By Kyle Wright
Even from where we parked a quarter mile away, I could feel that something special was brewing. One of my oldest friends, and our de facto guide for this hunt, eased the door shut on his pickup and then waved us over. Half a dozen guys huddled around him, including a game warden who had invited himself on the trip. The guy hadn’t been a jerk or anything, but his very presence had cast a pall on the carefree atmosphere of family and good friends sharing a hunt. My friend gathered us in and spoke in hushed tones.
“Alright, guys, this hunt is going to be pretty straightforward. We’re just going to spread out and push this field between these grain tents.”
Two identical agriculture tents stretched out ahead of us, covering mountains of freshly harvested corn. The tents were separated by a narrow strip of sunflowers, roughly the size of a football field. From a distance, it looked like the circus was in town. Ironic, because the greatest show on earth was about to play out not under those tents, but between them.
“Now, make sure you don’t cross the road at the end of the field because you’ll need a different tag to hunt over there.”
Greatest Show on Earth
Every head in the huddle turned toward the game warden, but he didn’t look up. The property we were hunting that day butted right up against the state line. Birds that got up in Oklahoma came down in Kansas. If they got up and beat their wings more than once or twice, they were liable to land in Texas or Colorado.
The closer we got to the field between the grain tents, the more the tension began to build. There was a static electricity crackling among those stalks of sunflower. We took our first steps into the field and a literal tidal wave of pheasants swept over us. The sky went black with birds. It was Biblical, pestilence and plague kind of stuff.
My brother limited out immediately. As he was stuffing a third rooster into his game vest, my dad stepped over and under his breath, recommended that he shoulder his gun and just walk along with us. My brother gave him a questioning look and in turn, dad gave a meaningful look at the game warden. We weren’t the kind of hunters that exceeded personal game limits, but we were absolutely the kind of hunters that kept shooting until the party’s limit was filled. With shots being fired from multiple guns at crisscrossing roosters, claiming a bird was often just a guess, anyway.
Because of all the action above us, it took the game warden a minute to notice that my brother had quit shooting. When he did notice, he directed a question towards my dad.
The Rule Bender
“What’s your son doing? Does he need more shells or something? I’ve got plenty.”
“No sir, he actually shot his limit right off the bat, so he’s just going to walk out the rest of this field with us.”
“The hell he is. Tell him I said to load his gun and get to shooting. I’ve been pheasant hunting my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like this. It would be a shame if we didn’t all limit out.”
The man was right. I hadn’t been pheasant hunting my whole life, but I’d never seen anything like it, either. And for that matter, I’ve never seen hunting like it since—hunting so good that even the game warden was willing to bend the rules.
