rarely resort to their wings as a means 
of escape until the covey has been scat- 
tered and the individuals have become 
excited and lose their heads. Even 
then they don’t give the hunter any 
the best of it as they break suddenly 
in singles or pairs from the most un- 
expected places, frequently in rear of 
the hunter, and fly in the most unex- 
pected directions. 
WAY they ran, each for himself 
dodging zig-zag from cover to 
cover and managing most of the time 
to keep a stone, a bush or the bank of 
some insignificant wash between him 
and the hunter, offering only a fleeting 
glimpse in the infrequent cases when 
he had to cross an open bit, and with 
it all covering ground at a rate which 
taxes the hunter to match when go- 
ing at a smart trot over the rough 
ground. In this way a covey will often 
disperse completely in all directions 
without a single bird taking wing. As 
they ran so did we, dashing headlong 
down into the draw trying to catch up. 
Once I stopped almost in mid-stride to 
take a snapshot which crumpled up a 
bird as he dodged from one rock to an- 
other. Three other snapshots taken in 
a similar manner were fruitless, the 
bird in each case disappearing just as 
the trigger was pressed. He is an ar- 
tist at that, is the blue quail, and no 
shame attaches to shooting AT this 
birds as he runs. When in range he 
has more than twice the chance of es- 
caping on his legs than with his wings. 
He never bunches with his fellows to 
offer a pot shot and he never stops run- 
ning as long as he is in range. Shoot- 
ing a running rabbit is child’s play 
compared with shooting a running 
quail. 
The covey had now disappeared over 
the hill in front and up it we toiled 
reaching the top in time to see a few 
birds running away to the right and 
left well out of range. Another small, 
mesquite-covered draw was just ahead. 
It seemed reasonable to suppose that 
some of the birds had taken refuge in 
it and, acting on this presumption, we 
dashed down into it, making as much 
racket as possible hoping to frighten 
the birds into taking wing. 
URE enough, they began to rise and 
we had a few minutes of snappy 
wing shooting as they bobbed up here 
and there. Two rising almost together 
offered me a chance at a double which 
resulted happily. Two successive sin- 
gles rising unexpectedly at long range 
led to two mises, but a third single 
was less fortunate. A wing shot at a 
blue quail seems to me to be easier 
than one at a bob-white. The blue 
quail doesn’t seem to fly as fast as a 
bob-white, though I wouldn’t bet on 
kaa é: es e : ay 
that statement, and he usually flies 
straighter. .The main trouble is that 
one never has any warning as to when 
and where one of them is going to rise 
nor in what general direction he is go- 
ing to fly. 
HE show being over for the pres- 
ent, a careful search was needed 
to retrieve my three birds. The dead 
birds are hard to find in tangled cover, 
especially as they have much the same 
color as the stones and brush, and then 
a cripple is quite likely to creep away 
and hide in some convenient rabbit 
hole. A comparison of notes showed 
that my friend had gotten three birds 
to my four, not bad under the circum- 
stances. There now remained a possi- 
bility of picking up a few scattered 
birds by beating the surrounding coun- 
try, but the result of hunting singles 
from a scattered covey can as often as 
not. be rated in terms of the number 
of miles covered to the bird rather than 
the number of birds to the mile. 
We spent quite a time hunting over 
the hills and through the draws look- 
ing for singles as we gradually worked 
further south. The results were not 
very encouraging. The only bird seen 
was one which flushed suddenly di- 
rectly behind me. The blue quail 
flushes with much less of a roar. than 
the bob-white, but the sound was 
enough to cause me to spin around in 


Fe 

After a particularly hard shot, one gets real satisfaction in gathering the bird. 
time for a straight-away shot at long 
range which brought down the bird 
amid a cloud of feathers. 
A steady beating of the country to- 
ward the lower end of this range of 
hills took us over several miles of 
rough going without turning up any- 
thing. It began to look as if we had 
exhausted the possibilities of the fa- 
vorable ground in our vicinity and we 
were ready to cross over to the west 
of the railroad as soon as we had 
looked over the ground around the last 
hill in the chain we were then working. 
Coming over the last hill we suddenly 
ran into a small covey on the southern 
slope. Then ensued an incident typi- 
cal of blue-quail hunting. There was 
a crowded minute or two in which we 
dashed madly hither and yon chasing 
the running birds, taking snapshots as 
they dodged among the cover, or get- 
ting an occasional wing shot as some 
unwary bird tried this method of es- 
cape. The guns banged away like a 
young battle. When the smoke cleared 
away, I had emptied my pump gun and 
was hunting through the brush for 
three quail which I had dropped. My 
friend also retrieved three birds. 
E had already covered a good 
stretch of country, but our ardor 
was unabated; in fact, we were just 
getting warmed up, for does not the 
(Continued on page 753) 
735 
