By Kyle Wright
I couldn’t hit the broad side of a stationary barn, much less the head or vitals of a flushing pheasant. And I wasn’t happy about it.
It was late in the season and the birds were wild. If I’m being honest, so were the shots. We had killed a few roosters, though, and had even stumbled into a covey of blue quail, knocking down enough of them that I was already salivating over supper. There’s no better comfort food after a full day of bird hunting than fried quail with a side of mashed potatoes and gravy. Especially when there’s a biscuit slathered in my momma’s peach preserves for dessert.
That meal in and of itself would have made the drive to Oklahoma’s panhandle worthwhile, but it had been great to catch up with my oldest friend, Casey, too. Not that there had been a lot of it to begin with, but the pressure of killing a limit of birds had bled off entirely. We were just having fun. Or, at least as much fun as guys can have when one of them can’t shoot straight.
A Late-Season Slump
Across three days of hunting, I had made exactly one shot that I was proud of. We were working a fence line that first morning that collected tumbleweeds like a pants pocket collects lint when two birds got up on my side. I swung on the closest and identified it as a hen just before I squeezed off so I kept right on swinging. The second bird was winging it for all he was worth when my swing finally caught up to him and the shotgun spoke. The rooster folded like a pocketknife and fell to the earth.
That shot felt like a lifetime ago, though, and I had gone cold since. Casey and I were walking back to the truck after pushing a field of wheat stubble, just talking and telling stories, when a rooster got up a quarter mile ahead of us. Casey stopped his story mid-sentence and the two of us stared in disbelief. The bird looked like a pterodactyl taking flight. It was that big. Or maybe a peacock ascending its perch. Its tail feathers were that long.
The Laughing Pheasant
During his flight, the rooster swiveled his massive head to stare at the two yokels standing slack jawed in the middle of the two-track. He must have recognized us from the morning hunt and realized that he had nothing to fear from our shotguns because upon eye contact, the bird visibly relaxed. He slowed the beating of his wings and then gave a throaty chuckle. The freaking pheasant was laughing at us.
We didn’t appreciate it and emptied our shotguns in his general direction. That got the rooster’s attention again. He must have turned his head for another look and maybe another laugh because when he did, the bird positively clotheslined himself on a high-line wire. It looked like something out of a professional wrestling match. The rooster somersaulted under and then over the high-line wire before being hurled to earth like a meteorite. I felt the thud of the bird’s impact where I stood.
For the first time since high school, my friend Casey sprinted to the crash site, a smoking crater in the panhandle sand, sifted through the trash and the tumbleweeds, and deadlifted the dazed bird out of the bar ditch. He then wrung its neck with both of his bare hands. It took the two of us to get the rooster stuffed into the game pouch of Casey’s vest. He threw his back out carrying that big sucker back to the truck.
But a high-line wire had wiped the smug smile right off that rooster’s face. And put a smile on mine.
