Deep in the Heart of Roosterland by T. Edward Nickens

It became my mantra, a chant inside my head. I said it when my ankles twisted in the prairie-dog burrows. I said it each time I bogged down in some kind of unidentifiable high-plains brush, or whenever I shouldered my way through head-high shelterbelts. And just now, I said it again to the rusted piece of old plow that nearly broke my shinbone as I jerked free from yet another Texas tangle.

"I am not supposed to be here!" Where I'm supposed to be is 50 yards away, with my buddy Lee Davis, high-stepping through neatly shorn stubble like some baton-twirling majorette at a Friday night high-school football game. I'm supposed to be out there in the open - where the birds just burst from the cover, where six of my fellow drivers cruise through concentric bands of CRP strips and sunbaked millet. A half-dozen roosters and who knows how many hens explode out of the last 50 yards of the drive, and there is little I can do but listen to the fireworks and watch the feathers fly.

Davis has no pity. He sidles up, patting twin bulges in the back of his bird vest. "These pheasants just wafted up in front of me," he says. "Would you like to pet them?" If I weren't so taken with this country - with its tiny ranching crossroads, endless skies, and the birds that I know are still out there - I might take offense. But as Davis and I are learning, there is more to this pheasant hunt than meets the shotgun bead. We are in Texas for a heart-and-soul kind of hunting, a commingling of community, camaraderie, and cackling pheasants quite unlike anything else I've ever experienced.