The calendar says fall starts near the end of September. In Texas, it starts a few weeks earlier. The leaves aren’t changing; it’s still scorching outside, and the summer heat won’t let up until mid-October. But the first week of September is different. On Friday night, the sounds of marching bands and cheering crowds roll through the trees of rural Texas. By morning, that sound is replaced by the retort of shotguns.
Dove season has started.
Shotguns that haven’t been touched in months get pulled from the safe. Boxes of shells get dumped into five-gallon buckets, coolers get loaded with beer, and group texts come back to life after months of silence.
On August 31, trucks begin pulling down caliche roads and into hunting camps. Some of these people only see each other on opening weekend. But within an hour, they are sitting around a card table drinking the same cheap beer and telling the same stories they told last year. Grandpa is sitting in his recliner watching as his sons get everything ready for the morning. They both have kids of their own now. Eventually, he goes to bed and everyone else stays up too late shuffling dominoes.
In the dark, trucks start up one by one. Guns get loaded into cases and kids who couldn’t wait for their first dove hunt suddenly don’t want to get out of bed. The first stop is the gas station. At five in the morning, it looks like a hunting convention. Dust-covered trucks with loaded-down beds line the gas pumps. Hunters wander the aisles buying coffee, energy drinks, Gatorade, breakfast tacos, and bags of ice. One cup of coffee and ten pounds of ice later, everyone is headed toward the field.
The goat weed is wet enough with dew to soak jeans from the knee down. Everybody walks through the dark toward familiar trees and fence lines they’ve hunted for years. The field is quiet except for the sound of a train horn carrying through the brush. The chair is a five-gallon bucket spray-painted forest green. It carries shells on the way in, birds on the way out, and a hunter’s ass the rest of the time.
As the sky turns orange, faces begin to appear farther down the barbed wire fence. The group isn’t quite the same anymore. It used to be bigger. Then everyone started careers, got married, had kids, and life got busier. But there are some new faces too.
A boy sits beside his dad on his first hunt, not sure what he’s supposed to be watching for. Every bird that flutters by is a dove to him. Then someone fires the first shot. Another comes from across the road. Then another farther away. For the next couple of hours, it smells like burnt powder and the countryside sounds like dove season.
Doves have an incredible ability to make a grown man look like an idiot. A bird comes floating toward the field looking like the easiest shot in the world. Three shots and the bird flies away. From fifty yards down the fence comes the laughter. By the end of the morning, a box of shells is gone and there are four birds to show for it. It was the wind. The shells. The birds weren’t flying right. Certainly couldn’t be the shooting.
Someone eventually announces that the birds are all going to the other side of the field, so everybody moves. Buckets, shotguns, coolers, kids, dogs. All of it gets hauled across the pasture. Ten minutes later the birds start flying over the spot everyone just left.
The nice September morning lasts about an hour. Sweat-stained shirts stick to hunters’ backs, the old dog pants under the nearest shade tree, and the young dog runs circles around a bird that was shot ten minutes ago. The shooting slows down and nobody seems in much of a hurry to leave. Someone pulls a Miller Lite from the cooler, someone falls asleep, and the kids start hunting for arrowheads.
A friend calls from across town, “You killing any?”
“A few. Y’all?”
“Covered up.”
He’s lying. So are you.
By afternoon, everyone is back at it. They’ve been staring at the sky for so long that dragonflies start looking like doves. Someone walks off into the brush because he’s convinced that he knows where the birds are. He’ll eventually come back empty-handed, hopefully with both socks.
Dove hunting isn’t particularly productive. Hunters spend a small fortune on shells, gas, beer, and food to bring home a handful of dove breasts.
But every September, a group of buddies will find a way to sit around a table, shoot the shit, and hunt the same field. One year, the kids are running around the brush shooting cans with a pellet gun. Then they’re carrying a shotgun. Before long, they’re the ones showing their little brother how to clean a bird. The young dog that couldn’t find shit eventually becomes the one everybody wants hunting beside them. The bucket gets harder to sit on, the walk across the field gets a little longer, and the birds get harder to see.
But the field doesn’t know the difference. The mesquite still grows along the fence, the dew still soaks everyone’s shoes, and the birds still seem to know exactly where nobody is sitting.
At the end of the hunt, the birds get piled on a tailgate, half of them covered in fire ants. Kids gather around to watch the birds get cleaned. Someone shows a little hand where to grab and where to pull. Soon enough there are dove breasts soaking in Italian dressing and somebody is wrapping them in bacon and cream cheese. The guns get put away, the tailgate stays down, someone grabs another beer, and the stories start again.
Next September, the group will meet up a little older and creakier. The kids will be a little bigger, the dog will be a little grayer, and the buckets will somehow be a little less comfortable. Maybe someone who missed this year will be back. Maybe someone who was here won’t be. Nobody thinks much about that while they’re standing in the field. They’re too busy looking for birds.
