PEA RIDGE - Bird hunting at its best is a game played with dogs, and it showed here Saturday.
The site of the hunt was a specially prepared field on the Larry McGarrah farm at the edge of Pea Ridge National Military Park, where Aaron Jolliff and several friends, including Lynn Sykes and Stephen Wright, had taken matters into their own hands three years ago to have a place to hunt doves. For a lot of hunters in Northwest Arkansas, that's the only guaranteed way to have a place to shoot.
Jolliff and his friends, all of Rogers, had scouted out a good piece of dove country between the sprawling fields of the military park and a nearby seed-processing facility, but there was also a lot of work to be done to transform what was essentially 20 acres of fallow pasture choked with waist-high weeds.
"We were city boys out there trying to act like farmers," Jolliff joked in the pre-dawn darkness as we waited in Rogers for several of his friends to show up to form a caravan out to the farm for the opening morning of dove season.
"We started out brush-hogging the pasture, chewing it up over and over and hauling out a lot of the weeds. Then we took a spring-tooth implement and ripped up the ground and followed that with disking the field over and over."
The next step was putting the field to use in a way that could be considered a "regular agricultural practice." In this case, the agricultural practice was seeding the field with wheat to raise winter forage for McGarrah's livestock. If a byproduct of the seeding attracted doves, it was perfectly legal to hunt them when the dove season opened and before the seeds sprouted.
The prep work to ready the field three summers ago had to be repeated the next two summers. "It has been a lot of work," Jolliff said.
Although the efforts have passed annual inspection by wildlife officers with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the results have not been an unqualified success.
"That first year we shot something like 240 birds the opening weekend, but last year we only got four; the hunting was just crud," Jolliff said.
This year the field was seeded just in time to receive several good rain showers, causing a lot of wheat to sprout and the field to green up. Would there be enough unsprouted seed left to attract doves if there were doves around to be attracted? The latter, of course, is always the big question for the season opener in Northwest Arkansas.
AND THE FEATHERS FLEW
Between a layer of fog rising from the ground and hazy clouds to the east, dawn came slowly to the field where the hunters were spread out along the edge of a brushy, weedy fence line.
Before walking across a pasture to reach the field, Jolliff cautioned everyone to be sure they had their hunting licenses and permits, as well as plugs in their shotguns. One hunter with a new gun had to improvise a plug with a pencil to make sure it was limited to three-shot capacity.
During the walk to the field, Jolliff pronounced the weather conditions to his liking. "The conditions are absolutely perfect - cool, still and not too dusty," he said.
The atmosphere was also antsy.
"Game time!" Jolliff yelled to announce the arrival of official shooting time, while the hunters were still shadowy figures in the fog.
Somehow, he was able to spot a pair of doves coming in high behind the fence line and angling toward the field.
"Behind you! Behind you!" Jolliff shouted.
Everyone, of course, took the occasion to empty their shotguns. Maybe some were shooting at phantoms because not a feather fell, but they raised such a volley that if any Rebs or Yanks had been encamped at the battlefield, they would have surely come running.
"A swing and a miss," Jolliff joked as he hurriedly reloaded.
Within seconds, another pair of doves flew the gauntlet along the fence line.
"Overhead! Overhead!" Jolliff yelled, raising to fire but failing to get off a shot while a crescendo of blasts sounded around him.
"Aw man, my shotgun is jammed, and we got birds in the air," he blurted.
It took only seconds to diagnose the problem - he had loaded a shell backwards in the magazine of his autoloader.
Such is the adrenaline rush of the opening of any game bird season. In the past, I've seen hunters load rolls of mints and cigarette lighters and one time a tube of lipstick.
"Hey boys, it helps to load your shells the right way," Jolliff advised with good humor.
During the first hour of the hunt, scattered doves in singles, doubles and triples showed up sporadically over the field, sometimes at intervals stretching to several minutes.
However, as the fog lifted and a bright sun climbed over the trees at the east end of the field, the pace of arriving doves picked up and would remain steady for the next two hours to extend the hunt to nearly 10 a.m.
No one would bag a quick and easy limit of 15 doves, but no one was counting the shots fired that would far, far outnumber the birds bagged.
DOG DAY
As it turned out, the long and steady pace of the hunt was ideal for three Labrador retrievers - Jolliff's young chocolate male Hagan, Sykes' young chocolate female Pepper and Wright's veteran yellow female Molly.
All three were able to get in plenty of single retrieves and some blind retrieves that provided great fun and good training for the dogs.
When the Labs had been first released from their kennels after arriving at the farm, I had watched with initial misgivings.
Over the years, I have seen many opening days of bird season ruined for dog owners and their companions by unruly and rambunctious retrievers and pointers. Dogs running off. Dogs fighting. Lots of angry shouting that would lead one to believe the most common name of retrievers was an expletive.
Most of the time, the problems were associated with dogs that had been kept in their kennels for months before suddenly being released in the field.
Hagan, Pepper and Molly were definitely eager when they hit the ground, but they were not out of control. They rolled all over each other like old friends, but they also stayed close to their masters before and during the walk to the hunting field.
When Sykes had described Pepper as a "dynamite little retriever," he had also added, "She ought to be with all the training she's had." I would soon learn that he meant professional and personal training.
Out in the field, the Labs heeled up nicely and held their positions in the run-up to shooting time. There was some anticipatory whining and trembling beforehand, but they weren't feeling any different than their owners.
Hagan would remain heeled up until Jolliff rose to fire. Then, he would jump out a few feet to scan the sky for a falling bird. If he saw one, he would race out to find it and deliver it to hand. If he didn't see the fallen bird, Jolliff would heel him up and hold his hand beside the dog's muzzle to give him a "line" or wave his hand in the air to send the dog on a searching sweep.
Down at the western end of the field, Pepper was regularly making classic retrieves, charging out and returning fast and straight as if she were a guided missile.
Between the sighted retrieves and the blind retrieves with hand signals, it showed how quickly the skills of a young retriever could be honed.
"Sykes and I have been training our dogs an hour a day for five days a week out in the back of Prairie Creek," Jolliff said.
That explained a lot.
At the other end of the field, Molly showed her six years of hunting experience, displaying a workmanlike attitude in unerringly retrieving her birds. When Hagan and Molly's retrieves overlapped, however, the result was often a spirited competition.
It soon became clear that the hunters were deriving more pleasure from watching the dogs than pulling the trigger. The words most commonly heard during the hunt were "good boy" and "good girl."
"I like the hunting, but to me, honestly, it's about being with my dog; that's the best part," Jolliff said.
In other words, he and his friends considered their retrievers to be the main excuse for all the work involved in having a dove hunting field.
Beyond providing their dogs a place to hunt and being conscientious about their training, they were also attentive to the dogs' needs in the field, making sure there was plenty of water for dry mouths.
One of the problems for retrievers while dove hunting is getting a mouthful of feathers during retrieves. Hagan regularly had wads of feathers hanging from his muzzle, but he didn't seem to mind. He wore them like badges of honor.
They smelled like victory.