We were both worn down and burned out after 8 days of mixed bag chukar and valley quail hunting. It was hot, dry, rocky and steep for chukar and all of the above minus the steep for quail. I didn't decide in advance when the hunt would be over, I just woke up on the 9th mourning, looked at the mountains and decided that I had had enough. I had camp loaded in my pickup well before noon when I realized that I didn't have a nice male valley quail for a mount. The reality was that I hadn't shot a lot of quail, about 15 and they all had too many pin feathers this early in the season. But hey, it was an excuse to stop one more time before hitting the road for the 26 hour drive home.
I knew where there was a reliable covey just a few miles from camp that I decided to check out. I was going to just leave Bo in the truck as the birds would either be shading under a small clump of russian olives over a spring seep, or they would be out on the dessert flat and I wasn't going to look for them there. But she whined and then started howling like a banshee so I booted her up and heeled her for the 200 yards to the spring.
As we approached I could hear chirping and tiny feet shuffling in the dead leaves. The valley quail were home! Bo clomped into the brush in her bright orange floppy boots and quail began buzzing out of the trees like angry bumble bees. Lots and lots of quail. As I swung on a bird crossing to my left I noticed more quail flushing out in the dessert. Lots more quail. I was very deliberate in choosing which birds to shoot as I immediately realized that we would easily take the 10 bird Nevada limit in short order. A guy just couldn't flush this many quail and not know that a limit of quail had just been laid out before him.
We hunted straight toward the truck and had five birds in the bag within that 200 yards. I watered Bo, checked the fit of her boots, and we worked our way to a knoll between two cuts in the mountain, where the majority of the birds had flown/ran. There were well over 100 quail in that initial flush, but I wanted to work at least a little way up slope because though I hadn't hunted this range for chukar earlier, it sure looked like it should hold chukar. We picked up three more quail when I reached a saddle a few hundred feet above the valley and as I stopped for a breather, I heard them. That stimulating, aggravating, taunting, chuckle of chuker.
Bo and I turned back toward the quail and truck. I was too beat to chase chukar. Bo flushed a few singles but mostly two's and three's of quail from nearly every sage and boulder clump as I watched other quail darting around boulders and running flat out for cover. We easily picked up the last two quail allowed (and 10 quail should be enough to satisfy any hunter) well before reaching a fresh bowl of water for Bo and a Mountain Dew for myself.
When a guy shoots 10 quail in less than a half an hour, the adrenalin rush and freedom of picking sure kill yet challenging targets, is more memorable than recounting the individual birds. But I can still remember most of them.