It was the first weekend of February, the customary time for Paul and me to quail hunt with William on his farm in Early County, Georgia. All afternoon William had been on a rant about Tom Pollard.

For many years, Tom’s family owned a nearby farm and he and William grew up neighbors and friends…of sorts. Tom went to law school, and when his parents died he sold the farm and moved to Columbus, where he practiced law.

William dropped out of college after his dad died and returned home to run the farm. There were a number reasons William felt rancor toward Tom, and he generally enumerated them to Paul and me during our visits: Tom was a lawyer, a rich one, a member of the exclusive Marion Country Club, lived adjacent to the ninth green, drove a BMW, and wore fancy clothes. Those things torqued William’s jaw, but the thing that really ticked him off was the condescending way Tom talked to him, like calling him a hick or a yokel or William Hudspeth, RFD. Worse than that, he lived close enough to come quail hunting with William a few times each season.

Imagine learning to ride horses and beginning to master equestrian techniques, while learning to fly fish and enjoying shooting five-stand and sporting clays and also, in season, working with sporting dogs or hunting five species of gamebirds-in your very own national-park-sized parcel.
Okay, technically, you’ll have to share this Western wonderland with your own family and other guests. But it’s just like having your very own national park for as long as you stay The High Lonesome Ranch, outside DeBeque, Colorado. The working cattle ranch is situated on more than 408 square miles of deeded and permitted land-framed by alpine mesas, the North Dry Folk Valley, the Kimball Creek Valley, and Cow Mountain with elevations climbing from 4,000 to more than 9,000 feet. The Ranch offers endless recreational opportunities and is a place where bird hunters, fly fishermen, and equestrians can get their fix.

I love a fast-and-furious day of hunting Hungarian partridge, but there are times when a desire comes to travel through shrub grasslands in the shadow of the Rocky Mountain range to hunt the largest native North American gamebird species, the greater sage grouse. Called the “cock of the plains: by members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, greater sage grouse were once the most plentiful gamebirds on the High Plains.
Maybe it’s the habitat in which they live or maybe it’s the wildness of the birds themselves, but both seem prehistoric. Sage grouse are special and hunting them with pointing dogs is a true pleasure because they give off a tremendous amount of scent and they flock up, sometimes forming groups of 30 birds. Once flushed, their whirring wings over a sea of sage cast shadows on the prairie.