Dove season means something different to me than killing doves.
It has since 2010 when I hunted Argentina. My host awarded me a cap for killing 1,500 doves in a day. I'm proud of that hat, but I'm a little ashamed of it, too.
I didn't eat a single one of those doves. I've heard that they feed them to hungry villagers, but I don't believe it. Thousands of dove carcasses stuffed into burlap sacks roasting in the sun for three days aren't fit to eat. I suspect they feed them to the hogs.
Nevertheless, I am awed and humbled to have hunted a place where doves blacken the sky, where I shot so much so fast that I blistered my trigger finger and bruised my shoulder. I looked at some of my video from that hunt the other day, and it was as spellbinding onscreen as it was in person.
Dove hunting in the United States doesn't compare.
Of course I still appreciate a good dove shoot, but I'm perfectly content to hang out in the fields and visit with friends.
Adam Ratcliffe and his sister Kathy Ratcliffe-Koehler hold an annual dove hunt at their farm in Sweet Home. It's a big deal to a lot of people, including Jeff Lawrence, a master raconteur, and Scott Hunter, my friend of nearly 30 years. Scott's wife, Karen Hunter, joined us, as well. Karen, a liver transplant recipient, is a profile in courage with her indomitable good humor and diamond-tipped wit.
I attended the Ratcliffe Farms hunt in 2009 and 2011, and again Saturday. The hunting was great every year but those three, but nobody seems to hold it against me.
We're always so excited when we gather at Ratcliffe's equipment shed. We catch up on each others' lives, and there always seems to be some kind of doughnut-buying drama. It happened this year to Ratcliffe at a doughnut shop in Northwest Arkansas, where he encountered a wild-eyed, wild-haired zealot tapping on a laptop emblazoned with a Hillary Clinton campaign sticker. He locked eyes with Ratcliff and excoriated him with a partisan rant.
"A friend of mine ran into that same guy at a Burger King yesterday," Ratcliff said Friday. "It was the same deal. You know, it can't be good for business to have a guy like that hanging around."
Another fellow recalled the story I wrote about the 2009 hunt.
"It's the one day of the year that people talk and act this way," he said, reciting his favorite line. "What gets said in a dove field stays in a dove field."
Then, he launched into a story about his duck waders and ... well, the rule still applies.
Expectations were high as we took our stations in the field. Ratcliffe advised using spinning wing dove decoys. The ground was so hard from drought that the decoy poles had to be hammered into place.
Lawrence, the senior regional director for Ducks Unlimited, had succumbed to the siren song of the Cabela's catalog for this event. There he found a metal tree that holds stationary dove decoys. It also required a hammer to go into the ground.
The rising sun lit the field and revealed a line of spinning wing decoys in front of expectant hunters. It was very quiet. The few birds that crossed the field didn't leave on their own.
I spent the morning visiting with Lawrence and Ratcliffe, who hoped to get his dog a little retrieving work. We talked about shotguns and handguns, rifles, ducks, deer, geese and rice. We talked of kids, wives, wetlands, conservation and universal truths.
A short distance to our left was Luke Berger, his son Gage Berger, 17, and daughter Lauren Berger, 13. It was Lauren's first dove hunt, and she gamely helped Gage clean the field's entire dove harvest.
Miss Kathy gave them a dedicated bucket for this task. She had buttressed her prize tomato plants with chicken wire and adorned each with printed signs in large type that said, "NO DOVE GUTS."
In 2011, I shot a photo of Luke and Gage Berger admiring one of the doves they shot. Gage was a little kid then.
"Dude, you've grown!" I blurted, momentarily bewildered by the march of time.
Tyler Lawrence, Jeff's son, joined us with his friend John Wilkerson, who was recently discharged from the military after a long stint in the Middle East. He regaled us with tales of his service, including a fascinating adventure about ... oh, never mind. You know the rule, and that story is probably classified, anyway.
Brian Carty, who owns a hardware store in Little Rock, strolled up and down the sunflower rows in a visitational manner. He gave everybody soft bracelets infused with citronella and lemon grass extract to repel mosquitos. They work very well.
Finally the heat drove us from the field, and we reconvened at the equipment shed for a sleep-inducing lunch of ribs, potato salad, barbecued beans, cole slaw and deviled eggs. As our families can surely attest, serving beans and deviled eggs together is an act of domestic terrorism.
The party broke up about noon. To my great surprise, Ratcliffe invited me back next year. Maybe whatever cosmic penance I am serving will be fulfilled by then and doves will quit avoiding me.
Ratcliffe laughed at that.
"It's great when there's birds around, but that's not really what it's all about," he said.
Amen, brother. These are my kind of folks.
Sports on 09/13/2015