Opening Day In America - South

The Healing Hunt

There are times when the best medicine is a day in the field with an old friend and a good dog.

- T. Edward Nickens

I didn’t fully understand until later. Not until the day was done, and I was leaning against the truck and waiting for Tommy to walk out of the dove field.

It had been a rainy, nasty, post-hurricane dove opener. When I picked up Tommy Krisulewczs at his house, we both felt it. The storm was scrambling our plans. No one would spend the night at Still water. There would be no late night by the bonfire, no big feed with Greg’s funky white Alabama barbecue sauce, and no caravan of trucks storming the field at dawn. There would be none of the pageantry and community that typically marks our opening-day dove hunt.

But I haven’t missed a dove opener since 1980, when I went home with a college buddy over Labor Day weekend and shot my first dove. That bird spiraled down into cut corn and red clay mud, and there was laughter all around the field and a pig picking afterward. It was the first time I’d ever hunted in a big group. In the years since, I’ve hunted opening day when I had nowhere else to go but crowded public fields, and I’ve hunted when “hunting” meant pulling a pickup truck into a borrow pit and sniping doves as they flew in to pick grit. I never miss opening day. So it was just me and Tommy and my little Lab, Minnie, driving east in a hard, gray rain.