Appearances

I always thought of it simply as a hat.
In the days of my youth ‘cap’ meant a ball cap, preferably with Texas A&M embroidered on the front.
‘Hat’ meant stetson.
If worn, stained felt it meant shelter from the sun on hot days and protection from the sleet and rain of winter.
Clean, with sharp corners on the brim was for dances, dominoes and Shiner beers on Saturday nights.
Now, my hats are mostly worn and stained and reserved specifically for days afield. They are still just hats. At least until Chad Love rechristened them in a blog over at Mallard of Discontent.
Now, they are dork hats.
So, to defend how cool I am, I dove into my photos archives looking for proof.
I did find this cool old photo of my dad on a pheasant hunt wearing his dork hat.

Unfortunately, I personally was not vindicated. I found stacks and stack of photos of me looking like a complete and utter tool.
Dork hat indeed.
On a positive note, I did not find any photos of myself looking sunburned, cold, wet or otherwise more than mildly miserable.
So, I declare a hat victory for all dorks, not for coolness, but for utility.
I embrace my inner and outer dork.

– GM

Quickening

It has been shoved aside for months. Roughly. Put in a closet. Oiled perhaps, but discarded out of sight. And out of mind.
Then this morning you wake and there is snow up there. Last night–a Sunday–you were up at the best bar in America listening to live bluegrass and haunting lyric strained through the vocal cords of the prettiest undiscovered twenty year old talent in Montana. It rained while she sang and then this morning. Snow. Up there. High country snow in late August.
So long, you say, to the shortest summer on record. So long, you fickle minx. So long.
So to the closet, where it is pulled out, fondled, oiled again. And the dogs twirl and two-step and jitterbug. It is here. It is here. Now. Upon us. The spring has been wet, the summer reluctant. No matter. The best of all seasons is on us like the warmth of a September sun at the beginning of a day out with shotgun and bird dog. The sun looks sharper. The day brighter. The sky bluer, crisper.
Hello. Where have you been?

– TR

Things that crack us up.

1) “Pointing” Labs.

2)  That tired old line about your eyes being side by side so your barrels should be too.

3) Woodcock.

4) Breeks.

5) Chat board debates between ruffed grouse and pheasant hunters.

6) Peta

7) Ted Nugent

*Disclaimer: This post is not intended to be taken seriously. We have friends who swear by their “pointing” labs and even some who git all giddy over the notion of chasing what look to me like landlocked sandpipers. Please feel free to post things that crack you up as well, as long as they don’t include making fun of real pointers or good over/unders, ‘cuz that shit ain’t funny…

Batten Down the Hatches

I saw a quail last week.

Big whup, Tosh, you live in Texas.

You’re right, but it was the quail’s location within Texas that threw me into an extended ponder.

It was a single hen bobwhite, and she was standing in a little sandy patch next to the road. She looked healthy, and when she scurried into the grass I waited to see if she had chicks or a mate. It’s nesting season, you know.

Turns out she was single. A single bobwhite hen on Mustang Island, Texas. A single bobwhite hen standing next to the main beach road in Port Aransas. Sure, she had the dune grasses for cover, and I’ve seen wild coveys, before on the Texas barrier islands. But not here; not twenty yards from the surf and in the middle of town. I’ve never seen a quail mingling with the sunburned land whales, and the yowling rednecks, and the Natty cans, and the empty Funyon bags, and the cigarette butts, and the saggy-pants Latinos. A seagull can swallow a jumbo shrimp on a treble hook in one try; a quail chick wouldn’t stand a chance, for chrissakes.

Bobwhites are resolute little critters, and given a bit of fortune I suppose she could pair and mate and pull off a clutch in the midst of all that humanoid flotsam.

No fortune came her way, though. Hurricane Alex roared in the next afternoon, and the spot where I saw the little wayward hen got four feet of tide, sixty knot winds, and five inches of rain.

There’s a real estate office in Port Aransas that schlepps rusted-out condos and moldy beach houses. Their sign out front speaks that age-old axiom of real estate success.

Location. Location. Location.

– TB

The MOF Whiskey Review

Matt Crawford:

I love Redbreast Irish Whiskey for a few reasons:

* It’s immensely “flaskable.”
* You can drink it in coffee, too
* You can call it Scotch and piss off the Scotch snobs

Greg McReynolds:

Famous Grouse

A better bargain-priced, blended scotch you will not find.
The grouse is ideal for drinking when it’s raining, especially while surfing gunbroker.com or reading the greatest American novel ever written.
I was drinking it when I met my wife, so it’s pretty classy to boot.
Plus, it’s named after the king of gamebirds.

Tosh Brown:
If we are truly products of our respective environs, then that pretty much makes me a beer swiller. It’s hot where I live, and I rarely find the need to pull warmth from a bottle.
But, if I had to pick a favorite distilled product, it would have to be a Macallan single malt. A buddy gives me a bottle for Christmas each year, and I usually try to make it last until the next one arrives. I suppose owning a bottle of pricey scotch could spawn guesses that I might be more of a highbrow “Scotch Snob” than I appear. That’s why I make a point of leaving the red bow and the gift card attached.

Bruce Smithhammer:
I’ll admit to enjoying the occasional bottle of Laphroaig, if only because how often do you get the opportunity to simulate falling face down in a peat bog and not being able to get up?
I also used to dabble in the Irish Whiskeys, until an evil voice at the bottom of a bottle of Jameson’s whispered in my ear that 2nd story balcony railings are great places to dance. Surgery and 6 screws in my ankle later, I have an immense amount of respect, mixed with fear, for residents of the Emerald Isle.
But lately my tastes have gone firmly in the Highland direction, and I can’t get enough of the fine products emanating from the Glenmorangie distillery, even when I’ve been repeatedly told that I’ve had, “more than enough.”

Blood lust

I’m going to admit to a blood lust. I like to kill and I love to hate.
But only one thing in particular: starlings. Stinking, shitting, filthy starlings.
I stalk them in my bathrobe. They flutter and twitter about the eaves of my home and crap all over my porch. They tweet in nails-on-chalkboard tones while I sip my morning coffee and I slip up on them with a twenty and blast them while they sit. Sometimes I get out the twelve . . . really whatever is handy. The twelve sits upstairs where I can load fast and shoot from an open window. The twenty by the sliding glass door downstairs. It is work done in slippers on the front lawn, robe flapping. It’s good not to have neighbors.
A challenging wingshot, but I will take whatever shot there is. The dogs twist in circles, mistaking an uncased gun and a creeping owner for September partridge steppes. Little matter, for when I fell one of the stink birds with a load of sixes, they rush in and fetch, only to spit the mangled bird out.
I kill the parents first and then get a ladder out and pull four screeching nestlings out to drown in the creek while the setters dance happily.
A fella has got to do something with summer.

TR

There is little dignity for a bird dog posing next to a starling, but such is the off-season.

Expeditions in the city limits

I surreptitiously scan the rim, then the fence, looking for anyone with a badge, ticket book or binoculars. Seeing no one, I reach down and slip the leash from her head. She’s still waiting.
“Let’s hunt,” I tell her. There’s no whistle today and she rockets past the big white sign and its list of rules (No glass bottles. Dogs must be leashed. No hunting…) before she checks back. I hike up near the escarpment coiled leash in hand.
She knows there won’t be hups or yells, so she’s watching closely and only takes a few tenative steps after the big old jack she jumps.
Then she tightens her swing and I know they’re close even before I hear them. It’s a pair and when she puts them in the air, they stay low and only fly 50 yards or so before landing in a shallow wash not far from another sign listing the rules. Breathlessly happy, she comes to heel and I slip the leash over her head.
These are fat quail, gambels and scalies that thrive on sprinkler water and bird feeders before heading back to the basalt and cacti to hunker down at night. Like the patch of open space they inhabit on the fringes of the city, they straddle two worlds.
They shouldn’t be here. According to the big white sign, neither should we.

GM

Snakes in the grass

The solstice is weeks away, but the heat has arrived in New Mexico and the prairie rattlers are sun bathing. This guy was hanging out not far from my house last week. It may be the Hopi rattlesnake sub-species, but I’m no herpetologist and that’s only a guess.

It’s time to step carefully and keep the dog on a short rein.

GM

Sharp-dressed Bird

I really like sharptails. If we ever run out of bobwhites in Texico, I’ll probably move north and hunt them fulltime.

Looking, first, at some of the sharpie’s kinfolk, I’d classify the ruffed grouse as the haughty blue-blood of the clan. He frequents the upper east and he’s often chased by folks who smoke pipes and belong to gunclubs. The spruce grouse is the inbred mountain-man of the family. He’s dumber than a stump, and that’s usually where he’s standing and staring blankly when a shotgun points his way.

Between these two intellectual extremes, we have the sharptail. He’s the sodbusting prairie-dweller that wakes up each morning with a different M.O. When it’s hot and windy he’ll flush underfoot and give you a decent chance. On cold days he’ll jump from the grass when the truck door slams and fly out of sight. I like his furry little feets and the way he cackles when he flushes. It’s a nasal, mocking, staccato, yodel that reminds me of the grade school punk that always needed an ass-whooping, but never got one.

Most endearing, though, is the sharpie’s little stomping and spinning jiggy-jag that he does when the ladies of spring are around. Thanks to Dawson Dunning for shooting this incredibly cool footage. – TB