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82 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S heartstrings, too. You want a great wild bobwhite hunt? Brush up on your Spanish. Largemouth bass rule the fishing world. On bass pro tours, they infect even the best-educated Yankees with Southern drawls. You want a ten-pound big-mouth? Put Mexico on your bait-bucket list, and mark its wet places on a map. A place that has all three—ducks, bobwhites, and largemouth bass—exerts tremendous pull on sportsmen. Think redheads, single malt Scotch, or the Dutchman's gold. Mexico is a tractor beam for sportsmen. We're going, bad water and banditos be damned. Our trip began the day before. We land in South Texas on a Friday afternoon. My guns, tackle, and clothes do not. I'm really pissed. How can an airline lose my stuff on a one-stop flight? Realizing it's almost certainly hopeless, I make the call E ight hundred feet below, God has scorched the earth. Brambles, briars, cacti, and jagged rocks line rutted, dusty trails that lead north behind us, toward the border. It appears that we are flying over Hell. I'm sick. And the airplane I'm in is trying to kill me. There's a perfectly good reason for being here, however— flying over this 150-mile stretch of Mexican backcountry, so let me begin at the beginning: Ducks do strange things to those who hunt. We travel to the ends of the earth, spend huge sums of money, and endure horrendous weather to hunt and shoot them, knowing full well that a chicken plucked from a Wal-Mart rotisserie tastes better. You want to shoot a lot of ducks? Try a freshwater impoundment in Mexico. Bobwhite quail, that storied little bird pursued by gentlemen who insist on proper attire and good manners, using expensive dogs and even more expensive shotguns, they tug at our We fly over an unforgiving, thorn-spiked landscape in search of ducks, bass, and bobwhites. The chief export here is marijuana, the national pastime is drunk driving, and even the lizards don't like the water. What could possibly go wrong? By Duncan Grant