By Avin Brownlee, Friendswood, Texas
In the March 2021 edition of American Hunter, the “Member’s Hunt” story was titled “The Right Place, Right Time.” My story is titled “The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time.” The story begins at least 55 years ago, perhaps more. My youngest brother, Mike (10 or 12 years old at the time), wanted me to take him quail hunting. Mike had probably hunted a little with our dad but he was certainly not an experienced hunter.
We were hunting about 40 miles north of Amarillo. This was cattle country with dry grass, rolling hills and bluffs, lots of dry creek beds, scattered wild plum thickets and a few tree-lined, spring-fed creeks. Mike was carrying a single-shot .410-bore shotgun and I was carrying a beautiful, highly engraved 20-gauge, straight-grip side-by-side French shotgun that Dad had “liberated” and brought home from Europe after World War II. We were walking parallel to each other about 100-150 yards apart; Mike was heading toward a big plum thicket. Suddenly there was a BAM! I ran to the plum thicket only to find Mike standing there with his head hanging down and looking quite dejected. He had spotted and shot into a large covey of quail huddled together on the ground under a big plum bush. He did not hit a single bird. Needless to say, I teased him quite a bit about not being able to hit a single bird while the whole bunch of them were sitting still on the ground. Mike would have none of that; he blamed it on the gun and refused to hunt again until he got a better gun.
I wasn’t about to let him use the 20-gauge since I expected to inherit it someday and wanted to protect it. A couple of days later our dad borrowed a 12-gauge pump from a neighbor, so Mike was excited to try again. I insisted that he practice a little with the 12-gauge before actually hunting. So, we took a few empty cans to the country for him to shoot at and get the feel of the pump action. The recoil of the first shot surprised him and pushed him back a couple of steps. But after he was finally able to hit a can that I tossed into the air, he was raring to go.
We then returned to the site of the first hunt and set up the same way we had before. Mike had already walked through the plum thicket, across a dry creek bed and was walking through dry grass when I heard BAM! BAM! BAM! Mike hollered, “Avin, come quick. I got three, I got three!” I thought, “Yeah, sure.” I walked over to him and started helping him look for the birds. We looked, and looked and looked. I started teasing him about imagining seeing the birds fall. He insisted that he had seen three birds fall. We continued looking for what seemed like a long time and finally Mike yelled, “There’s one,” and ran over and picked up a bloody, still warm but very dead red-headed woodpecker. That is when the teasing really started. We did continue to look and finally found Mike’s two dead quail. After that day, Mike became the best shot in the family (we had four hunters) and he always outshot me at least two-to-one. We have gone on many hunts together, mostly quail or pheasant and occasionally turkey. Except for one time, Mike always got more birds than me or anyone else in the group. Strange as it may seem, I could only find one picture of us hunting together. That is Mike on the right, helping me hold my turkey, the only time I shut him out.
This story has two endings. The first is about the 20-gauge. That beautiful gun was stolen when our parents’ house was burglarized years later. Many years later, I found a similar gun at a gun show in Houston, Texas. Even though it was not as nice as Dad’s, I bought it and presented it to him for Christmas. He was up in years then and didn’t really hunt much anymore so he gave it back to me. So, in a way, I did inherit that old French double-barrel. Along with it, I hunt with an old Browning Auto-5 recoil shotgun and an even older Swedish Husqvarna underlever 12-gauge side-by-side. They are all fun to shoot.
This story’s second ending concerns the woodpecker. Even though Mike is a great hunter, I occasionally have to remind him that the first “game animal” he harvested with a gun was that poor, innocent red-headed woodpecker who was unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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