Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/742011
106 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S Editor's Note: THE GREATEST QUAIL HUNTING book EvER "My Health is Better in November" is among a big covey of articles in The Greatest Quail Hunting Book Ever, scheduled for release by Sporting Classics in early November. This fascinating, 400-page anthology will feature 35 stories from those halcyon days when sporting gentlemen pursued the noble bobwhite quail with their favorite shotguns and elegant canine companions. The book opens with compelling tales by the literary giants from quail hunting's golden era, including Nash Buckingham, Robert Ruark, Havilah Babcock, Archibald Rutledge, and Horatio Bigelow. The second section presents reminiscences by sporting scribes of the modern era, among them Jack O'Connor, Gene Hill, Joseph Greenfield, Dave Henderson, and Mike Gaddis. The third section is comprised of unforgettable short stories on quail hunting and bird dogs by James Street, Bob Matthews, Dan O'Brien, and Caroline Gordon. The Greatest Quail Hunting Book Ever will be published in two editions: Collector's Edition, hardcover with dust jacket, $40, and Deluxe Edition of 300, leather-bound and signed by co-editors Jim Casada and Bob Matthews, $75. To order, call (800) 849-1004 or visit www. sportingclassics.com. I'm no Jeremiah lamenting his fortunes. I'm not complaining. I'm just explaining. And all I am asking is a little consideration for the state of my health between hunting seasons. I'm tired of having my every complaint met with the same wifely reception, namely: "Oh, you'll get over it when the hunting season opens. Now don't tell me that drying the dishes and mowing the lawn affect your neuritis when you can tote a shotgun all day. Yes, I know. Sitting up in church gives you lumbago. Moving a trunk to the attic gives you lumbago. Pulling morning glories out of the garden gives you lumbago. Waxing the floor gives you lumbago. Yet day after day you can hunt your dogs to death, and I never hear 'lumbago' once." See what I mean? I repeatedly tell my wife that hunting is different. That it is also self-sustaining, since in quail season I save enough on doctor and medical bills to pay all field expenses, which is the gospel truth. But as a college freshman wrote: "It's like water on a duck's back— in one ear and out the other." Is your health seasonal, too? And do you feel qualified for membership in the Order of Misunderstood Husbands? If so, you can send in your dues and call me brother, for I am secretary and treasurer, president and chairman of the board. n whim of fortune or skullduggery of chance became a white-collar man. I am a country boy who wound up in the city, and it goes hard with me. For 25 years my dear wife has been trying to make a gentleman out of me. I dream of a springy sod beneath my feet, a nip of autumn in the air, and of a lemon-eared pointer loping across the golden broomstraw while I pound the pavements or sit behind a desk and tell hundreds of people I'm glad to see them. But don't waste your sympathies on me. That pavement-and-desk routine is just for nine months of the year. During the hunting season I am a rebel and a renegade, away from the job so much that I stand in imminent danger of being fired. I always leave full instructions for my successor, just in case. Yes, I get quail hunting aplenty for three whole months, and that's the only time I don't feel bad when I get up and worse as the day progresses. Some of you who fish and hunt are probably like that, too. We spend nine months of the year waiting for the other three. We are children of the earth. When they try to civilize and regiment us, we fret and fume. Our colons become spastic, our pancreatic juice becomes unhappy, and our old chronic ailments go to work on us. We are not unlike the Titans, the earthborn giants of mythology who were invincible in battle only as long as their feet were planted on the good earth. bobwhite quail vignette by bob kuhn–courtesy the remington collection