I landed in good luck there, for I had anticipated the pleasure of meeting old friends and relatives—a cousin whom my mother had reared and who to me had always been a sister—but I had the additional good luck to fall into the hands of Mr. Geo. W. Ferguson, the county treasurer, and the owner of Raymond S. by Montevideo, the handsomest young trotting sire it has been my good fortune to see in any State. And I found the blooded stock interest alive and growing in all that section, and surely no place under the skies has a better license to rear them. In the hands of Mr. Ferguson and Mr. W. B. Stone, the county game-warden, I realized one of the dreams of my life—a prairie chicken shoot. If you have never indulged in one, go a thousand miles to Dakota—and every year will find you wanting to go again. It was a bright, crisp morning in September, and Mr. Stone’s beautiful setter bitch was good and fit. I had been out early to see some threshers at work in the wheat, and a little shower coming up I had gotten wet. This in the South would have meant two hours’ dampness, and a cold, but imagine my surprise, in a short while, to find the ground dry and myself with it, very dry! In the rarefied air of this great country I do not believe one can get wet unless he is foolish enough to drink water.
Mr. Ferguson met me later with his surrey and two spanking red-sorrel trotting mares, as well bred as Raymond S, and away we went across the prairie after the chickens. The ride itself was pleasure enough—forever going through that beautiful black loam, as tempting to the eye of the man who loves the soil as a cobwebbed bottle or a fat capon to the stomach of a priest. For it was bespangled with red berries, ripe heads of flax, golden stubbles of wheat and oats and barley, red grasses finer than ever bluegrass grows to be and richer than all tame blades.
My first covey is pictured forever in my mind. The bitch came to a staunch stand near a low, marshy place, where the grass was blue green and studded with fall flowers. On all sides were shocks of wheat, and away in the distance the interminable smokestacks of busy threshers. I walked up and took it all in—I stamped the picture forever on my mind. I wanted it there that I might always see it—the very clouds, the distant horizon, the golden stubble-blades, the very silence that hangs like a benediction over the land. And all over it and above everything that beautiful Llewellyn bitch, frozen in living marble before me.
“Is it possible,” I thought, “that nothing is between these birds and me but the air?” No pines of Alabama and Mississippi, no thickets on the creeks of Louisiana, no wooded lots and big hills of Tennessee, no barb-wire fence with hideous signs stuck up warning me that some hog lived there on posted land? All my life I had shot quail under those conditions. Now—now—nothing but me and the pure, clear air and the boundless, rolling prairies and that dog of marble waiting for the word, to flush a dozen prairie hens squatting in the stubble ready to rise with a cyclone’s rush on wings of thunder. I stood frozen—like the dog. I could not move. My heart beat like a race-horse in the back stretch, making me take long breaths and swallow hard as I came to the hunter’s attention. Then!—
Never arose before mortal man so thrilling a sight. They sucked me forward like the gust of a passing express, like the roar of a wind storm, like the burst of sun from a cloud, thunder-lined. The earth of stubble quivered to their wings of thunder and the air pulsed like a man-of-war when the big guns bellow to port.
But I did not forget to fire—oh, no! Man is a killing animal by instinct, and a hog by nature, and neither poetry nor romance nor the wild glory of the great fields can stop him from killing when his killing blood is up and his stomach is at stake. Yes, I fired—once—twice—and I shot to kill. Two beautiful ones I picked with lightning glance from the splendid covey—two glorious ones that fairly split the air in the wild joy of escape, only suddenly to—
Well, “the rest is silence,” as Shakespeare said, when Hamlet died, and it is the same death that will come to you and me—the end will be just as sudden, whether we fall in the mid-day of life or fall to the slow fever of age. They fell but ten feet apart and I walked up and looked down on them—the proud, beautiful creatures now limp and lifeless.
I took them up and fondled them—I wanted to kiss them, they were so quiet now and warm, still splendid in death.
Mr. Stone had killed his brace also, but being more experienced, had shot them farther off.
“You killed yours too close,” he said, as I stood fondling the limp and beautiful birds. “You should have waited up to fifty yards or seventy.”