Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/769056
72 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S Writers are fond of generalizing about the habits of game, and I have done some plain and fancy generalizing myself. I honestly thought I knew about as much about the habits of Gambel's pretty quail as anyone. Yet that day I had to discard practically everything I had learned from tramping over the deserts for nearly 30 years. Those birds were Gambel's quail in form, in color, in calls; but in action, they were like bobwhites. Hunting them was bobwhite hunting in a Mexican environment. One field had been planted to wheat, and it must have contained six or seven coveys of from ten to 20 birds each. Juan had harvested it with a hand scythe, and the stubble was a good six inches high— high enough to conceal the feeding birds and also to make them fairly hard to find when we grassed them, unless we kept our eyes open. Those birds did not run when they heard us coming, as Gambel's so often do. Instead, they hid and burst out from beneath our feet when we were almost ready to step on them. Sometimes they flew over into an adjoining field, but usually they fanned out, scattered, and hid again in the same wheat stubble. O rdinarily, the quail of the deserts flush at from 20 to 30 yards; sometimes, when they are wild and the ground is quite bare, from 35 to 40. These birds exploded at our shoe tops. Bobwhite hunting? Nothing else! And for the first time in my career, I longed passionately for two things almost no Southwestern hunter ever buys—a really good bird dog and an open-bored gun. Used to longer flushes, I ruined the first three birds I took out hunted. If they did pot something now and then with a rusty old single-barreled shotgun, it was a cottontail or jackrabbit, never a quail or a dove, since they didn't have the skill to hit the birds on the wing and felt it a waste of money to shoot them. Mexicans of their class stew up everything with chile, garlic, and onions anyway, so they think jackrabbit meat is just as good as quail, and one shell gets far more of it. The only time I felt Juan's downright disapproval was one day when he showed me a closely huddled covey that I could have practically exterminated with one shot. I refused to shoot, and he showed plainly that he thought I should have my head examined. Those milpas were really lovely, a fit setting for hunting the smartest, gamest bird in the Southwest. The big, feathery cottonwoods along the ditches were just turning then, flaunting great masses of clear, bright yellow against the transparent blue of the southern Arizona sky. Scarlet strings of chile hung against the light-brown adobe houses, and the fields were checkerboards of green and gold. W hen we left the adobe of Juan and Mercedes that first day, we hadn't gone more than 50 yards when we flushed a covey out of an ancient cottonwood overgrown with grapevines. I had heard about such things before—or, rather I had read about them in stories of hunting bobwhites and ruffed grouse—but never before had I seen Gambel's quail eating grapes. But I was warned, and when, 50 yards or so farther on, another covey burst out of a brush pile, we both went into action and got three.