Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
We finished hunting an hour or so before lunch on that final day out east of Eden (a nod to Mr. Steinbeck), along a little creek with no name that flows down a long wooded hollow from the north. Chuck needed to leave early to get back home, and Matt had to finish packing for the trip that he and Dan were making to the World Championships of the Bird Dog Challenge in Meriden, Kansas. And so as they left the lodge and headed off the ridge in opposite directions, Dan Torgerson and I sat in the dining room enjoying a leisurely lunch with Arthur Dick, the owner of Willow Oaks Plantation where we had spent the last four days gunning bobwhite quail and ringneck pheasants. The five of us had just finished a great morning afield, and I was fully prepared to start back myself when Arthur had a thought, turned to Dan and me and said, "Look, just because Chuck and Matt and I are cutting out early doesn't mean you two guys have to. Why not stay and hunt this afternoon?" I looked at Dan, whose gear was already loaded up for his and Matt's trip to Kansas, and he looked at me, and an hour later we were on our way back out into the sprawling valley for one last afternoon on the edge of Eden. W illow Oaks Plantation sits five miles east of Eden, North Carolina overlooking the rivers and ridges and rolling foothills of the southern Blue Ridge mountains. The landscape and habitat here are distinctly different from the quail plantations of the deepsouth, more like the country a few miles northwest of here where I grew up in pursuit of squirrels and rabbits and deer and, of course, bobwhite quail. For the last couple of decades I had grown accustomed to southern Georgia's legendary plantation belt with its longleaf pines, live oaks, Spanish moss and endless expanses of golden sedge where you can walk for hours and days and even lifetimes and hardly ever change elevation. But now it was as though I had come full circle, home to a country that was deeply etched into my soul, a rolling and richly textured landscape of beech and oak and sweetgum, hickory, sycamore and loblolly pine. There was clover and chickory and partridge pea, with long wooded ridges and deep meandering valleys and creeks that reverberated in my memory like echoes of childhood. Built in 1818, the beautiful main house overlooks most of the plantation's 2,000 acres of lush gamefields. Reflecting the simple, clean lines favored in rural plantation homes in North Carolina since before the American Revolution, the beautiful home is now a popular venue for weddings and corporate meetings. S P O R T I N G C 122 L A S S I C S