Dampening the Thrill of the Hunt

It’s nice to have an older, wiser man in one’s life, someone whose wide experience and good judgment can both open up the world a bit and keep you from falling all the way in.

I’m lucky to have Fritz. He’s known me longer than I’ve known him, since he and his wife, Flo, used to baby-sit me when I was a toddler and our budding families lived in the same apartments on Aviation Way up near LAX. He is a peaceful man, slow to anger, quick with a story, methodical and thorough in what interests him, loyal.

He is also a superb outdoorsman, hunter and fisherman. For the past five years or so he has been toddler-sitting me in the field every bird-hunting season, much as he did back on Aviation Way, except I now wear Size 10 boots and carry a shotgun. He has been teaching me the fine points of quail hunting, which take a while to sink in and much longer to successfully implement.

One rule of the quail hunt is don’t do it in the wind because the birds won’t fly and you won’t see any. Rule No. 2 is don’t bother doing it in the rain because they won’t fly and you’ll be miserable.

So, with the first big autumn storm of the year and our little quail expedition both set for the following day, we put our heads together. Fritz didn’t believe that a prevailing weather system would interfere with the hunt and said we should head down to the desert south of Orange County in spite of the forecast.

“We’ll just see how it goes,” he said. “Can’t hunt in the rain.”

We left Orange County at 4:45 a.m. The radio said heavy rain had already hit the northern reaches of Los Angeles County, and the storm would blast into Orange County by late morning. By the time the sun came up, we were in Corona, where skies were dark and brooding but dry. Looking back to the northwest from where we had come, we saw nothing but black skies. To the south where we were headed the skies looked, well, tenable.

We outran the storm. By 8 we were in the rolling, cactus-studded hills where the birds live, watching with pride and anticipation as our dogs braided their independent ways up the hillside, noses to the dirt, bristling with retriever energy. My brown Labrador, Cassius, halted abruptly and turned his block of a head back to me, just to make sure I was there and doing my job. Whatever it is that goes through a bird-dog’s brain when he’s working, I like it very much.

Of course, the storm caught up with us. First there were just a few light drops, and the sky really didn’t look all that wet. So we pressed further into the gully and rock piles where the quail like to hide. We each had couple of birds by the time the sprinkles graduated to a steady drizzle. Out came the plastic ponchos.

“Can’t hunt in the rain,” Fritz said. “Let’s work this cactus again.”

By the time we were done working the cactus, my boots and pants were soaked through. I chased a little bunch of birds over the rise and lost Fritz. For the next hour I sloshed on with Cassius through the rain and breeze, my glasses streaking with rainwater and my hat--thoroughly saturated--weighing about eight pounds. I mused on the concept of “waterproof” boots, a chimera nourished by salesmen and advertisements in outdoorsy catalogues.

Cassius was ecstatic in the cold. Nothing like a nasty windblown rain to make a Labrador feel right at home. He leaped from boulder to boulder as if weightless (Cassius weighs 80 pounds and is built like an NFL center), shot from bushes, streaked up hillsides and crashed through thickets of forbidding manzanita scaring up birds all over the place that I could hardly see or hear in the now heavy rain.

I went back to our little base camp, huddled under my poncho, ate an Oscar Mayer Lunchable and waited for Fritz. When he didn’t show, I figured I’d walk back to the truck--at least a mile away--and go pick him up. The muscles in my back were jumping up and down from the cold and, astonishingly, Cassius was shivering. I was about to leave when I saw Fritz unhurriedly coming down, just a speck of a man lost against a rain-soaked mountain.

Fritz is in his mid-60s but almost always hikes farther, climbs higher, works harder than I do. So I wasn’t surprised that his love of the hunt had carried him out into the special territory that only Fritz seems to inhabit--a place of birds and dogs and rough country and hours passing like minutes--rain or not.

“Can’t hunt in the rain,” I said. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

“This is miserable.”

Luckily, the local caretaker came by with his truck and gave us a ride back to his place. Fritz and I and the dogs sat in the open bed with the firewood. We added up our birds, each of us silently trying to justify almost three hours of driving, two hours of hiking through cold rain and the present misery of chattering teeth and near-frozen hands, for the four sad birds in our game pouches.

The caretaker seemed to find us ridiculous.

We used his covered patio to dry off and put on fresh clothes and shoes. We stood there, blue-lipped, staring down at Fritz’s waterlogged boots, which sat on the concrete floor, steam issuing up from the dark insides. The dogs were curled together like commas--just a blotch of drenched and matted fur from which three eyes (Cassius only has one) woefully regarded us. The caretaker brought us some homemade chicken soup. Fritz had to wait a few minutes to lace up his nice dry tennis shoes because his fingers were so stiff.

Back in the truck in our clean, dry clothes, we headed back to the highway, heater blasting, going home. But the rain stopped and Fritz wanted to show me a new place he’d found--not to hunt right now, but just in case I wanted to go there some time without him. When we got there, about 50 quail ran across the road.

Fritz looked at me and I looked at Fritz. On the one (still thawing) hand were clean, dry clothes and shoes we would clearly ruin if we chased after these birds. On the other hand, well, there was the whole reason we were out there in the first place--quail.

Three hours later, Fritz had two of them. We also had two pairs of ruined athletic shoes and two pairs of ruined jeans. I’ve since washed mine three times on “heavy,” but the grass and brush stains have hardly even lightened.

“Can’t hunt in the rain,” Fritz noted on the way home.

“We picked a helluva day to try it,” I said.

“We picked a helluva day.”