Another Day in the Country@
It’s hunting season once again and we’re glad to see the hunters arrive with all their dogs and regalia. While the railroaders kept our bed and breakfast busy in Ramona the first year we were in business, it was the hunters who were our inspiration to even try the venture.
Hank’s boys came back regularly for the beginning of hunting season for lots of years and when Hank’s son, Keith, had a boy old enough to join the hunt, he came, too. They’d send us pictures in California of their Kansas hunting trophies, posing with their game bird held high. Or they’d leave trophy feathers at the Ramona House. And then life took over with it’s myriad responsibilities and the family hunters dwindled.
“What do you do with pheasant feathers?” my sister wanted to know. (She’d dusted around them once too often.) I didn’t know, but they were beautiful.
While Cousin’s Corner was still just a family affair, my cousin Gary brought hunter friends from Ohio or Iowa or some other far-flung place to Kansas when hunting season began. And they stayed at the house we’d bought on the corner of Fourth and D streets in Ramona.
“Maybe we should try turning Cousin’s Corner into a bed and breakfast?” we said. So, we did.
When hunters arrived this year — not family, but soon to become friends — our weather in Ramona was like a day in California, fair and warm. After two days of these tropic breezes, the hunters were done in.
“We’re heading out,” they said. “This warm weather is hard on us and the dogs can’t take it.” I didn’t know hunting in warm weather was hard on dogs, but then I’m not a birddog hunter.
“I’ve been hunting with bird- dogs for 63 years,” one of the guys said with a sly grin. “That tells you how long I’ve been at it — and when a dog comes back after 15 minutes and drinks a gallon of water, you know it’s too hot to hunt!”
Furthermore, in our warm Indian summer, there were still crops in the field which offered too much cover for a hunter’s prey. “We’ll be back in December,” our friends said and here it is December and they’re back!
I saw a cock pheasant standing by the road yesterday, looking bewildered. He was evidently measuring his chances of survival between hunters with guns and travelers with automobiles, and decided standing by the highway in twilight was the safest bet.
So far as I know, my grandfathers were not really hunters. It was survival in Kansas that occupied their time allotted to sports and perhaps they’d had enough of killing when the family’s meat quota was reached with the slaughter of cows and pigs.
My Uncle Hank loved to tell a hunting story from his youth. It seemed a visiting Lutheran preacher wanted to hunt pheasant and my grandpa sent his two teenage boys out with the minister, since they didn’t have birddogs. Uncle Al, about 15 at the time, was to carry and load the gun and Uncle Hank, around 11, was to help flush out the prey and carry the bounty home.
It evidently was a warm Kansas Sunday afternoon and the boys got tired of traipsing around after this too-eager, novice hunter.
“Watch this,” Uncle Al said to his younger sibling. “He’ll get tired of hunting in a hurry,” he said and grinned as he loaded way too much powder into the barrel of the old shot gun and tamped it down.
At about this point in the story, my Uncle Hank would start to laugh, “I’ll tell you that-there gun went off and like to knock that preacher on his hind end.” More laughter at the memory. “Didn’t take much of that and he was ready to head home. Of course, we’d been ready for a long time!”
It’s another day in the country and the hunters are back! As for me, my hunting is confined to more mundane things. “Has anyone seen my keys?”