ranger and used to drive cattle up the old Chisholm Trail) made quite a combination.
Jake took off across the southeast corner of the field, working through Johnson grass for a while, next crisscrossing an abandoned field of corn that cattle had beaten down to stubble, then swinging downhill and working toward the little creek — “branch,” these central-Texas people call it — at the bottom of the valley.
As I stood at the fence and watched, Cap said, “That’s funny — they should have been in that field at this time of day.”
Jake worked off to our right, then kept fairly close to the fence line all the way up to us. He greeted Cap again, then went on to our left and circled back down into the valley. We still stood, just watching, and to me that was an odd way of hunting. In the ranch country I’m used to, you stay close to your dog or you may lose him. I’ve had a dog hold a covey until his eyes were bugging out while I hunted all over the country for him. But here we merely watched.
“He’ll find ’em,” Cap said.
“How do you know they’re not across the road?” I asked, pointing to the farm behind us.
“They stay on this farm,” Cap said, as though he were talking about chickens. Well, maybe Cap was right, but Jake couldn’t seem to find the covey, and I suspected it actually was across the road. Still, from what I’d already seen that day I decided to take Cap’s word for it.
I acquired Cap and Jake when I abandoned my old homeland in the Rio Grande country not long ago and moved up into the hills of central Texas. As we pulled up in front of our new home my wife looked at the house and said, “It’s small but we’ll be comfortable.” And just then I heard a dog bark.
“That sounds like a pointer!” I exclaimed.
We got out of the car and my wife and son and daughter headed for the house, while I made tracks for the high board fence between our new home and the house next door. Sure enough, a big pointer was there in the yard. He put his paws high up on the fence and greeted me, the way a bird dog ought to greet a man who’s spent a long span of years hunting quail. I reached through the fence and patted him on the head by way of introduction.
“This is indeed a pleasure,” I said to the pointer. “You and I must get better acquainted.”
“Come help me arrange the furniture,” my wife called from the door.
“You ought to see the eyes on this one,” I said. “They’re deep-set and they show confidence and intelligence and determination —”
By that time my wife had grabbed me by the arm. “We’ve moved into a new home,” she said. “Out of respect to the family, you should at least look at it.”
As soon as I could I got back out in the yard and noticed an old man talking to the dog. I figured he was probably the father of the man who owned the dog. But he was Cap, and the dog was Jake, and Jake is Cap’s dog. And Cap’s keen blue eyes light up so, when he starts talking about hunting, that you figure he’s forty, not eighty.
“I’ll stay young as long as I can follow Jake,” he told me. “When I can’t follow him any more — well, by that time maybe he’ll be slower,” he added with a twinkle in his eyes. I think he’s confident he’ll outlast Jake and end up hunting with one of Jake’s grandsons.
Cap and Jake and I opened the season together. A stiff north wind was blowing as we took off, Cap carrying a little 20 gauge double-gun which he had just bought. I caused him to spend the money for that one — not by anything I said, but because I showed him the .410 slide-action gun I use on quail. After he hefted it and then picked up his ancient 12 gauge he decided to get himself a 20. “Might speed up my shooting a little,” Cap said, dismissing the thought that difference in carrying weight had anything to do with it.
Jake and Cap know their birds in this farmland country — largely because they go out now and then before the season and inspect the situation at first hand. They know just how many birds there are, on a farm, and about where they are — or should be — at a certain time of day. Where I had always hunted, you find coveys where you find them, and if they’re not there you simply move on.
“We’ll find our first covey, sixteen birds, around the abandoned peach orchard there by the shack,” Cap said as we climbed through the fence. Jake was heading for the orchard too, although he worked upwind through some Johnson grass and skirted the edge of an old sorghum patch just to be sure.
When almost 100 yards from some heavy grass that bordered the orchard he threw his head high in the air, as though trying to reach up for something, and began weaving in, the way a real bird dog does when he winds a covey a long way off. It was fascinating to watch him follow that invisible scent, working slower and slower until he put each foot down deliberately and softly, then came to a dead halt.
Cap and I eased ahead, Cap with his pipe gripped between his teeth.
The covey got up just beyond the edge of the grass, and farther away than I expected. As usual, I was too eager on the first shot and missed clean. Then, as part of the covey swung to my right, I leveled on the tailender and managed to scratch him down. Cap, on my left, fired only once. He took his time and dumped a cock right at the edge of the orchard.
“That’s the covey with sixteen birds,” Cap said.
“I have the ones spotted that flew this way,” I told him. “They’re just this side of the creek.”
“We better go after the others first. They lit over in that grass, and Jake’s after them,” Cap said. So we followed along after Jake, and he nailed a single.
“Your bird,” Cap said.
“No, no, Cap,” I objected. “I’m hunting with your dog — you get the first.”
Cap yielded, and when the single got up he started to level on it. I thought he’d never shoot. He dumped the quail in a wad, just when I began to figure it was out of range.
Right after he shot, a single flushed wild in back of me, and I gave Cap a demonstration of the way I shoot sometimes. I emptied my .410 pump at that bird, and he’s still flying. I was going to smack him down quick and I swung past him, then tried to come back on him for the second shot and was wide again. The third shot merely showed that I was annoyed.
Jake found another single not far away, and Cap insisted I take it, since he didn’t count the wild bird as a real shot. But two quail got up instead of one. I blasted the first before he had time to wonder which line of flight he was going to take, then I automatically swung on the other and was about to let fly when he dropped. Cap, that time, had got in a pretty fast shot. And so far he hadn’t missed.
“That makes five,” Cap said. “We can take five more out of this covey. Want to leave six for seed.”
This too was new to me. When you hunt quail on a 4,000-acre ranch, even if you set out to take only a certain number of birds from a covey, chances are you can’t do it. For in a short time you have three or four coveys scattered over the same general area, and the birds run when they hit the ground so that you don’t always know which covey you’re shooting on.
Cap’s idea of leaving six birds for seed, I thought, was fine. But pretty soon I began to suspect we’d leave eleven birds for seed; although I walked right to the spot where they landed, and Jake was ahead of me, he couldn’t find what was left of that covey.
Cap didn’t follow Jake and me down toward the branch. He turned and walked back to some high grass on the other side of the peach orchard. “I don’t think they’ll hold down in that mud,” he called. “They don’t like mud.”
“But they won’t come right back to where we flushed them,” I returned.
“You can’t tell,” Cap said.
I soon began to regret that I had followed Jake, for mud balled up on my feet until at times I had to pull my shoes free. And Jake and I didn’t find anything. Finally he headed up hill, racing through the cotton patch as though he knew he wouldn’t find anything there, then crisscrossing the patch of grass near where Cap stood.
I Couldn’t Believe It
When he came down on point I refused at first to believe him. It seemed incredible to me that those birds would have hotfooted it up those cotton rows right back to within 200 yards of where we flushed them. But Jake was holding. So I began lifting those balls of mud, and soon Cap and I moved in.
The birds were to our windward. With that strong north wind helping them along, four of them swung to my left and the others went near Cap.
I got my first quail in a hurry, but my second put on still more speed and I shot behind him.
I heard Cap grumbling a little about “shooting too doggone fast.” He’d missed his first shot, but dropped the bird on his second. So we had two birds — three to go. And instead of trying to follow the scattered birds, Cap proposed that we move on to what he called the lower-branch covey.
“I never saw quail back-track like that before,” I remarked as we started circling to come in on the far side.
“They don’t like mud,” Cap said. “With the ground like it is down at the far end of the cotton patch, they seek out high places — dry cover.”
The going was tough on Jake, for he had mud on his pads and mud up to his belly, and he had almost literally to plow through the Johnson grass at times. But he kept at it, and at the far edge of an old grainfield he ran smack into a covey. He was going downwind and he had the birds nailed close.
Cap and I started for him. I had trouble holding myself in check, for I was afraid the birds, being so close to Jake, would get up. And they did. The whole covey flushed just before we got in range. They flew down into the valley and settled near a row of willows.
“Do we wait here until they run back up the hill, or go after them?” I asked.
“They’ll stick there,” Cap said. “That little ridge with the trees is not so wet.”
We took our time getting there because we had to — the mud was balling up on our feet. Jake reached the willows long before we did, and had a bird waiting for us when we arrived.
Cap nailed him. Then quail began to get up the way I love to have them — in ones and twos. A bird would take off and one of us would drop him. Then I’d slide another shell in my gun, hoping nothing happened until I got it safely home, and a brace of them would get up. Then Cap would reload and here would come another quail. We stopped trying to decide whose turn it was to shoot. We just shot.
We stood in that one spot and downed six birds out of a covey of fourteen.
“Let’s go on to the fence-line covey,” Cap proposed. “Then, late in the season, if the going isn’t so good other places, we’ll have enough left to get a small bag, maybe, right here on the farm.”
Back at the car, Jake leaped to his place in the bed of the jump truck and we circled the farm and stopped by the southeast fence line to wind up the day working over the quail in covey No. 3.
But as you know from what I said at the start, Jake couldn’t find them. For almost an hour we stood there watching him work out that entire end of the farm. I became convinced the birds weren’t there, but Cap said he knew dog-gone well they were. Finally, however, deciding Jake had worked enough for one day, he blew his whistle and Jake turned and started in.
Jake Knew Better
Cap and I were putting away our guns when I happened to look back. Jake wasn’t in the truck — he was trotting down the road, holding close to the fence.
“Jake’s decided to leave us,” I said, pointing. Cap called but Jake never turned. He just kept on until he was about 300 yards from us. Then he turned suddenly, facing the fence, and came to a halt.
“Well, dog-gone my cats!” Cap said. “He’s got that covey.”
“He acted as though he knew where they were,” I put in.
“Shucks, I forgot about the wind,” Cap grinned. “He couldn’t wind them from the other side — should have sent him along the road in the first place.”
Cap and I took our guns and headed for Jake. Evidently the birds were in the weeds right by the road. They didn’t want to move. And when they did they came out almost straight up, and in two waves. It was getting late and the light wasn’t too good, but the birds showed against the sky.
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We got two apiece. It wasn’t such good shooting as it sounds, for we reloaded between the two waves of birds and Cap shot three times and I shot four times. Still, we got four birds, which gave us a grand total of seventeen for the day — nine for Cap and eight for me.
And when we put those four birds in with the others I felt a little silly, coming in second fiddle to a man eighty years old. But on thinking it over, I decided I had done right well.
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