Border Country: A Quail Hunt in Southern Arizona by Jim Fergus "A tireless walker with strong legs to carry his Buddha-like build, (Harrison) is a fine hunting companion who is not only a good shot (despite having only one seeing eye) but also great company in the field." Jim Harrison prepares for a southern Arizona quail hunt. Although the two regions occupy roughly the same latitude, northern Florida and southern Arizona could hardly be more different if they were separate countries altogether. I've made the trip between them a number of times, generally with the Airstream in tow, a long three-day drive (you're in Texas so long you feel like you've established residency). But driving at least allows me to gradually reacclimatize from one ecosystem to the other, so that by the time I reach Arizona, the desert landscape seems less foreign and inhospitable. In this case, however, Henri and I had flown from Tallahassee to Tucson and we were still in the throes of a kind of environmental jet-lag. Indeed, it is an odd feeling to one day be hunting the relatively lush pine forests of the Southeast and two days later find oneself in the grassy desert uplands of the Southwest. Where did all the trees go? At the same time, sometimes it's hard to believe that the various species of quail which occupy these radically different habitats -- bobwhite quail in Southeast, Gambel's, scaled and Mearns in the Southwest -- are even distantly related, so different is their appearance and behavior. Yet they do share some traits, with slight variations: they are roughly the same size (though Gambel's quail are a bit larger and Mearns a bit plumper), they are all covey birds and they fly very fast. I had come to visit my Michigan friends Jim Harrison and Nick Reens who spend a good part of their winters in southern Arizona hard against the border of Mexico. Both are good hunters with fine dogs -- big gangly English setters originally out of the Old Hemlock line founded by the legendary and recently deceased hunter/writer George Bird Evans. These dogs seem more suited to the grouse and woodcock coverts of New England, or, in this case, northern Michigan, but have adapted beautifully to this new austere landscape. When exposed to different country, good bird dogs generally figure out rather quickly where the birds hang out. Whereas Gambel's (Lophortyx gambelii) tend to favor the desert itself and are the most notorious runners of all the quail species, scaled quail (Callipepla squamata, a.k.a. blue quail) seem to prefer the intermediate grasslands, and Mearns (Cyrtonyx montezumae, a.k.a. harlequin quail) like a bit more elevation yet, in grassy meadows and openings in the mountains, or at least the foothills, where they hold so tightly that you practically have to step on them before they will fly. But it's also true that sometimes you can catch things just right and find all three species in a single day's hunting, sometimes even in a single draw with mixed Gambel's and scalies at the base and Mearns a little higher. On this particular day, we were hunting such mixed country, near the New Mexico border in a valley between two broad plateaus cut by a series of draws. Neither Harrison nor Reens will hunt in the desert proper, as the cacti, particularly the notorious jumping cholla, cylindrical pieces of which break off and attach themselves to dogs like barbed pin cushions, can take the fun out of hunting. "I think too much of my dogs," says Reens, "to put them through that." So as southwestern quail country went, this valley and the draws that fed it were relatively gentle. Large oaks grew in the bottom, smaller oaks and mesquite clung to the grassy hillsides which gave way to a flat, treeless plain on the other side of the plateau. It had been a wet spring in the area (the nearly sole determinate of quail populations in the southwest from year to year) and we got into birds almost immediately -- a covey of Gambel's on the plain, running ahead of the dogs. The trick is to get them to fly and break up into singles where they hold much better for a point. In fact, when hunting Gambel's and scalies, many Arizona quail hunters encourage their dogs to first flush the covey and then hunt the singles, an approach that would be heresy to a southeastern bobwhite quail hunter. Bust them up we did, as one of Reens's stellar setters, Art, scattered the birds into the air. We marked them down and were able to hunt the singles with some excellent dog work, some of it even performed by the young upstart Henri, who backed the big setters faithfully and even found some birds of his own. Harrison, a novelist and poet of some renown (Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and his most recent novel, The Road Home) is a heavyset, I don't want to say portly, but let's say somewhat beefy fellow, whose major loves in life, other than his family and friends, are (in no particular order) good food, fine wine, the natural world, his dogs and walking. A tireless walker with strong legs to carry his Buddha-like build, he's a fine hunting companion who is not only a good shot (despite having only one seeing eye) but also great company in the field. He's one of my favorite people on the planet to hunt with simply because he notices things, and is as conversant on the natural history of his home territories as he is on the subjects of poetry and literature. He knows the names of the various grass species and the songbirds, and he can quote Rilke and Lorca at the drop of a hat. He and Reens, who is one of the country's foremost dealers in fine sporting art, have been hunting together for several decades, and they complement each other well. Although I've always prided myself on my ability to keep up with anyone in the field, I practically have to jog beside Reens to keep pace. Long-legged and in great shape, he moves fluidly through cover, up and down hillsides, following his big-running setters without ever breaking stride. He also reads cover and understands bird habits and habitats as well as anyone I've ever hunted with. Between Nick's and his dogs' natural and acquired savvy, if there is a bird in the county, they will find it. We generally switch hunting partners regularly and our paths frequently converge, but today I was hunting mostly with Harrison while Reens marched the distant hills, the far-away sound of his dogs' beeper collars and a regular shotgun blast, or two, marking his location and telling us that, as usual, he had found birds. Now Harrison's setter, Rose, went on point on a likely looking grassy flat, a large covey of scaled quail, which fly in odd, irregular, almost bat-like patterns, spraying out of the cover. Harrison shot a double on the covey rise and I a single, and then we had some fine shooting as we hunted up the singles, young Henri acquitting himself quite well and making a couple of snappy retrieves to boot. And now we climbed up a draw to the steady sound of both dogs' beepers on point mode, Rose and Henri locked up on the slope beneath a gnarled oak tree. The Mearns got up out of the heavy grass nearly under our feet, scaring us with the whir of wings, their rotund little bodies belying their airspeed; they flew like a dozen softballs thrown by notably wild pitchers in a fast-pitch league. But we each connected with one. And the dogs repointed a couple of the singles. Nick joined us then and we took a rest under an oak tree, laid out our three species of southwestern quail to admire their distinctive colorings and feather patterns. For all the apparent austerity of these desert grasslands, the beauty, fecundity and variety of its wildlife species seemed somehow extraordinary to me. No one had shot limits yet but we had plenty of birds, and sometimes the end of the hunt just seems obvious. "I think it's time for a bite to eat," Harrison said, to which suggestion we all enthusiastically agreed. "And possibly a beverage," added his old friend Reens. We hiked back to the vehicles, loaded dogs and gear, and drove to a Mexican restaurant in the nearby town where we ate steaming bowls of menuda and drank Pacifico beers. Late that night Henri and I caught the red-eye back to Tallahassee and the following day found us hunting bobwhite quail again in the muted southern pine forest, as if our brief trip to Arizona had been just a dream. Copyright © 1999 Jim Fergus. All rights reserved.