Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/171258
hotguns S By Robert Matthews Right now the coming season lives only in our minds, and as we imagine it, all of our adventures will come to fruition and we'll shoot as we've never shot before. B y rough calculation, you should be reading this around the first of September, or maybe just a little bit later. Congratulations are in order! You have survived to begin another "season" – the season that we live for, you and I. It is the season of guns and dogs and birds and crisp frost-rimmed mornings and high mountain passes and low-country sorghum fields with coveys of quail around the edges and wispy gray clouds of snipe circling the wet spot in the middle. The season of good things. Things like the high distant stammer of mallards warily circling a set of deeks, and the Harley-Davidson rumble of a covey-rise. Like family and friends gathered round the fire, laughing over the response to "remember the time"? Rain. Snow. Things like seeing the fire return to old Sam's eyes as the aging pointer gives it one more try. Or Mike holding a freshly killed grouse and turning to gaze across the mountains in the hope that I won't see the tear. Since this piece is being written in the doldrums of summer, I'm just now beginning to imagine where, with luck and grace, you and I will be when you read it. Between here and there, I will have made the pilgrimage to Argentina, for a two-week marathon of birding with John Burrell's High Country Adventures. By the time you read this, we may have had an early season dust-up with the doves back home, as well. Soon after, there will be a trip to the distant blue mountains of the Rockies. The ostensible purpose will be to hunt elk, but as they say, a leopard never changes his spots and it's fairly certain that there will be a shotgun squirreled away in the duffel somewhere. I know the approximate location of a flock of blues that need to find their way into my frying pan or into my fire, and I think I'll help some of them get there. October should find me in South Dakota for pheasants, followed by a week or so chasing his lordship the ruffed grouse in Wisconsin. Around the first of November I should be exploring the dry side of Oregon where there are reported to be scandalous numbers of pheasants, as well as the odd hun or sharptail just waiting for me to arrive. Since the whitetails on my Georgia farm tend to get lusty around the middle of November, I guess that I need to come home around then. I recently saw my old friend, a wide-racked ten pointer standing in the shade of the big white oak that shelters the bend where Coldwater Creek wraps around the end of my back field. His rack was still in velvet, but I still recognized him. I hope we'll meet again. Of course, I'll stay for the holidays. I guess that the guns and dogs could use a rest by then. And the old man, too. At least until the bobwhite begin to call us to South Georgia in January and February. O nce again, the gun is the "piper" that leads us to the high lonely places, and it's a heck of a season that I've got planned. It involves a lot of shooting. And a lot of killing. Some may have trouble understanding that it isn't about the killing, but it truly isn't. The kill just makes it honest. It's not even about the chase. It's S P O R T I N G C 44 L A S S I C S