Royal Flush

by Randy Lawrence

Dateline:  Somewhere in Kansas.  I was not an eyewitness.  

No matter.  The heavy breathing came through the text:

"All I heard was, 'Covey!' from somewhere overhead...as in 'straight up' overhead.  Steep dirt cliff.  No alternative.  Higher than I am tall.  Threw my empty gun over the top and climbed.  My friend, who'd had the birds blow up around him looked over to see me scrambling over the top, grabbing handfuls of grass to pull myself up on my hands and knees.  Picked up my gun and said, 'Which direction?' LOL."

Understand, Dear Reader, that this is one very keen Gun.  She has seen her share of covey rises and generally ambles/moseys to dogs on point, teetering always on the horns of the "Camera or Shot Shells/Shot Shells or Camera" dilemma. 

I say "teetering."  She loves to shoot second only to "loves photographing her setters in good country, standing game."  When she typed "No alternative," she meant it.  If the dogs are locked down on birds, she will get there to shoot a shutter or shoot her double gun...regardless of the obstacle.

My point being that she is decidedly not given to bursts of Marine Corps-like assaults on the high ground.

But we understand the hand-over-hand haul up that slope to where the quail had flushed.   There is something about a bevy of wild bobwhites hurtling out of the bunch grass that routinely inspires mad feats of otherwise unseemly behaviors.

Part of that rests in the fact we are ruffed grouse hunters by trade.  Our birds are most generally rolling thunder solo launches.  No matter how many trips we make to quail country or the years lived there, two dozen buzz bombs detonating out of the landscape never become commonplace.

We have seen reliably cool customers, some with only faint barrel bluing left just ahead of the forearm on a double shotgun they know far better than ever they did their first husband or wife, behave, when a covey flushes, as if a generous dollop of molten glass has been poured down their brush pants.  

In the motel the night before, we can whisper ourselves to sleep with the mantra  "Pick one.  Just pick one" - and still shoot in ways to suggest we'd have been just as well served pulling two shells from deep pockets and hurling them into the flurry of wing blur and shape shifts.

So rich, the word "flush."  Both Merriam and Webster remind us it's "to expose from a place of concealment."  The same word, they are quick to remind us, also describes the intense sensation of  blood rushing to one's face from exertion, excitement or, on occasion, embarrassment, all of which can derive from that first definition.

No matter how we parse it, Grouse Hunters travel to quail country for the covey rise.  For follow-up searches that give the dogs a chance on a single or two.  For the deep satisfaction of knowing when "enough" is "enough," understanding that the fragile treasure that is a bevy of bobwhite quail needs numbers to survive the winter.  For the rightness of whistling the dogs off surviving skulkers buried in the deep brush and hunting in another direction, praying someday we can come back to this place and be dazzled all over again in the raw thrill of a covey's flush.