Brays Island Plantation, South Carolina, February 2006
Mrs. O. is afraid of birds—not terrified, not “chicken,” as it were, and not exactly phobic. She just considers birds to be air lizards, icky velociraptors in bad boas. The Galápagos trip with George and Laura would have been a misery for her. When we were looking at the Lindblad Expeditions brochure, Mrs. O.’s reaction was, “The blue-footed boobies waddle right up to you? Ugh!” I’m not saying she got pregnant with our youngest child, Buster, just to avoid the Galápagos cruise, but . . .
I, on the other hand, love birds. I spend a lot of money every year and travel thousands of miles for my love of birds. I trudge across acres of muddy fields, push through tangles of forest underbrush, and hunker in swamps at dawn simply to find birds—and kill them. Call it tough love.
Every good marriage is a compromise. For years, Mrs. O. displayed no nervous symptoms about mallards in the freezer, as long as the gutting and plucking had been done somewhere other than her kitchen (or laundry room, as I had occasion to be reminded). And I didn’t go after pheasants in South Dakota on our wedding anniversary. Then one day Mrs. O. said, “I want to learn to shoot. I want to go bird hunting.” Why? A more recently married person would have asked that aloud. But if I suddenly said, “I want to learn to empty the dishwasher. I want to get up in the middle of the night when the kids cry,” Mrs. O. wouldn’t check the medicine chest to see what I’d been taking until later. She’s say, “Great!”
I said, “Great!” But I was worried. Mrs. O. wanted to learn to shoot. I mentally reviewed my recent behavior. I was pretty sure she was using “shoot” as an intransitive verb. I didn’t think I detected an elision of “you” at the end of the sentence. Maybe Mrs. O. had been listening to me. It’s always worrisome when a spouse does that. I’d been telling her that the way to get over her fear of birds was to go hunting. “Shoot at them,” I advised, “and after you miss the little SOB’s three or four times in a row, you wont’ be scared, you’ll be angry.” Did I really want an angry wife?
Or maybe something had happened on a recent trip to London, when I’d dragged Mrs. O. to the Holland & Holland store. While I’d been drooling over shotguns, perhaps she’d realized that the field sports present a whole new head-totoe wardrobe opportunity. A flash of pain ran through my Visa card.
Also, I was concerned that if Mrs. O. tried bird hunting, she’d end up hating it. I privately suspect that men and women are different. They don’t always enjoy the same things or enjoy them in the same ways. No doubt, when our children came along, Mrs. O. had similar anxieties about gender-based tastes and inclinations. Probably she was secretly relieved and surprised that I didn’t eat the kids. I thought I’d have to make bird hunting somehow posh, festive, and feminine. How would she, I asked myself, go about convincing me that changing diapers and singing lullabies at four AM is as much of a good time as sitting shivering and soaked in a duck blind at about the same time of day?
Actually, with proper application of Jack Daniel’s, either can be fun. But women, in my experience, are not quite so easily convinced that they are enjoying themselves. I called my friends Perry and Sally Harvey and wangled an invitation to Brays Island, a swell quail plantation in South Carolina.
Brays Island is 5,500 acres of tidewater landscape on the Pocotaligo River not far from Hilton Head. It’s pretty much how I picture heaven, with, in the first place, a membership too exclusive to include me. The vast woods and fields and the miles of waterways and marshes are full of wildlife. Besides the quail there’s shooting for Hungarian partridge, chukar, pheasants, doves, ducks, turkey, and deer. Largemouth bass lurk in the freshwater ponds. The Pocotaligo is replete with redfish, black drum, and flounder. In the nearby blue water are sea trout, stripers, bluefish, and tarpon. If these pleasures should pall there are skeet, trap, sporting clays, an eighteen-hole private golf course, tennis, a pool, a twenty-five-stall boarding stable, and forty miles of equestrian trails. The weather is admittedly less like paradise and more like the opposite during the summer, and Brays probably has more gunfire and dead animals than heaven does. Maybe it’s the heaven that dogs go to, which, truthfully, is the one I’d prefer. The plantation has forty bird dogs, in kennels larger and cleaner than my old bachelor apartment ever was. I suppose Brays isn’t heaven for quail and redfish, although, on my previous visits, these critters seemed immortal enough when I would blast or cast.
I usually hunt in places that are, frankly, more purgatorial. But I figured that Mrs. O. has years to learn about bird season accommodations of the “Fur Seasons” and “Itch Carleton” kind. No need to introduce her immediately to the toilet facilities of an Arkansas duck shack. She doesn’t have to know, yet, that the most productive woodcock cover in New Hampshire is an old town dump.
The entrance to Brays is a mile-long avenue of white board fences without a paint flake or knothole stain in sight. The meadows are so well-tended that only the presence of real stable grooms instead of the cast-iron kind distinguishes the fields from suburban lawns. Ancient live oaks rise, arboreal castles with green baileys, green keeps, green crenellations, and—to strain a metaphor—heraldic banners of Spanish moss. This doesn’t look like a place to shoot birds. This looks like a place to marry off Scarlett O’Hara, except without the liberal guilt. General Sherman’s troops, on their flamboyant (in the root sense of the word) march to the sea, burned the original Brays Plantation Manor and distributed some of the plantation land to emancipated slaves. Instead of a ticky-tacky Tara of doubtful provenance, the main house at Brays is a handsome white-brick Federalist-revival spread built with modern plumbing and laborsaving kitchen appliances in the 1930s by Francis B. Davis Jr. of the firmly Yankee United States Rubber Company. The Davis home has been converted to guest quarters, dining rooms, and a bar for the Brays Island members. And (heaven again) the food is worth dying for. Only one thing was wrong with Brays Island on our first morning there—pouring rain.
“Darn,” said Mrs. O. “We’ll have to go shopping.”
“Fortunately,” I said, “I brought an extra pair of rain pants. Put a hand towel inside your Barbour coat collar so the water doesn’t run down the back of your neck. We’ll have to kick the birds up a bit. They won’t be flying very well in this weather. Don’t shoot at them if they just hop; you don’t want to hit the dogs. And don’t worry about rattlesnakes when we’re stomping around in the brush; when it’s chilly and wet like this they’re not very active. Let’s get going.”
“Why?” said Mrs. O.
And I have to admit, she had me there. I thought about all the time I’ve spent hunting upland birds in inclement weather, usually getting skunked. “So we can be wet and uncomfortable,” I said. “And not have very good shooting and probably catch cold.”
“Are you crazy?” said Mrs. O.
We went shopping. The nearby town of Beaufort, South Carolina, is very cute and quaint. It has a large, large number of antique stores. As near as I can tell, shopping is, for women, what hunting is for men. Except that they never get to use the remote control, battery-operated electric-shock dog collar on misbehaving store owners who are supposed to be helping them hunt for antiques. Also, as far as I’m concerned, a lot of antiques look like somebody’s shot them already.
Then we toured Brays with Sally and Perry Harvey. The former cattle ranch was sold to the Pingree family in the 1960s. They turned it into a development centered on hunting and fishing. The land-use concept was based on an idea of Frank Lloyd Wright’s. Each of the 325 house sites is a one-acre circle surrounded by common land. The sites are screened from one another. Membership in Brays Island is limited to lot owners, and the members own the plantation.
A few sites were still for sale. One looked out over the river toward a bald eagle sanctuary in the distance. I could see Mrs. O. eyeing the spot with a hunter’s—a house hunter’s—rapt gaze. Imaginary swing sets and fictive bikes and Zip scooters were beginning to materialize in the rain.
“I came down here from Aspen to visit a friend,” Perry told me. “And I fell in love with the place. I was out all day, fishing in the morning and shooting quail in the afternoon. When I got back that night, Sally had bought a lot.”
“Sally and I are going over to look at the new tennis courts,” said Mrs. O.
“And I’m sticking right with you,” I said.
The rain stopped about four, and Mrs. O. took a shooting lesson from the manager of the Brays shooting club, Greg Freeman. I stepped aside on the theory that spouses should never get pedagogical with each other. We’ve been through this at home with Mrs. O. trying to teach me to unload the dishwasher. Greg went through the rudiments of gun safety and put Mrs. O. on the No. 4 pad on the skeet field. He launched a clay pigeon from the high house. She missed. Greg stepped forward and spoke to Mrs. O. briefly. He launched another speedy pass shot from the high house. She broke it. And the next one. And the next.
After forty years of shooting I get a hit on No. 4 high house about as often as Ozzy Osbourne gets one on the Billboard top forty.
“I’ve noticed this before,” I said to Greg. “Women are good at learning to use a shotgun. Even if they’ve never shot before, it only takes a little bit of instruction. Why is that?”
And I try to listen too, except after forty years of shooting I don’t hear very well—as I’ve explained more than once when I didn’t get up in the middle of the night when the kids were crying. “You hear the little ‘ping’ from the microwave OK,” said Mrs. O., “if burritos are defrosting.”
When Mrs. O. had rendered the clay pigeon a pretty much extinct species I asked her, “What did Greg tell you?”
“He told me to put my weight forward and quit thinking about it. He said, ‘Lower your IQ to fifty.’ ” No wonder men don’t listen. My IQ has been down there since puberty, and if I put any more weight forward I’m going to have to give up on Brooks Brothers and get that artist, Christo, who draped the Pont Neuf in bedsheets, to wrap my gut as an art project.
The next morning was cool and bright. Brays Island has a picturesque mule wagon that carried Perry, Sally, Mrs. O., and me into the quail fields. The guides and the dogs followed, less picturesquely, in pickup trucks. We could have ridden horses to the covers, if we’d wanted to be over-the-top picturesque.
Most quail shot east of the Mississippi are raised in pens and set out for the benefit of sportsmen. Thus, as shopping is hunting for women, hunting is shopping for men—a visit to the poultry department at Safeway, although Perdue roasters never have a chance to fly away unscathed and make me look like a fool.
The hunting grounds at Brays are laid out in the old cattle pastures and among the groves of live oaks. The fields are carefully sown with the right vegetation and selectively brush-hogged. The men in charge of the quail pens make sure that the birds are acclimatized—so they’ll covey up the way they do in nature and fly well when flushed. Land that’s been settled since the 1600s requires a lot of cultivation to make it wild. Senior guide Billy Aiken has a good ol’ boy’s accent. However, it’s in Latin. He knows the taxonomic name of every plant in the quail fields. He has degrees in these things.
“So,” said Mrs. O., “there’s basically no point to hunting. Everybody just goes to a lot of bother to shoot little quail.”
“Um, yes,” I said.
Mrs. O. eyed the grass tangles where the birds, which discomfort her so, were hiding. “I can understand that,” she said.
Billy and fellow guide Bryan opened their kennels, releasing seventy-some pounds of English pointers, Boomer and Pal.
“Good doggies!” said Mrs. O., whose loathing of birds is matched by such affection for dogs that she cried at the end of Cujo because the rabid Saint Bernard died.
“These aren’t pets,” I warned her. “These are serious working dogs.” The serious working dogs trotted over to Mrs. O., licked her face, and rolled on their backs to have their tummies scratched.
Mrs. O. and Perry lined up at a cover with Billy in the middle and Boomer quartering all over the place. Boomer pointed an Audubon Society calendar photograph of a covey—a perfect feathered rondel of quail backed against each other and ready to fly in every direction. Billy had Mrs. O. walked in. I held my breath. A big quail flush is a myocardial rupture moment for even the hardened nimrod. There was a great burst of birds at Mrs. O.’s feet; a convulsion of quail rose in her face. This must have been a nightmare for her, an Imax screening of Hitchcock’s The Birds with her eyelids taped open. I mean this is the woman who calls me at work when there are pigeons on the kitchen windowsill. Mrs. O. didn’t flinch.
“It would have embarrassed Boomer,” she said.
Mrs. O. didn’t flinch, but on the other hand, Mrs. O. didn’t shoot, either. “I was afraid I’d hit that tree,” she explained to Billy.
He was a model of tact, explaining the harmlessness of No. 7 shot to a mature live oak. Boomer pointed more birds. This time Mrs. O. did shoot, but she shot from the hip. “Because my shoulder hurts from yesterday’s shooting lesson,” she stated with precise feminine logic.
Billy, who probably should be our nation’s ambassador to the UN, where ability to suppress laughter is a vital asset, said, “Next time think one-two-three-four. Lift the gun to your shoulder, press your cheek to the stock, push the safety forward, pull the trigger back. One-two-three-four. Lift, press, push, pull.”
Mrs. O., being a woman, listened. Boomer flushed a madhouse covey, bigger than the first and flying harder. Mrs. O. turned her gun on a particular bird. There was a puff of feathers, and a perpendicular drop. Boomer brought the quail to her feet.
Billy picked up the bird and Mrs. O. backed away. Billy thought she was having a PETA moment of animal cruelty regret. “Aw,” he said, “it’s not like it would have lived very long in the wild.”
“Why don’t you let Boomer make sure it’s completely dead?” said Mrs. O.
That night we had dinner with Sally and Perry. “Well,” said Sally, “how do you like birds now?”
“With quince preserves and curried rice, thank you,” said Mrs. O., spearing another air lizard on the serving fork.