I hold the onionskin gently, the fragile, yellowed pages edge-tattered by silverfish in the years since my great-grandfather Louis “Bub” Campbell hunted and pecked the words upon them on March 26, 1946. Bub was a bird dog man, from an Alabama bird dog family, who spent most of his life managing a ten-thousand-acre quail plantation in Tallahassee, Florida, in the famed Red Hills. The pages are carbon copies of an article and cover letter he addressed to Mr. Ned West of the Tallahassee Democrat. From Bub’s spelling, punctuation, and brevity, I assume the submission to be his first.
As Bub came to writing later in life, so I am a late-life quail hunter, as zealous as any new convert. The texts of my faith reside in a cracked leather binder he unwittingly left me twenty-five years before I was born: eighty-year-old letters, notes, and newspaper clippings about hunts and dog trials and quail, the foundation stones upon which Bub built his life. Reading his words, I feel the pull of shared blood feeding my own growing passion for Colinus virginianus, the northern bobwhite quail:
So many people have asked me,
“How a covey of Quail spends the
Day”—here it is. I have kept in
mind a day in December.
I sense the expertise that made him a known authority on quail behavior:
At daylight the roosting circle
breaks and they whistle between
breaks and they whistle between
covies—using the scatter call.
They drink dew from grass tips
and feed for a while and partially fill
their crops.
I see a writer’s rhythm emerging in simple sentences describing a photo he included for Mr. West. Bub stands with a rearing English pointer, paws in his hands, both of them in front of a white horse:
The name of the horse with me
in the picture is “Pal.” I have ridden
this horse for eighteen years. He
knows as much about hunting as
I do.
Like bobwhites, most of which don’t make it beyond six months of birth, Bub died young. My grandmother bought six hundred acres near Athens, Georgia, with money he left her. There were no quail there, save the stories she told, no whistles but her mimicry. For most of my life, a bobwhite was as distant and grandiose a notion to me as the long-dead Northern owners of the land Bub managed and where she was raised. I am fifty-two now, a year past what Bub saw, and his living inverse, learning the rapture of the bobwhite in the same phase of life in which he took up the pen.
Every link in the food chain precedes “Gentleman Bob,” for whom simply living is a profession of faith in community. Conversely, everything on the Southeastern landscape follows a white-throated, black-masked bellwether. To hear the two-note, low-high call of a wild quail—bob-WHITE!—is to be among native grasses filled with native insects, the understory of sustainable forests maintained by flame. Turkeys and deer slip through, concealed yet unobstructed, under the eyes of a balance of owls, raptors, and songbirds. A quail-based ecology is as it was designed, whether by cosmic happenstance or divine providence. To hear them is to know that we are well—to not is to know we damn well better start listening.
Waxing on about the quail’s ecological significance would be hypocritical without acknowledging that I seek to kill what I profess to love. As surely as I accept that cruel truth, I savor the beauty of a quail hunt, whether it be an afternoon walk through the woods or the full pageantry of a Red Hills outing. My first time there, hunting from horseback, pointers and setters coursing through broom sedge in search of huddled birds, wagons trailing us all, felt like being within shouting distance of heaven. The dogs pointing, statuesque, as Bub’s white-jacketed successor called me forward to stand ready as a flushing dog charged into a covey yet unseen. Birds bursting up and out in a fireworks show of whirring wings, feathered missiles twisting through cover, against which I could choose one, maybe two, if I was not sense-saturated by the eruption. But I am a simple man, and wandering under longleaf with nothing more than good friends and good dogs, all soot-stained browns and blaze-orange hats, following flagging tails with double guns broken over forearms, brings me closer still to paradise.
More than spectacle or camaraderie, hunting the bird upon which Bub built a life is for me to answer the call of blood. When I take to the quail woods, I feel him, and my grandmother, with me, another gift from Gentleman Bob.
In North Carolina’s Cape Fear region, where I live, there are places where public and private efforts to preserve and increase wild quail populations are seeing success, where the bobwhite’s call once again brightens a walk in the pines. Though the birds exist in huntable numbers, I am satisfied merely to flush them and revel in the explosive glory of their rise. These are multiyear efforts, cycles of clearing and burning, of fighting predation from species long on the landscape and the invasives expanding their territories with the changing climate. They are the purest labor of love, a genuine example of planting a tree in the shade of which you may never sit.
What is it about this six-ounce bird that spends its life trying to survive the things that kill up to 80 percent of them each year? Why do its adherents spend absurd amounts of time and money to save a creature so fragile from the threats of human creation that we seem unwilling to stop? I find the answer walking through wire grass gilded by morning sunlight, when the call of a bobwhite pierces the air, ringing so boldly from something so tiny. I hear the promise of hope, and I know that I am home.
See the other articles in our For the Love of the Game collection:
In Pursuit of the Ancient Tarpon of the Everglades, by Monte Burke
The Heart-Pounding Rapture of a Wood Duck Morning, by T. Edward Nickens
Man vs. Turkey: The Quest to Outsmart a Gobbler, by David Joy
Chasing Chinook—and Family Memories—in the Waters of Alaska, by Kim Cross
A Love Letter to Largemouth Bass, by Charles Gaines
