I’ll call him Bud, because that’s what he was drinking, methodically draining each can and then tossing it on the ground before belching, heaving himself up from the cooler, retrieving another can and then plunking his ginormous ass back down with a sigh and a loud, yawping fart.

Bud was my hunting partner for the evening. We met quite by accident—if you call ignoring the unspoken rule of driving on to the next spot when you see a vehicle parked at this one—an accident.

Bud didn’t get that memo, you see, and as a result I was blessed with his company this fine evening. How lucky can one guy get, right?

I heard him before I saw him, stumbling and wheezing his way up the trail toward the stock tank—my stock tank—like a quivering, 300-pound bag of cholesterol, some 45 minutes before the end of legal shooting light, with beer cooler on one hand, shotgun in the other.

Bud did, however, have the courtesy to wait until those last forty-five minutes of legal shooting light to show up. Apparently Bud knew I only prefer company during the best part of the evening to have no company when you’re sitting on a dove spot.

If Bud noticed me as he jiggled his way past where I and the dog were sitting in the sage brush, he gave no outward indication. He—slowly and with much flatulence—walked past me, directly to the edge of the tank, where he dropped his cooler on the sand, opened it, grabbed a beer, closed it, and then plopped his ass down on top of it with a great sigh and yet another ripping fart. Bud was now ready to hunt.

Bud was swaddled from head to toe in the finest camouflage livery offered by the local WalMart sporting goods department. His Mossy Tree Erection 3D blended in perfectly with the vast stands of oaks not found out here on the treeless Oklahoma plains.

His plastic Dick Commander-endorsed shotgun (in matching Mossy Tree Erection 3D) was designed for just these types of Xtreme hunting conditions (sunny and mild, with a howling 8mph wind). When he stood up to grab another beer—which was often—Bud looked like a leafy bratwurst holding a branch. When he sat, his bulk spread out, turning Bud into a muffin-shaped oak tree sprouting from the top of a blue and white beer cooler.

When the dove started coming in a few minutes later, Bud, perched right on the edge of the tank some fifty yards from the nearest speck of cover, began shooting at them. Repeatedly, and from ranges well beyond the advertised claims of his special hundred-dollar Grim Reaper “XXtended Death” aftermarket choke tube.

Three-shot fusillade after three-shot fusillade of hyper-velocity XXtended Death lead rose up to meet the birds, only to fall softly back to earth, gentle as rain, with nary a feather cut. Soon Bud had a pile of spent hulls almost as large as one of his ass cheeks piled up next to his cooler.

After a few more minutes of watching Bud seed the surrounding prairie with spent shot, hulls, and beer cans, I decided to call it a day. Bud never acknowledged my presence as I rose and began walking back down the trail to the road. He just kept on playing that same three-note tune on the shotgun:

BamBamBam! Reload. BamBamBam!

When I got back to the truck, I was utterly unsurprised to see that Bud’s ride continued the evening’s theatre of overcompensation. His truck, lifted, chromed, bedazzled with giant, massively knurled tires, manly off-road accoutrements and festooned with menacing deer skull stickers (how did I know Bud would be a Boner Collector?) dwarfed mine, rising into the air like some great phallic “look at me” totem. Sigh. What the hell did I expect? A Subaru?

After letting the dog take a long piss on one of Bud’s custom wheels, I loaded him up, got in the truck and drove off with the notes of Bud’s grand finale riding the evening air behind us. BamBamBam! Pause. BamBamBam! Pause. And so on.

One evening a few days later, after the majority of the once-a-year yobs had expended all their promo shells, drunk all their beer and disappeared back to their natural environments (the bar, the couch, the county jail,) I hunted Bud’s stock tank again, expecting the worst.

There was no sign of Bud. Literally. Not a beer can. Not an empty hull. Not a candy wrapper. Every scrap of Bud’s presence had been picked up and carted off. What Bud had packed in, Bud had apparently packed out. The area around the pond was trash-free, littered only by naturally-occurring sandburs and cowshit.

Hell, maybe Bud hadn’t been such an asshole, after all. Incompetent, yes. Clueless, definitely. But perhaps not utterly hopeless and worthy of scorn. I even felt a tiny pang of guilt for letting the dog piss on his ridiculous expensive truck wheel.

I’ve run across plenty of slob hunters since then, but despite hunting that tank every year thereafter I never again encountered Bud following our one magical evening together.

But I like to think he’s still out there somewhere, ruining other people’s hunts with truly heroic levels of incompetence and slovenly behavior and then, inexplicably, cleaning up after himself.

Sometimes, people surprise you…

“Bobwhites remind me of Hungarian partridge, birds that run up mountains faster than mule deer, rise in front of a pointing dog with the same clamor of wings, feel just as soft in the hand, and have, when they glide across the prairie, the same wing set. If I could hunt only two species of birds they would be the gray-legged partridge on a canvas of infinite perspectives and the bobwhite quail in my backyard.”

Guy de la Valdene, For a Handful of Feathers

The schedule’s been a bit sporadic lately with a lot of work and a lot of travel, but I’m trying to get back to posting a photograph every Friday. And yes, once again it’s my favorite little native gamebird, with a twist on the standard “bobwhite posing on fencepost” theme. I promise I’ll start mixing it up a little more in the future, but this guy posed so nicely for me yesterday and I couldn’t very well snub his courtesy…

Royal hunting scene from Buda Castle, Budapest, Hungary.

I live in in a land of aching silence, and it suits me. We all choose where we are most comfortable, most ourselves, and when it came time for me to choose, I turned where most others did not, away from people and into the comfortable ruin of empty space, letting the currents of the wider world sweep silently past; unknown, unnoticed, and unsought.

Why? Why does anyone truly know what moves them, makes them feel like they belong, tells them they are home? There are the obvious answers, of course: Birds and dogs and wind and light and grass. Sky. Space. Distance.

These are the things that make me, me. For whatever reason the light of my soul feels diffused out here, filtered through a lens of my own imagining, pulsing on a wavelength only I can see as it scatters little pieces of myself into the endless, keening void of plains, prairies, desert; the “Horizontal Yellow” as the writer Dan Flores called it.

But — to paraphrase the old saw — no person or land is an island, and as much as I am rooted in my chosen place, leaving it occasionally to see the glow of the moon and the swirl of ancient water on the other side of the world is the best way to appreciate the importance of both here and there, and to understand both yourself as well as those who are different.

My wife and I first traveled to Europe over twenty years ago, and we’ve been back a number of times since (more so for my wife, a teacher who has led many student tours to Europe). I am not someone who is naturally comfortable in large groups or within large cities. I am both socially and physically claustrophobic to an extreme — and probably clinical — degree.

And yet I continue to go, eagerly, because I am fascinated with all that history, all that humanity; the palpable sense — obvious everywhere you walk — of the passage of all that ancient time, ancient events. To see the thousands of years of history and beauty and war and destruction etched so deeply into the face of the great cities and landscapes of Europe is to once again remind me that we are such a goddamned wondrous marvel, we humans, and such a goddamned curse.

I have learned, over the years that, with my misanthropic proclivities and aversion to tight landscapes, I can go about two weeks. Two weeks happily walking amongst the teeming crowds, hearing all those different languages, marveling at all those different sights and sounds, eating all those different foods, happily soaking in all that different-ness.

And then I hit a wall. I know when the wall starts approaching, because a few days before it arrives, I start looking around for a place not occupied by people, a place which offers a brief moment of silence, or if not silence in the midst of a city, then at least a few square feet of solitude for a bit. Just a little time apart to put enough in the tank to throw myself back into the ever-flowing human swell.

I will sit and think of the vast, unpeopled nothingness of the grasslands back home, where I can drive into the great, yawning chasm of horizon and never see another soul. I will think of the sound of wind through prairie grass, and the feeling of being such an insignificant speck, a single stipple, on the canvas of the land. These visualizations help me overcome the anxiety of being a single stipple, surrounded by millions of others, on the canvas of the fascinating, beautiful, but crowded places I visit.

My wife is used to these required momentary pauses, and since she is a thoughtful and understanding travel companion, she patiently waits while I recover. It was during one such recovery moment, as my wife and I sat on a quiet park bench in Budapest last week while on a long-overdue 30^th anniversary trip, that I realized why I find Europe so fascinating: Because it makes me think about America; our youth, our exuberance, our inexperience with the kind of deep history so present in Europe.

Trips abroad are by their very nature exercises in comparative pondering. And sometimes the simplest, most ordinary of observed moments elsewhere — like a lady walking a dog — can send me on an unexpected meditative tangent about my own home.

A local woman was walking a dog down the sidewalk in front of us, and I instantly recognized it as a vizsla, a pointing breed fairly popular here in the U.S. but which originated in Hungary centuries ago. It seems such a trivial thing, but if you are a bird hunter and bird dog lover it is a treat to lay your eyes on a pointing dog in the country of that dog’s origin.

It is an ancient breed, and as it and its very chic, well-dressed owner walked by, I thought of generations of those fierce old Magyar kings who first developed and bred the vizsla for a world that mostly no longer exists. It reminded me, like everything over there, of how incredibly old European cultures are compared to us. Those long-gone Hungarian Magyar kings were hunting the ancestors of that dog now walking past me long before we, as a country, even existed.

However, I’m fairly certain this particular vizsla was thoroughly citified, and as such had in all likelihood never had the hot scent of a pheasant or Hungarian partridge coursing through its nose.

And that made me wonder how much longer its Americanized cousins, bred for a world that is still here but rapidly changing, would hold out before they, too, would be reduced to apartment living and leashed walks to a fenced-in dog park.

If you, like I, require wild, publicly-owned places for the meaning and purpose of your own existence, these questions (existential questions, I would argue) are not just academic exercises about hypothetical futures, but increasingly relevant and timely concerns about the now, and what it will look like for those of us who are still the beneficiaries of being citizens of a young and still-growing nation with large swaths of still relatively wild and empty places, places that are still largely public and open to all.

But for how long and at what cost, what struggle to preserve and protect that which we all own from those who would take it from us for their own profit, their own pleasure?

The funny thing is, were I a peasant in 15^th-century Hungary, I wouldn’t have been allowed to own a vizsla, much less hunt the king’s land with it.

And therein lies the irony and dichotomy of what makes Europe so fascinating to me as a student of history, and what, despite its many flaws, what makes America so special to me as a citizen: We are damn good at democratizing some things that were once reserved for the few, whether that’s public lands that anyone can hunt on, or a dog once reserved for royalty.

Of course, we’re also really shitty at democratizing a whole lot of other important things that Europe de-privatized and made public decades ago, but it can’t be denied that there for a while we were pretty damn good at that whole democratization of hunting, fishing, and preserving wild places thing.

But it’s getting harder and harder to say that about America now.

And as that vizsla walked away down the street, I thought of my own dogs, the way they float so fast and free across a landscape so different from this one, a landscape that has never been royal, never been restricted, never been anything but all of ours, and I wondered if my distant progeny would still be able to say that when this country is as old as Europe is now?

As I walk through the front door of this grimy, glass-and concrete repository of heartbreak and crushing hopelessness, a man and a young boy are walking out. The man is tucking two five-dollar bills into his wallet. The young boy is craning his neck back toward the counter, watching the clerk carry a child-sized bicycle into the crowded back room where the physical manifestations of a thousand other hard-luck stories are stored, held hostage until the ransom is paid, with interest.

Most never are. A few months later the hostages — past history now erased by an unpaid pawn ticket — will be taken out, dusted off, assigned a value and then set out to be recycled into someone else’s dream, like a big wheel that just keeps going round and round and round...

That’s why I’m here, poking in dusty corners and rummaging through the ruined dreams of others, hoping to scavenge something of value among the smoking ashes of their misfortune.

And that’s when I see it, leaning against a big tangle of cheap rods, cheap reels and yellowing monofilament.

It’s not a reel. It’s a time machine, and I’m no longer a dyspeptic, slowly eroding 54-year-old man standing in a filthy pawn shop that reeks of cigarette smoke and desperation. It’s nineteen eighty-something and I’m a mullet-headed teenager standing on the cow-stomped red dirt bank of a windswept Oklahoma farm pond, reveling in the warmth of a mid-spring sun, the sirens of youth whispering their false promises in my ear as I cast that exact reel. The world is good. No rocks on the shoals of my future. Were there ever, back then?

It’s morning. School is in, but we aren’t, and a whole day of illicit possibility stretches out before us. The next pond, the next adventure beckons, so off we go, stowing our gear in the back of a ‘71 Nova that stinks of bass slime and the anise-infused oiliness of Fish Formula attractant. Where? Don’t know. Just go. We’ll find something. And we do, although none of us are to realize it at the time. We search for no grand, overarching truths, no deeper meanings. We just fish. What else is there to life when you’re 16?

I’m back in the pawn shop. I kneel and disentangle this artifact of memory, this someone else’s dream from the snarled pile. The rod isn’t the same. Mine was a Lew’s. This is a Berkley. But everything else is identical: Medium-heavy action. Pistol grip. Five feet, six inches long. Stiff. Clunky. Utterly obsolete these days, a museum piece. But in 1985? Perfect.

The reel, however, is mine. A Shimano Bantam, paid for with the minimum-wage sweat of countless paper bags filled with the groceries of bitchy housewives, life-weary single welfare moms, alcoholic, rheumy-eyed bachelors, sweet, gray-haired widowers who’d sometimes tip me a quarter, and batshit-crazy outpatients from the state mental hospital who’d yell at the sky and pray to gods only they knew as they took the bag from my hands and walked out the door and down the street, shuffling back to whatever world they temporarily stepped out of for bread and milk.

I hold the reel in my hands. It’s cherry. History wiped clean. Memory erased. Whatever hard-luck story that led it to this pawn shop is now forgotten, and it’s ready for new memories to overlay the old ones. Or in my case, serve as a physical reminder of my own old memories.

Because that’s what we do when we’re old and thinking of the past: We seek out those things that take us back. Round and round and round...

I take the rod and reel up to the counter.

“What’s your best price on it?”

“Twenty-five and tax.”

“I’ll give you twenty out the door.”

“I can do that.”

I give the clerk a twenty and walk out the door with my artifact, this totem of memory suddenly brought back to life.

Is it merely a proxy? A temporary stand-in for something yearned for but never coming back? Maybe. But at some point, isn’t it all?

In all things, progress is most often measured in such small increments that you will despair of ever seeing before you what you so easily see in your mind. And such it is with trying to wrestle the land back from the enveloping and fiercely tenacious grip of an invading army.

But keep at it, and progress will give you an occasional, fleeting glimpse of itself; a reminder that while all good things must be earned and earning does not come cheap, that tiny bit of progress you have bought with all that sweat is worth the price.

And for me, there are few things more wondrous and more worthy of the equity than seeing new sunlight hitting ground that has known nothing but perpetual shadow.

For years now I’ve been waging a small, lonely war on this 160-acre piece of southern plains prairie. It is a place I love. Some of my ashes will be scattered here when I die, high on a ridge where as a young man I saw my first lesser prairie chicken, and where I sit sometimes of a summer evening listening to lonely male bobwhites calling from the grass, searching for love.

But this place is also changing, quickly, much like the rest of the southern great plains. That first prairie chicken I saw thirty years ago was the last prairie chicken I ever saw in this country. There are legion threats both obvious and subtle facing the grasslands of the southern plains: climate change, conversion of grassland to farmland, development, overgrazing, aquifer depletion, and of course woody encroachment, which is the issue I have been sweating (both literally and figuratively) lately.

Over the course of decades of fire suppression and a sort of benign mismanagement involving too many cows, a complete absence of fire, combined with a lack of awareness of just how acute the problem had become, this little patch of prairie had slowly gotten choked out by an encroaching wave of eastern redcedars, a native species that historically had been controlled by fire and bison but over the past century has been inexorably spreading across the grasslands.

This ground is just a postage stamp-sized microcosm of what is happening all across the region. Looking across the fence I see mile upon mile of dense cedars, always spreading. The scope of the problem can seem overwhelming, and it often makes me feel futile and silly with my little chainsaw, as if I’m simply engaging in cosplay performance art, and that nothing I do will make the slightest bit of difference on a larger level than the small patch of ground I try to defend.

Which is true, of course. But as I told a friend recently during a conversation on the topic of conservation, I continue to do it because on the individual level, that insignificant performance art is the only tangible, organic thing I have to give me the illusion that something I do matters, if only for a moment (ecologically speaking) and if only on a tiny patch of ground.

It is the solace of individual action, telling myself that in doing what I do on such a microscopically intimate, strategically insignificant level, but on a piece of ground I so dearly love, the action itself will bring me peace and a sense of grounding in a world that otherwise seems so untethered and increasingly unhinged.

And I think a lot of small landowners probably have a similar feeling. I absolutely believe that small-scale conservation is more psychiatry than conservation, a coping mechanism against the ever-looming machinations of the larger world and the sense of utter hopelessness it engenders.

Does it actually accomplish anything beyond that? On some levels, not really. This patch of prairie upon which I labor, where I first saw that first chicken so long ago, will never see another chicken no matter how hard I work my guts out on this place, no matter how many cedars I cut.

And there’s not a damn thing any one program, agency, or conservation group is going to do to change that. Because the will — political, economic, social, policy, and otherwise — to do what needs to be done on a landscape level is simply not there, and never will be there. Political and cultural reality can be a crushing force on that kind of hope and vision.

But not on our individual level. Not on our tiny little spaces where we can make enough of a difference to give us whatever measure of solace we need to keep going.

And so I will keep cutting, and keep looking for those little glimpses of progress and joy and hope that keep me going and give me my own small measure of solace and meaning.

From where I took this photograph you couldn’t crawl — much less see — to the other side of this little side finger off the main draw that I’ve been slowly clearing where the skid steer can’t reach. In a few weeks all those cedars in the background will be gone and the entirety of this area will see sunlight for the first time in decades. And that, to me, is the kind of magic that keeps me doing this.

After I finished, I sat on the truck tailgate, drank a beer, and thought about how the land has changed since the last time grass grew on this spot. I thought about how I’ve changed in the 30-odd years since I first became acquainted with this place. And I thought, a lot, about the connection between the two, and how each has helped change the other, in ways both large and small.

And I think we’re both making a little progress. Not much, but enough.

One of the unfortunate disadvantages of digital mediums and formats like Substack is that they must be read on a phone, a tablet, or a computer. And if you are anything like me, too much of phones, tablets, and computers tends to make you feel overwhelmed by the omnipresence of all that connectivity, which in turn fosters a strong urge to unplug and walk away for however long it takes to recalibrate those internal receptors that help distinguish what is real and matters from what is not and doesn’t.

One of the advantages of that constant push-pull, however, is that the need to push yourself away from the ersatz binary world inevitably pulls you back into the welcoming embrace of the analog, and that’s where I’ve happily found myself lately, doing a bit of reading. It’s a reminder that books remain the absolute best place in which to lose yourself for an hour, a day, a week, or a lifetime.

The cycles of personal reading interest are a curious thing, and while I’ve always been an avid disciple of the literary wing of the outdoor writing world, and honestly couldn’t care less about the rest of it, I went through a period where I was absolutely uninterested in reading anything about the sporting world, even the authors who were a huge influence on my own writing and thinking.

Maybe after working in the industry for so long I was simply burned out and hopelessly cynical about the entire scene. Who knows? For whatever reason, there for a good long while I didn’t read a word of hunting or fishing prose, even as I worked in it with others and churned it out myself. I’d pick up a book I had read and loved, try to read it, and couldn’t get past a few pages before I gave up. Everything about the genre just bored the hell out of me.

But a funny thing started happening not long ago: The more I realized what an absolute cesspool the modern hunting and fishing scene has turned into, and to what depths of ethical depravity people will now go to attract followers, the more I started missing those quiet and largely forgotten (or ignored) voices that — as a much younger person — had helped shape and guide me into the hunter, reader, writer, and person that I eventually became.

There was a good deal of hubbub recently about a profile on Thomas McGuane framing him as “the last of his kind” in terms of the great American“literary outdoorsman” writer. It was a stupid title, a flawed piece, and I certainly don’t agree with the assertion, but it cannot be denied that, taking a high-latitude look at things today, there aren’t a helluva lot of those voices that possess any of the cultural clout of preceding generations of writers because we are more fractured and tribal than we have ever been.

I’ve always believed that when you get away from the habit of introspection, the deliberate questioning and examination of the “why” of things, you tend to lose that which keeps you decent. You become unmoored and start to drift from that which grounds you. That’s a minority opinion these days, of course, but I think it bears out in seeing what we as hunters and anglers have become.

So I recently started reading those familiar old voices again, both as a balm to the carnival barkers of the present and as a way to reconnect with a part of me I was really starting to miss.

And one of those voices was Guy de la Valdene.

Some of you who follow the literature of bird hunting know who he was. Guy de la Valdene wrote several small but influential books on bird hunting, and he was among the last of a generation of truly literary modern sporting writers, the talent and voice and perspective of which we rarely see these days.

He was a contemporary of that group of writers and artists that included the likes of Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Russell Chatham, Richard Brautigan, Steve Bodio, and other so-called “counter-culture” writers, artists, and poets. Not exactly your average bunch of hook-and-bullet writers. He also dabbled in documentary filmmaking. His 1973 flyfishing film Tarpon is a bonafide cult classic and features many of those same writers.

I first discovered de la Valdene — like most — through his book “For a Handful of Feathers” a long time ago. I had never read anything quite like it, and was instantly hooked.

This is probably a dangerous thing to admit to some of you, (and somewhat hypocritical considering the subject of this piece…) but I — with a few notable exceptions — never really got into many of the old-school “Golden Age” sporting writers.

I found many of them incredibly boring and stilty; the reading equivalent of those old Movietone newsreels where the announcers all had the same fake, nasally monotone, old-movie accent. The all seemed to write the same story, use the same template, same imagery, same tropes, same jokes, same cliches.

Maybe it was because I grew up in a different time. I was a suburban kid raised in the 80s by a single mom and so I didn’t come of age in a traditional male hunting culture. I read all the outdoor literature voraciously, of course, but I just didn’t connect with or care about those old writers who wore fedoras and sat around drinking bourbon and smoking cigarettes down at the club like mid-20th century caricatures.

I was always more into the ones who came after; the ones who had hippie hair, dropped acid, smoked weed, and cussed a lot. The ones who partied and wrote their hunting and fishing stories like they wrote their novels and poetry and short stories — as the literature of life. Many of those writers were, in fact, novelists, journalists, and poets who also loved to hunt and fish.

It’s also no accident that many of these writers, and this new style of hook-and-bullet writing, coincided with the rise of the boundary-pushing New Journalism movement of the 60s and 70s and a concurrent evolution of American literature in general.

I’ve always been drawn to writers with unique voices, and de la Valdene had a wonderful writing voice. That’s why I recently pulled his books off the shelf, trying to reconcile that gorgeous writing with what passes for modern hook-and-bullet “content” and it drove home to me how much poorer we seem to be now for the passing of such writing, and writers.

I’m not usually one to grouse and gripe about generational differences (despite having done just that for the entirety of this piece…). I fully realize that for a younger person, the things that speak to me and move me are probably as boring and irrelevant to them as those stilty old golden age farts were to me, but I can’t help but think we’re slowly losing something fundamental to the core of what makes hunting and fishing writing so compelling and powerful.

The thinking, literary side of outdoor writing has always been a small subset, a niche — but an important one. In today’s world a thoughtful, honest, well-crafted story that says something about life will never win a popularity contest with a TikTok video or a slick, ultra-produced Instagram post.

But those kinds of stories serve as an introspective counterweight to the whack ‘em and stack ‘em mindset, and a reminder that bloodsport isn’t just a hobby or a game or a branding opportunity.

Writers like de la Valdene brought humanity and grace to a genre that quite often sorely needs it. He died in 2023, and I wonder who will continue that tradition, now so pushed to the side by the frenetic pace of our culture of endlessly streaming content consumption.

I’m not utterly without hope, though, and I do believe the next generation of thoughtful, contemplative hunting writers is out there, and I hope they will not be dissuaded by the sense that no one cares about good writing anymore.

Because there will always be readers who appreciate good words. That’s not a generational thing, it’s a universal human thing. I suspect the next wave of great outdoor prose writers will not look or think like me or those of my generation.

It will be younger, more female, more diverse, more non-traditional. And that’s a good thing. But you can also learn a helluva lot from looking back.

It is, apparently, World Book Day, so I thought, in the absence of something more substantial to offer, I’d simply highlight a good book, and this is indeed a good one.

Not only is most of my own writing focused on the region in which I live and which I love, I also collect books and printed ephemera of the Great Plains and Near Southwest.

And this is one of my favorites: Ian Frazier’s 1989 classic, which originally ran as a three-part series in The New Yorker in the late 80s.

Frazier, who is probably my favorite of all the New Yorker writers, seems to share both my own fascination with lonely places and, surprisingly, a love of fishing. He also penned an excellent book on Siberia (an equally lonely place) as well as a book of essays on angling, among many, many others (Frazier’s a prolific writer).

In 2017, when this part of the southern plains went up in flames, Frazier returned to the area and wrote a story for The New Yorker that is probably the best account of that event. So the man obviously has a soft spot for this hard place. As a native with the same proclivities, I can see why.

The North American plains and prairies seem to be experiencing a small (OK, tiny) renaissance in both cultural and environmental interest these days, but back in 1989 they were simply those utterly forgettable middle flatitudes that you had to drive through — as quickly as possible — to reach the places that mattered.

For myself, however, being born and raised squarely within that zone of indifference, the plains were an endless fascination that stretched to the far limits of both horizon and imagination. And Great Plains was the very first modern, narrative non-fiction book about this region that I remember discovering as a kid.

I had devoured everything of Edward Abbey’s up to that point (he died in ‘89) but I hadn’t found a similarly contemporary voice for the plains, and while Frazier’s book was more bemused observational history than fiercely personal essay, it helped fill a void in my reading, and my understanding of the plains beyond the stodgy old classics.

I vividly remember finding it on the shelf in the old, now long-gone Norman public library (the building’s gone, the library is still happily in existence…) when I was a senior in high school.

By that time I was a plains-obsessed kid eaten up with prairie history, prairie environment, prairie wildlife, and prairie hunting. Always a voracious reader, I was wishing for something new to scratch that literary itch. And in that regard Frazier’s book was a revelatory read.

It showed me that this region had a story, a history, and that story was compelling and worthy of the same kind of praise and attention received by other, better-known and well-loved regions and landscapes.

It was the first book that made me realize that this place I loved, but which so many others considered ugly and worthless, could sing a beautiful song.

So if you ever get a chance, give it a read. I think you’ll like it.

A few of you who know me personally know that in a former life I was a full-time writer and editor in the outdoor space. On the whole, I found a lot more to dislike than like about both the career and the industry which made that career possible (maybe that’s a future essay sometime…), and one of the most distasteful parts of the job involved “Highlighting public hunting opportunities.”

Or, as the more honest among us like to call it, hotspotting. Because that’s essentially what it is, regardless of whether you’re a member of the more traditional (whatever that really means anymore) media, TV personality, or just your garden-variety social media influencer.

Naming names and giving locations in pursuit of exposure, clicks, likes, views, reads, or whatever other metric of visibility and consumer consumption you chase is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, but the vastly expanded means, speed, and scope of conveying that information certainly is, and no matter how much those who engage in it deny it, it’s a problem. A big one (maybe there’s an essay there as well).

So when I left the industry, I told myself that I was done writing anything that required mentioning specific locations. I still had a few outstanding assignments, and the story below was one of the last ones I wrote about specific locations. It was a decent story, but it wasn’t a great story, because I don’t think you can write a truly great hunting story with destination/how-to as its main angle (your definition of great, of course, may differ significantly from mine…).

A few days ago I was pondering these things, so I dusted off this story to see what removing almost all mention of location turned it into. Would it make the story boring? Too vague? Confusing? Incomplete? What do you lose when you take location out of a story? What do you gain?

As the writer, what I gain, obviously, is anonymity for a place I cherish, and to not be shackled, creatively speaking, by “highlighting public hunting opportunity” that for damn sure does not need any more highlighting.

What the reader gains is up to them, but I believe the job of the writer who chooses to leave names and locations out of a story is to make the reader recognize their own secret places, their own stories. I’m not sure this one actually accomplishes that, not without a fundamental rewrite for the entire thing.

But I do know one thing: I like this version a whole lot more than the one that got published.

(And those of you who know the region can probably guess the place(s) in the story. But I can live with that…)

As geographical oddities go, it’s not much. On a map, this thin, remote, and sparsely-populated strip of land, a mere 34 miles north to south and 167 miles east to west, sits perched like a misplaced Tetris piece straddling the borders of four other states.

It is by any measure a lonely, harsh, and isolated region, but one full of history. The epicenter of the Dust Bowl occurred here. Before white settlement this land felt the thundering hoofbeats of countless millions of bison and the southern plains tribes that created entire cultures around them. It is a land full of ghosts, heartbreak, and imposing space.

But it is not all barren emptiness. And if you are a bird hunter, what you will discover out here is an opportunity to chase both bobwhite and scaled quail across a setting unlike any you will find elsewhere. And you’ll most likely do it alone, with just the wind, sun, and sky as your only company.

It’s not easy hunting, nor is it the most productive in terms of sheer bird numbers, but if you’re looking for solitude, and maybe a bird or two along the way, this sliver of the southern plains can provide both, for those willing to accept it on its own terms.

And that’s exactly what I needed. Some time spent following my dogs across that spare, astringent landscape, hunting public land and sleeping in a tent, seemed like a good way to recalibrate and renew my spirits.

Day One

My journey began at an historically imposing yet invisible barrier—the 100^th Meridian. East of the 100^th Meridian rainfall averages over 20 inches per year and the native landscape is characterized by a combination of short, mixed, and tallgrass plants. Beyond the meridian lies true shortgrass prairie where average rainfall drops below 20 inches a year. It’s a semi-arid transition zone that—depending on the whims of the weather gods—vacillates between drought, drought, more drought, and sometimes rain.

And rainfall is the one dominant factor influencing quail, quail numbers, and quail hunting in this country. Get rain at the right time, and you’ll have birds. Get rain at the wrong time—or don’t get rain at all—and you may find yourself hunting nothing more than memory.

Luckily, this past spring saw timely rains at the right time and, and I found myself heading to a piece of public land that is s diverse patchwork of native sand-sage prairie, mixed-grass uplands, and dense riverbottom. I had hunted it many times before and was looking forward to a return.

Unfortunately, I had brought weather with me. Or at least the wind.

And here is where I must mention one of the absolute constants about bird hunting on the southern plains: The wind, the ceaseless, often-howling wind. A calm day on the plains is a rarity. The wind always blows here. Always. There’s a reason it drove early settlers insane.

But if you wait for the wind to stop blowing here, you’ll never hunt, so the only thing to do is clear the dust from your eyes, your throat and your sand-blasted, wind-burnt, wind-chilled soul, pick up your shotgun, send the dogs, and go hunting.

And so that’s what I did. I managed to set up my tent on one of the designated camping areas, and, after making sure the tent wouldn’t sail away to Texas, I loaded up the dogs and went looking for a secret little draw I had found years ago, a long, meandering canyon covered in sand-sage, little bluestem, and sandplum thickets.

The draw offered no real respite from the wind, but I figured I might find a covey holed up in the midst of a thicket. As my oldest pointer, Abbey, worked the draw from side to side, I pondered the notion of “Gentleman Bob.”

I don’t know who first coined that phrase, but he obviously never ventured west of fairytale land. You will find no gentle or gentlemanly specimens of Colinus virginianus here, unless the birds you hunt began life in an incubator and are found behind a fence.

Western bobwhites out here on the edge of their range are tough. They have zero interest in accommodating cliched notions of what they should be and how they should act. What they do have is an abiding interest in living, and pretty much everything they do is geared toward continuing that. They are not going to wait for you to light a pipe, wax your beard, adjust your cravat, or strike the perfect Instagram pose.

As if to punctuate that notion, as I was waxing poetic about quail, Abbey went on a solid point in front of a small thicket in a finger draw ahead of me. As I started to walk in, a covey of bobs exploded, caught the wind and were instantly gone in the most ungentlemanly way possible as I shot two futile holes in the sky.

That night, the dogs and I huddled together in the tent and dreamed of calm days and willing birds as a prairie gale pushed against the canvas and tentpoles groaned.

Day Two

The next morning—as so often happens on the plains after a big blow—was as still and beautiful as a picture. I was tempted to stay and spend the morning hunting right from the tent, but I was worried the calm wouldn’t last, and at any rate I wanted to reach the next destination.

There is a place on the southern plains where, on published maps sits a blue dot denoting the presence of a lake. Trying to reconcile the maps with reality, however, is impossible.

Simply put, there’s no lake here.

All the trappings of a lake are present: massive dam, boat ramps, campgrounds, parking areas. It’s a veritable water wonderland — minus the water.

Theories abound on why the lake never filled up.

Whatever the reason, it now sits high, (mostly) dry, and lonely. Driving through it is an eerie experience. Campgrounds and parking lots sit abandoned and weed-choked. The ceaseless prairie wind moans through empty pavilions, empty picnic tables, empty restrooms.

About the only thing this place isn’t devoid of, however, is wildlife. However colossal a failure it may have been as a lake, it has turned into an oasis for wildlife, including quail.

It is a special place to me for many reasons. It was where, many years ago as a young, bird-crazy kid from downstate, I both saw and shot my first scaled quail. It was also my first glimpse at that true shortgrass prairie, where the feel of the high plains and near southwest mix into something gorgeous and lonesome; grass and cholla and prickly pear and the promise of tough dryland quail.

Since then I have gone back year after year, through good years and bad. You will never shoot huge numbers of quail here, and there are many years where you’ll not see scaled quail at all. This is the eastern fringe of scaled quail range, and their presence ebbs and flows according to yearly weather.

This year, however, I was feeling optimistic as I rolled into the area and made camp at one of the long-abandoned campgrounds. The reason for my optimism was twofold: One, we’d had good rains in the spring, and two, a birding friend had told me he’d seen a covey of blues on a birding trip earlier that summer.

There wasn’t another soul around as I pitched my tent next to a crumbling old concrete picnic table in one of the overgrown campgrounds. After a quick lunch, I loaded the dogs and eagerly went looking for birds.

And here is where I must mention that second constant of hunting certain parts of the southern plains Painful vegetation. There are very few places in this area where a dog can place its pad without encountering something sharp and painful. Sandburs are ubiquitous almost everywhere, and prickly pear, where it flourishes, can stop a dog in its tracks.

This place has a lot of both, and as someone familiar with the area, I should have known this. But, eager to get my young, big-running pointer Zuma, on birds, I slapped a collar on her and let her rip. And rip she did — for about 50 yards before coming to a screeching halt amidst a giant prickly pear patch hidden amongst the grass. Even tough-footed dogs need boots sometimes, and I felt bad that in my eagerness I had failed to recognize that.

A few minutes later and now properly shod, Zuma let fly across the prairie. Ten minutes later she came to a screeching halt in a large patch of fragrant sumac. This time the birds didn’t have the assistance of a 30mph tailwind and I managed to shoot a beautiful male bobwhite off the covey rise. It was a damn good start after the windstorm of the day before.

What followed was an absolutely delightful morning watching a young dog coming into her own. Zuma had finally started putting things together earlier that season in Montana, and witnessing her performance that morning reminded me of why a dog in motion on the prairie is the most beautiful poetry in all of hunting.

Day Three

West of there, in fact, west of everything out here, lies one of the least-traveled parts of the southern plains, a curious mix of Rocky Mountain foothills, near Southwest rimrock country, and southern plains shortgrass prairie.

And it is to these grasslands that I have now come on this last day of my three-day odyssey. It is the farthest west I can go hunting without buying another state’s license, and the last chance I have to hunt scaled quail on this trip.

Up until the 1930s these lands, at least in their present form, didn’t exist. They were individual homesteads, quarter and half-section dryland farms blown away and abandoned during the dustbowl years, then subsequently repurchased by the federal government.

The irony of the situation is that in the years since, the invention of center-pivot irrigation has transformed much of the surrounding area back into cropland, and the grasslands which were once farms are now isolated islands of native prairie in an ever-expanding sea of agriculture.

Since I’ve always preferred to find a nice isolated place and make my own camp far from the company of strangers, I knew from previous trips where I’d pitch my tent. It had been several years since I’d been to this spot, but when I pulled up it looked exactly the same. Since I had found several coveys of blues on that last trip, I took this as a hopeful sign.

After getting settled, I decided to hunt from camp that afternoon. Both dogs needed a good long run, so rather than hunt one dog at a time, I decided to run the two sisters together.

There is something inherently satisfying about simply walking out of camp and going hunting; no drive time, no roads, no interaction with the world at large. Just you, the dogs, and all that land and possibility stretched out before you.

And on this last day of my quick three-day trip to reacquaint myself once again with a region I fell in love with so many years ago, that was enough. It was a beautiful day, I was hunting across a starkly gorgeous landscape that I—as an American citizen—own, and I was in the company of my two favorite dogs in the world.

Realizing this, my need for a scaled quail melted away. From this point on, birds would only be a bonus, mere addendum to the joy and freedom of the experience itself.

Did I find birds? Did I finally get that blue? Maybe, maybe not. But I can say that looking back, that day spent in that lonely, quiet land remains one of my fondest memories from this past season.

And that’s all that matters, really, isn’t it?

I’ve been busier than expected these past few weeks — with life, the day job, doomscrolling, and other preoccupations of modern life — and as such I haven’t been keeping up with Substack (my own or others) very well. Hopefully with the warming sunshine and longer days of spring I can get back into a more active pattern in both writing and optimistic (if a bit forced) living. One thing I am looking forward to, now that hunting season is behind me, is getting back behind the camera.

In the meantime, here’s a repost from an early post of mine, which in turn was a rewrite of an old essay that ran in a magazine several years back. In the ensuing years since this essay was first published I’ve taken a lot more (and better) quail photos, so perhaps a new essay with new images and words is in order…

In the meantime, however, for those of you who haven’t seen this one, hope you enjoy it.

I discovered a long time ago that you can learn a lot about the world around you — and yourself — by quietly sitting at the base of a prairie windmill and watching the day slowly die.

You can learn a lot about quail, too. You do, of course, also learn a lot about quail from what you observe of them from behind a dog, and along the course of a lifetime pursuing them, I’ve learned plenty that way.

But to really get to know them, to observe them as they go about their daily lives, you must go where they live, and watch them as they live, not just as they flee. And my favorite place to do that has always been under the creaking blades of a rusty, weathered old Aermotor.

On the far, arid western plains, under the withering, desiccating heat of a late-summer sun, water is life. And when the clouds fail and the rains disappear, windmills — these fast-disappearing prairie icons — become oasis for the wildlife that live around them. Cold, ancient fossil water gushes up from the earth, pumped from the depths by the incessant prairie wind into a waiting stock tank.

What the tank can’t hold flows into a small overflow pond, and it is this tiny circle of perpetual greenery which supports an explosion of life. Birds, deer, insects; an entire thriving, vibrant ecological community springs up from the thin rivulets of that wind-driven water. Water flows to life, and life flows to water.

And in the waning light of a summer evening, the quail flow too, trickling into this small sliver of water like tiny, feathered clockwork. They come as singles, or pairs, or with half-grown broods, cautiously sneaking through the grass and weeds to gather and drink at the water’s edge.

Such a moment, being mere feet away from a creature you normally only see as a blur in flight, is revelatory. When you see and understand something not just as quarry, but also as a living, breathing, essential part of a greater whole, it — as the young kids say — just hits different.

It is in these fleeting moments — when the birdsong of the prairie is quietly cacophonous, the aroma of sand-sage permeates the air, and the evening light glows in that special, spectacular way that only dying plains sunlight can — that I feel I truly know quail. 

As I sit and watch them, listen to their endless chatter and vocalizations, I marvel at their ability to adapt, to find just enough niche and just enough moxie to survive.

What truly remarkable little creatures they are, and how lucky we are, to know them, and appreciate them. If I never hunted them again, I’d still do this every chance I get.

I can’t imagine ever tiring of walking out into the prairie, sitting underneath a windmill, and watching life — in all its forms — unfold before me at the water’s edge, and hoping to catch a glimpse of the amazing, fiercely unassuming little bird that most represents why I love this place.

I was idly perusing an online used gun site recently, just seeing what interesting old shotguns they had, when I came across a listing which stopped my scrolling and instantly took me back to being a desperately poor 20-year-old who possessed Dom Perignon taste in guns on a Milwaukee’s Best budget. What gun reawakened my long-buried early adulthood fever dreams? This one*…

It was a thing of beauty leaning there in the gun rack amongst the ass-ugly plastic fantastics and worn-out department-store pumpguns. Two triggers, two barrels, solid rib, with an English stock of swirled chocolate. It wasn’t often you saw a such-configured pre-war Browning Superposed, even back then.

It was a widower’s gun, on consignment for an elderly lady whose husband had had good taste in firearms and a penchant for Brownings. In addition to the Super, there was a Sweet Sixteen and two Light Twelves, all pristine post-war guns.

But I only had eyes for that old 30’s-vintage Super. I’d come into the gun shop, press my face to the glass of the circle rack and slowly turn the carousel until it was level with my face, then I’d ask to look at it, again. The asshole clerk would sigh, hand me the gun and glower impatiently while I fondled it.

I’d swing the gun on a few imaginary birds, break it open yet again, look down the bores, trace my fingers over that beautifully-figured stock and then reluctantly hand it back to Dickface, who would put it on the rack with a smirk and then go back to ignoring me. The hangtag said $600. Hell, they were practically giving it away.

Didn’t matter, of course. It may as well have been $60,000. I was a sophomore in college, working as a donation clerk at the local Goodwill store. I shared a dumpy one-bedroom apartment with a girlfriend who made even less than I did. I was driving a Schwinn at the time. I could afford Milwaukee’s Best. I could afford Hamburger Helper. I couldn’t afford a Browning Superposed no matter how much of a screaming deal it was.

And then, of course, one day it was gone from its place in the rack. The eared phallus smiled broadly as he told me that some guy from Tulsa here on business had walked in, just killing some time, picked up that old Super and bought it on the spot. “Helluva deal on that gun, too bad you couldn’t get it.”

Yep, too bad...

*As much as I’d love to have it, some old dreams should remain dreams. So if anyone is interested in that wonderful old Browning Superposed in the photo, message me and I’ll send you the link…

Hello, young men with cameras on your heads. You probably don’t notice me sitting here from afar, eating a sandwich on my tailgate in the sublime, sunshine-kissed perfection of this unseasonably warm late winter day, but I can’t help but notice your group— or “crew” if you prefer— walking across the rolling, sand-sage hills of my favorite public hunting area.

I notice that you’re all sporting sticker-festooned shotguns with extended mag tubes, that you seem to have a number of video cameras poking from your headbands and shotgun barrels, and that you’re following some sort of dog of indeterminate Continental breeding.

Seeing this, I assume you’re here to partake of the wild, public-land quail hunting offered by this region. I don’t blame you. That’s exactly why I live here.

See, I’m a bird hunter, too. In fact, I proudly self-identify as one when asked, even though I doubt that qualifies as building a personal brand or online persona.

All I know is that a life without wild birds and dogs with which to chase them is a life antithetical to my own existence, and that the bobwhite quail in particular has been my totem bird and spirit animal since the first time I held one in my hand as a clueless adolescent.

So who knows? Maybe that constitutes my brand, but I’m no expert in such things.

But what I am an expert in is how I feel about that vanishingly small covey of already-hard-hunted bobs I’m watching you shoot out of existence (and—I assume from your antics—filming for your online audience).

Awe. And reverence. That’s how I feel about those little bits of feather and bone and blood your entire group is blasting to hell and whooping and high-fiving and fist-bumping over. Those are the two feelings that first, long-ago quail evoked within me, as has every other gamebird I’ve shot since that day.

You know why? Because quail—and all the gamebirds I hunt, wherever I hunt them—represent the pursuit of perfection; the fleeting, addictive rightness of that singular moment when the alignment of the holy trinity of dog, bird, and place all come together and you are given the gift of something wondrous.

I ask: What else would a person seek in walking all those miles across all those landscapes but that one precious moment and the gift it bestows?

Because that’s what those quail now lying in a row on your tailgate being filmed are: they are a gift.

They belong here, on this ground I walk. They are of this landscape.

They weren’t brought here from somewhere else and released to be targets for human recreation.

They sprang from what this land is, and their song is the song of time and eons and meaning.

They’re not big, or flashy, or particularly colorful. They’re hard to hunt and they’re hard to hit.

They’re best hunted alone, just you and your dog, or a close friend. Preferably a silent one.

They prefer landscapes to parcels, and their pursuit requires a level of commitment beyond walking a cornfield in a crowd.

They don’t read books or articles written by people like myself, they don’t follow social media goobers, and they don’t give a damn about my or your expert opinion on how, what, or where they’re supposed to be.

They live where they live, they be what they are, and they do what they do totally apart from our human-based perspective of existence, and they are wonderfully, inscrutably indifferent to what we think we know of them.

And this bears repeating: They are a gift. So, please, try to be worthy of that gift.

And when you’re lucky enough to kill one, or a few, remember that the act of killing them doesn’t make you special. It doesn’t make you a brand, and it sure as hell doesn’t make you a bird hunter.

It just means you were blessed enough to be given something that will always be larger than who or what you are, or ever will be.

Now, times have changed, I know, and I suppose I probably sound hopelessly outdated to you and your friends. Or maybe I’m just old, and this is simply an upland-specific manifestation of the eons-old gulf between one generation and the next. Perhaps I am indeed that old man shaking his fist into the sky as he loudly berates passing clouds in that popular meme my children and younger friends like to text me when I get particularly cranky about something.

But what doesn’t change across generations is truth, or respect for the things you hunt, and the life you take.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not suggesting that you should scrub all joy and celebration and fun from the hunt. I like all those things, too, without any shame or guilt whatsoever. Hell, the time I watched my eldest son shoot his first prairie chicken over the dog he grew up with, I whooped, too.

There is, however, something else to be felt in the pursuit of fragile, beautiful wild things that die at your hand in order to give you whatever spiritual and physical sustenance you derive from the act, and that is respect.

Respect for the birds you hunt, and a little appreciation for what the life you’ve taken has given you, and the meaning it has bestowed upon this moment.

Perhaps in the future, if you can press pause on your guncam footage long enough to ponder and appreciate that point, then maybe—just maybe— the act of killing something so perfect and so worthy of veneration as a quail (or any other gamebird) can hopefully help to make you into what I assume you strive to be. Which is a bird hunter.

You see, any asshole with a shotgun can kill a bird. But it takes a bit of grace to be a bird hunter.

So please, don’t be jackasses; in the field, the parking area, or your social media accounts.

Maybe, instead of acting like peckerheads and repeatedly blasting the hell out of the same covey hoping to get cool footage for your YouTube channel, you could simply kill a bird or two, enjoy the sublime perfection of the moment, and move on to the next moment, the next gift.

Sometimes—but especially with a creature as wondrous as a quail—being content with “enough” adds an appreciation to the act of bird hunting that sheer body count cannot.

Try it sometime. A little class, a little courtesy, and a little respect toward the birds, the land, and the larger world you are a part of goes a long way toward honoring—rather than trashing—the ethics and ideals and traditions of what I assume you hoped to aspire to when you first picked up a shotgun with the intent of hunting quail with it.

Signed,

An old man, yelling at clouds.

Somewhere in the Driftless, happily lost in all that ancient Ice Age wonder, with only a 3wt and a tiny, flowing blue line to show me the light and the way. With spring comes feelings of renewal, restlessness, and a yearning for cold, flowing water and the treasures it holds. Someday, I’ll go back.

If there’s anything finer or more spirit-renewing than a warm, sun-drenched spring afternoon in Oklahoma, this admittedly parochial native has yet to experience it. Winter’s gray and dreary yoke has finally been thrown off, replaced with a dazzling palette of fresh color and light borne to us on a whispering southern breeze.

On such a day, it seems, the possibilities are limitless. On such a day, under a brilliantly clear azure sky, trouble seems a million miles away.

As most Oklahomans know however, trouble may be forming, unseen, right over our heads.

“A tornado watch has been issued for…”

When we see the tiny little multi-colored state map in the corner of the television screen, get the notification on our phone, or hear that disembodied Steven Hawking-like computer voice on the weather radio, we know the day—however beautiful—just got tarnished with the slightest tinge of anxiety.

There is perhaps no more apt metaphor for the wildly bipolar nature of our state’s weather than the tornado watch. In essence, it tells us that on some of the most achingly beautiful, carefree days of the year, we are routinely expected to be on the lookout for weather that can and will (without the slightest provocation on our part, mind you) rip and tear asunder virtually everything we hold dear, up to and including our very lives.

No wonder some people think living in Oklahoma should come with a warning label.

The official definition goes something along the lines of “a tornado watch means that conditions are favorable in the next few hours for the development of tornadoes within the watch area.”

But anyone who has spent more than a season in Oklahoma knows what that really means is, “Don’t worry, chances are absolutely nothing is going to happen today, unless, of course, it does.”

Zen Buddhism as weather forecast, Oklahoma-style.

Truth is, most Oklahomans are nonchalant about the issuance of a tornado watch because, statistically speaking, they can be. There’s a world of difference between possible and probable, and we know through experience the majority of tornado watches don’t produce tornadoes.

Of course, we’d prefer not to let anyone else in on that secret. Among non-residents of Tornado Alley there has always been and continues to be widespread confusion about the difference between tornado watches and tornado warnings. This gives the unscrupulous pranksters among us a great deal of latitude to impress gullible out-of-state visitors with our alleged icy nerve in the face of seemingly certain doom. Who among us hasn’t been guilty at one time or another of using a tornado watch to lead on a visiting out-of-state relative or friend?

You: (yawning) “Hmmm, looks like they just issued a tornado watch.”

Them: (waves of panic crashing across face) “What? But it’s sunny outside! My God, where’s the basement? Where are the kids? Hurry up! Grab the dog!”

You: “Oh, we don’t have any basements in Oklahoma. We usually just sit outside on the front porch and watch. Might want to chain yourself to the rail, though, this being your first one and all. The wind can get a bit strong…”

In reality, however, there’s an element of whistling past the graveyard in such nonchalance, and only the truly moronic among us completely disregard the tornado watch, even when most of them fizzle into nothing. At the picnic, on the lake, at the game, wherever we are and whatever we’re doing, there’s always that little kernel of information that colors every decision on those certain days the air just feels different somehow, an oppressively palpable texture of frightening possibility.

This peculiar pre-cognizance we experience does of course beg the question of whether Oklahomans, by reason of geography and experience, can just tell when bad weather is imminent.

Scientists will, of course, say no. If the collective brilliance of thousands of our brightest minds and most powerful supercomputers still can’t fully explain and predict the incredibly complex and mysterious dynamics of tornado development, then there’s no compelling reason to believe that John or Jane Doe Sooner can step outside, peer into the sky, and say with any degree of authority that today’s tornado watch is different, more menacing, somehow more real.

And in truth, they’d be right. I for one would rather put my faith in trained meteorologists, Doppler radar, and sophisticated computer models than in Uncle Leroy’s weather-predicting rheumatic joints.

But still, if there’s one thing Oklahomans should be intrinsically tuned in to, it’s the weather. Perhaps over the course of the last century we’ve developed some deeper, subconscious connection to the subtle atmospheric markers that initiate tornado development and the tornado watch is merely the empiric confirmation of that sixth sense.

Or not. Who knows? Just remember to act calm and relaxed when the relatives are here next spring and the season’s first tornado watch is issued. We’ve got a reputation to maintain.

“I will never forget myself starting across the sere Oklahoma panhandle at dusk one cold February evening and becoming so depressed by the melancholy of its emptiness that I almost had to turn back. It was perhaps because of that drive across the Oklahoma panhandle at dusk in the winter that I began to read narratives of travel in Siberia ...

Larry McMurtry, from his essay collection, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.

That quote has always reminded me of this sign—surely one of the loneliest, most inhospitable, amenity-free and least-photographed “Welcome To” state signs in the lower 48. My favorite kind.

No Man’s Land. I took this forgotten and empty road in the Oklahoma panhandle while driving to Colorado a long time ago. Why? Because it was lonely. Why else?

It wasn’t February, though. It was summer, and at noon I pulled over at the state line to eat my lunch. And as I sat there on the tailgate of the truck I pondered the McMurtry quote, and that sign.

A Union Jack sticker from an itinerant British motorcycling tourist (Love those adventurous Brits…) and a cluster of decidedly local bullet holes. An interesting combination. Vastly different, but the same, really. Both saying “I was here,” but one borne of adventure, never to return; the other perhaps borne of frustration and anger, never to escape.

That or just plain dumbshit ignorance and access to a six-pack and a gun.

I’d never know.

I tossed my bread crust at the prairie rattler curled up underneath the sign, (no cute tourist pictures to be taken in front of this one...) listened to the wind for a while, watched a hawk trace a few looping circles in the sky, then got back in the truck and drove off, utterly alone, across a landscape that once reminded a favorite author of Siberia.

There are worse places to be compared to, I suppose. It just all depends on your personal landscape aesthetic. I mean, at least it’s not Illinois…

The hauntingly beautiful words below are from the late, great, and incomparable Texas writer John Graves, taken from his essay, “Self Portrait, With Birds” in which he laments the diminishing of the American plains and grasslands through the lens of his singular totemic species, the upland plover (better known these days as the upland sandpiper).

The photo above is of the last Oklahoma lesser prairie chicken I ever watched on a lek. It was taken by me many years ago, and that bird is to me what the upland plover was to Graves; the one species that represents the staggering loss of so much that will never return. Most photos you see of prairie chickens are of the males, pinnae feathers erect, booming and fighting over the ladies. But this one was taken after a vigorous morning’s display by a very small group of males vying for the affections of females who never appeared. One by one, as the female-less reality of the moment slowly beat back evolutionary urge, the male chickens wandered off into the grass. This was the last one I took a photo of before he, too, disappeared. I had watched that lek for three mornings, and never saw a female chicken, just those hopeful, doomed males. I never went back. Eventually, neither did they.

If you’ve never read any of Graves’ writing, do yourself a favor and go find some…

“Of all these passers-through, the species that means most to me, even more than geese and cranes, is the upland plover, the drab plump grassland bird that used to remind my gentle hunting uncle of the way things once had been, as it still reminds me. It flies from the far northern prairies to the pampas of Argentina and then back again in spring, a miracle of navigation and a tremendous journey for six or eight ounces of flesh and feathers and entrails and hollow bones, fueled with bug meat.

I see them sometimes in our pastures, standing still or dashing after prey in the grass, but mainly I know their presence through the mournful yet eager quavering whistles they cast down from the night sky in passing, and it always makes me think what the whistling must have been like when the American plains were virgin and their plover came through in millions.

To grow up among tradition-minded people leads one often into backward yearnings and regrets, unprofitable feelings of which I was granted my share in youth — not having been born in time to get killed fighting Yankees, for one, or not having ridden up the cattle trails.

But the only such regret that has strongly endured is not to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh, and the plover that whet one’s edge every spring and every fall. In recent decades it has become customary — and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight — to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon.

What I myself seem to damn mainly, though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight, I would likely have helped in the ravaging as did even most of those who loved it best.

But God, to have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine and call at night in the sky.”

Every time I bear witness to the quivering stillness of a dog followed by the flush of a quail, I can’t help but think I stumbled into something of which I’m not remotely worthy, as if I were a stranger having just crashed a quiet gathering of intimates.

And in the aftermath of what transpires in those brief, fluid moments between appreciation and action, I get this incredible sense of luck and gratitude and excitement, as if I have—by simply being there in such proximity to those who are clearly my betters (the dogs, the birds, the eternal sky above, the grass below)—touched something of the divine. I hope I never lose that feeling.

But the longing for that feeling does wane this time of year as surely as it waxes in late summer, at least for the part I am supposed to play in this beautiful set-piece drama.

Simply put, I shoot so few birds in February that I can hardly in good faith call it hunting.

There are many reasons for this, of course, reasons of both the head and the heart. Science increasingly tells us that those quail which make it to February are the following spring’s breeders; survivor birds who have negotiated a breathtaking gauntlet of predators and weather and other deadly hazards.

So every bird you shoot this time of year is one less bird making next year’s birds, one less brood, one less note in a cacophonous symphony that plays ever on. Swing successfully on a single memory in late February, and you eliminate multiple opportunities to make next fall’s memories.

Beyond those practical, fact-based reasons, however, are the personal. I love quail, and revere everything about them; I love watching them, photographing them, and learning all I can about them. Quail provide me a palette upon which to marvel at the divinity of existence itself.

As such, I have always believed, however much I love hunting them (and I have spent a lifetime hunting them) that at this point in the season, any quail that’s survived this long deserves its survival, has earned it, and it damn sure doesn’t need me trying to kill it for my own selfish reasons.

No, February is not about killing, but mostly about carrying a gun that stays silent, if I carry one at all. February is for me more about thinking and walking and watching, especially if I have a young pup, which I do this year.

So we walk, the pup and I, just like I have walked with every pup before him. If everything goes just so, in a way that will help that still-developing lightbulb in his young head come on just a few lumens brighter, I may shoot a bird for him, if I happen to have brought a gun. But mostly we just walk and have fun and learn.

Because February is for both young pups and old men to learn about themselves and how they’ve fared over the past season and year. This year in particular I’ve been thinking about the unfurling of history and how, like a river, it never manages to run straight.

I saw a quote recently that really stuck with me. It was from the novel “The Sellout” by Paul Beatty, which I have not read, but now will do so.

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book - that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

It’s one of the better interpretations of what history really is that I’ve read in a while.

There is history in everything we do, of course. We steep in it even as we make it. It colors our thoughts, our decisions, how we see the world, and how we see ourselves. We can never escape our history, the things that have made us and shaped us and scarred us, for both good and bad.

And to walk the prairie in the rare warm sunshine of February is to walk with all that history and soul exposed in all its shining truth: good, bad, and everything in between.

We all need a spiritual astringent, and this one is mine, because every step teaches.

Sometimes the way we are shown is not the path we will take.

I was digging through a box of old things today trying to dredge up forgotten memories for a story I’m working on when I found these two long-buried artifacts.

We all have such boxes containing the ancient, musty talismans of who we once were. How else but through the physical markers of memory can we connect with the memory itself and thereby conjure the ghosts of ourselves?

The broadhead—an old, rusty two-blade Zwickey—was once upon a long-ago time glued to the swaged end of a vintage Easton Gamegetter aluminum arrow, and it passed through the first deer I ever killed with a bow. I was 19.

I am long past those days now, but I can run my thumb along its edge and still live that moment.

The compass, a WWII-era military-issue Wittnauer, was given to me by my grandfather when I was a kid.

I honestly can’t remember if he told me it was his (he was a Marine in the Pacific, wounded on Okinawa) or if he just had it lying around the house.

Either way, from about the age of eight I carried that old compass with me everywhere.

I didn’t have a clue how to use it like it was supposed to be used, and I can’t say it ever kept me from getting lost, metaphorically or otherwise, but I always knew in which direction it was advising me to go, even if I had neither the inclination nor the wisdom to actually go there.

Kinda like life…

For a number of years my wife, as one of those recurring holiday jokes, would buy me the exact same gift, which was a calendar of the trout of North America. And although meant as a gag, it was actually a pretty neat gift that I enjoyed much more than say, a tie. The calendar gave me 12 excellent paintings and a brief history of various trout species, subspecies, or strains, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed reading about, even if I will never be given an opportunity to fish for many of them

In particular, one month’s highlighted salmonid species and its accompanying history made such an impression on me that I wrote down some notes about it, and as I’ve been reading about the most current in the never-ending effort to divest us from ownership of the collective public treasures of our public lands, I felt the need to revisit the fundamental truth and timelessness of the history lesson it taught me.

March’s piscatorial pin-up from that old, long-ago calendar was a subspecies of the rainbow trout called the Pennask Lake rainbow trout (featured above), which as you might deduce (if you knew such things, which I didn’t) is a strain of rainbow unique to Pennask Lake, in British Columbia. The things you learn from reading…

At any rate, this Pennask Lake rainbow, while not a particularly large strain of trout, (at least not Lahontan cutthroat large) possesses some admirable fighting qualities that once, a long time ago, greatly impressed a visiting American sport with some awfully deep pockets…

I quote from the calendar text…

“In 1927, James Drummond Dole, the “Pineapple King” traveled to a remote lake in British Columbia with the promise of hard-fighting rainbow trout for his fly rod. Dole was not disappointed and claimed the lake was “nearest to being the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, of any lake seen or heard of.”

Dole, so enamored of these rare, hard-fighting Pennask Lake rainbow trout, did what any self-respecting tycoon would do when faced with something precious and beautiful and unique: He used his wealth and power to take it for himself and keep anyone else from enjoying it. Unless, of course, they had the proper cash and social standing to afford the experience.

The history lesson thus continues…

“The American industrialist and sportsman quickly set about to purchase the majority of the land surrounding the lake and established an exclusive sporting club, the Pennask Lake Fishing and Gaming Company.”

Now why does that sound familiar? Why does it seem so, hell, I don’t know, prescient, contemporary, even? Like there’s something eerily similar playing out across the public lands of the United States right now, with wealthy and powerful interests casting a covetous eye at our public resources, our public lands, our public treasures, our public birthrights, and exclaiming— like the old Pineapple King himself when he first laid eyes on Pennask Lake—that such treasures are “nearest to being the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

It sounds so familiar because “The Pineapple King” and the Pennask Lake rainbow comprise just one tiny footnote in a story as old and familiar as time itself.

And what is that story?

That greed and shitassery are the feedback loop that drives the great bulk of human history, its only constant, the shining North Star that has guided and goaded eons worth of sorry jackasses across history’s ever-shifting dunes.

Empires and nations rise and crumble. Movements flare brightly, then fade to black, then flare into something else. Prevailing attitudes wax, wane, evolve, devolve, and shift in the howling winds of time and human vagary, but the one great truth of human existence is there’s always going to be some greedy shitass trying to take your rainbow and your pot of gold for himself, even if that rainbow and gold rightfully belong to all of us.

Who knew you could learn so much from an old Christmas gag-gift calendar about obscure fish?

This is a quiet little essay that appeared recently in an issue of our state magazine here in Oklahoma. Like all quiet little essays, it bobbed to the surface for a few moments into the light of published day, was perhaps read by a few folks sitting in doctor’s waiting rooms, and then — lacking any bombast or outrage upon which to tether itself in the public consciousness — just as quietly slipped back into the depths of my own little world of words. But I’m fond of it, and quite fond of the bird that inspired it, so here you go, one more addition to my growing little cemetery of previously published works here on Substack…

“One day late in the afternoon I walked about the headstones at Rainy Mountain Cemetery. The shadows were very long; there was a deep blush on the sky, and the dark red earth seemed to glow with the setting sun. For a few moments, at that particular time of the day, there is deep silence. Nothing moves, and it does not occur to you to make any sound. Something is going on there in the shadows. Everything has slowed to a stop in order that the sun might take leave of the land. And then there is the sudden, piercing call of a bobwhite. The whole world is startled by it.”

N. Scott Momaday, from The Way to Rainy Mountain

Just off the highway heading south out of Norman, there’s a feral, overgrown patch of long-disused farmstead ground—still there, last time I looked but subdivisions were inching closer—that doesn’t look like the genesis of anything, much less a lifelong passion.

But if, as some believe, the ghosts of memory still haunt the places where those memories were made, you may see—if you look hard enough and use a little imagination—the fading apparition of a kid tromping his way through the Johnsongrass and sunflowers of that long-fallow field, chasing the lonesome whistle of a charming, vexing little bird that would eventually come to occupy so much of that kid’s adult life and become a full-blown obsession.

But that’s how it goes with Colinus virginianus, or as we commonly call him, the bobwhite quail. The scissor-tailed flycatcher may be our state bird, and rightfully so, but for myself and generations of Oklahomans who were raised on that simple, two-and-sometimes-three-note call, bob…bob…white! there is no finer or more appropriate embodiment of our state than this small, plump, ground-dwelling bird of the taxonomic order Galliformes.

Why? Because they are so remarkably tough and adaptable. For a quail, life is personified by that much-paraphrased Thomas Hobbes quote about life being nasty, brutish, and short.

A wild bobwhite will rarely live past its second birthday. They are food for virtually everything that walks, flies, or slithers. Even in the best of times they live on the ragged edge of existence and at the mercy of predators, weather, habitat loss, and just about anything else nature (and humans) can throw at them.

And yet they thrive, often in places and in conditions that would kill you or I. Their numbers may ebb and flow from year to year, but there is an amazing core of resilience buried deep within that small bundle of feathers, one that is all out of proportion to what you see and feel when you hold one in your hand.

Quail are survivors. And if that’s not Oklahoma, I don’t know what is.

I love the bobwhite quail not only as a lifelong bird hunter, but as a lifelong lover of birds and the wildness and beauty they represent. And I am not alone. Quail hunting is woven tightly into the cultural fabric of our state even to this day as continued habitat loss has silenced that whistle across much of the bobwhite’s former range.

The halcyon days of a covey in every fencerow all across the state are over, but these days Oklahoma quail hunters don’t hunt numbers, anyway. They hunt to venerate something intrinsic to their culture and their soul. They hunt to support conservation efforts with their dollars and time, they hunt to watch their dogs fly across the prairie, and they hunt because the act itself is more important than the outcome.

Sometimes on summer evenings I sit underneath a prairie windmill watching life unfold before me. But mostly I’m hoping to catch a glimpse of the amazing, fiercely unassuming little bird that most represents why I love this place.

And in the waning light they arrive, filtering in as singles, or pairs, or with half-grown broods, sneaking through the grass and weeds to gather and drink at the water’s edge.

Such a moment, being mere feet from a creature you normally only see as a blur in flight, is revelatory. When you understand something not just as quarry, but also as a living, breathing, essential part of a greater whole, it fills you with a sense of awe.

It is in these fleeting moments—when the birdsong of the prairie is quietly cacophonous, the aroma of sand-sage permeates the air and the evening light glows in that special, spectacular way that only dying plains sunlight can—that I feel I truly know quail.

As I sit and watch them, listen to their endless chatter and vocalizations, I marvel at their ability to adapt, to find just enough niche and just enough moxie to survive.

What truly remarkable little creatures they are, and how lucky we are to share our state with these tough little Oklahomans.

Dawn, way out beyond the 100th, in blue quail country. Empty country. Haunted country. My kind of country.

The heart wants what it wants, regardless of reason or logic or reality. Someone wanted a home here, once. Their hearts said yes. The land said otherwise. Such is the human condition, in most things of love, land, and life, and such it will always be.

Aridity and solitude are good for the soul, as is a paucity of trees and people. A few of both scattered about are fine, but quickly become cloying nuisances when there are too many around you.