At least once a year, for over twenty years now, myself along with some old friends have made an annual pilgrimage to the great state of Texas. The Rolling Plains to be exact. I was a teenager when I started reading about Texas. More accurately, quail hunting in Texas. I was enamored to say the least. My love affair with bird dogs and wild quail started as a young boy. So, when I first read about hunting quail in Texas I was all in.
After I read my first magazine article about hunting wild quail in Texas, I read everything I could get my hands on. I simply could not get enough of the stories about the birds and the men who hunted them with hard going dogs. There has always been such great lore surrounding quail hunting in Texas. A seed was planted in my heart, but it would be many years before that seed ever sprouted.
I was just a kid in a small town in Georgia with little means to facilitate a hunting trip out west, but regardless, my dreams ran rampant. I continued to read all I could and talk to the handful of fortunate souls that had the luxury of going out there. The stories were vivid and burned very strongly in my mind.
My desire to be a part of that glorious affair, that could only be found in Texas only grew stronger with each passing year. I hoped, I prayed and I waited for what seemed like a lifetime. I often wondered if my dreams would ever come true. I started hearing about day leases in Texas and realized that maybe my dreams were in fact obtainable.
There were men from our area that had been going for a while and had learned where to go and what to do in Texas. I was all ears. I asked a multitude of questions about everything. It became apparent that maybe my dreams were about to come true. That very first year I went with the men that I hunted with since I was nine years old. I was thirty-three at the time and had never really been anywhere, much less a trip to Texas.
Sonny Lamb, Bill Rountree, Wayne Rountree and myself set out on a Sunday morning, headed for Texas. We had gas in the truck, a little money in our pockets and a box full of dogs in the back. We studied the atlas a fair amount and somehow, made our way to Texas. We were in Northeast Texas and I had made arrangements with a fellow to hunt. We hunted, found a few birds and saw our very first roadrunner. Beep-Beep Beep…..
It was fun, but somehow, I knew we had not reached the place we were meant to find. I talked with a friend who was hunting further west and we decided to head that way. We arrived in northwest Texas armed with a list of names on a sheet of paper torn from a legal pad. After a few calls I had us a ranch to hunt on for the remainder of the week. We hunted and found some birds. We stayed in a roadside motel in a little town that was about the size of Midville. Although the hunting that first year did not rival all of the stories I had heard for all those years prior, I knew we had found our spot. The place, the town we were destined to be.
There were many exciting conversations on the way home as we planned out our next trip. Even with all of our planning and anticipation, we were unable to go that following year. There were not many birds so we were made to wait once again, but good things do in fact come to those who wait.
The following year we had a plan to go back to that same little West Texas town. I had rented us a house and made arrangements with a rancher to hunt on his ranch. We were nervous, excited and felt a whole litany of other emotions as well, but we had once again found ourselves in what I simply refer to as paradise. It was heaven sent. It was orchestrated by God himself. We knew early on, us and the rancher, that our meeting was not happenstance. We became immediate friends and in the twenty years that have followed, our relationship has only grown. We became like family.
Over the years we have leaned on each other through some of life’s difficult storms and with each passing year we have only grown closer. So, every year we look forward to our annual trip, but it’s about way more than hunting these days. It’s about the bond we share with our Texas friends.
This year was no exception. The excitement was high and we could not wait to be back in Texas once again. The bird numbers were up and we couldn’t get there fast enough. It is a day and a half trip for us to get there. Getting there is fun itself. We made it back to our beloved little town once again. We changed clothes and went hunting that first afternoon after we visited with our friends. It was just like being home.
The weather in Texas can change in about thirty minutes and the next day it was cold, really cold, but we hunted. It was going to seven degrees that night and we decided not to hunt the following morning. After lunch it was a balmy fifteen degrees. We had to go! We started hunting and decided to drive to the far end of the pasture we were in and hunt back to the truck and call it a day.
As usual I was driving the buggy. When we got to the fence on the far end of the pasture, I fell off the buggy, unable to move my right side. My friends rushed to me. I said “I think I had a stroke”. (to be continued)
