texas community pheasant and rooster hunt in the pandhandle with the hart lions club by t. edward nickens

Deep in the Heart of Roosterland

fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:00:00 -0400

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"It's a little paradise around here," says Matt Kern, 26, a Nazareth native. "People don't realize that there are birds this far south. We have years where you walk 5 miles and never see a pheasant. But we have years with birds you wouldn't believe. Wild birds, and every one is crazy as hell."

Kern always comes home for the pheasant opener to welcome a group of community hunters on the land where he was born and raised. "This is the place I love," he says. "If these folks don't have a good time while they're here, we take it personally."

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On Kern's hunt, Tommy Roberts helps runs the show. A good-natured Texan with a quick smile beneath a dark mustache, Roberts has participated in the Nazareth community hunt for years, and he shows up with a plan. By the side of the road he gathers his hunters around a black pickup and sketches out the upcoming push on a dusty rear quarter-panel, drawing half-moons and hash marks with his fingertip. His son, Matt, leans over and laughs. "Yesterday, he let us have it because we didn't have enough line discipline," he says. "But he knows what he's doing. Walk slow, zigzag, and pause. It makes a big difference."

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The Last Minute in Nazareth: The next day, I'm scrambling over chest-high brambles of redroot and busted pieces of cattle trough when a rooster pops up 5 feet ahead, catches a 35-mph wind, and streaks away, cackling like a Halloween witch. I shoot until the action locks open, the final shot puffing black and amber feathers from the bird. Before I can congratulate myself, an enormous bird vaults from under Greg Hull's feet. This hombre is bigger than any I've yet seen, and he's only 20 yards away. Hull shoulders his gun, and I brace for the shot, but there is none. I can see Hull's barrel track the bird, and in my mind I am screaming Shoot him! But nothing happens. "What in the world?" I holler.

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"My bead was covering up the back glass of that tractor," Hull says, pointing to a parked hulk of metal 50 yards away. "I'd have blowed the rear window right out of it. I kept thinking, move over, move over! Then, bam, he's gone. These birds know how to play this game."

And they have a decided home-field advantage around Nazareth. Unlike Hart's vast unbroken plains of row crops and pivot irrigators, Nazareth anchors a chunk of cattle range where there's as much pasture as corn and cotton. Sprawling playa bottoms are pocked with feedlots, mountains of hay bales, and farm machinery rusting in tangled shelterbelts. Curiously, Chinese fowl love the mix.

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I don't see such a fragile spirit in Nazareth or Hart. And I suspect you won't find it in Dimmitt, Easter, or Lazbuddie either. Not this weekend, anyway. Instead, I see a grinning Sarah Hart wipe the sweat from her brow as she pulls another platter of biscuits from the oven. I see Cyril Mitzie slap the backs of hunters he's known for 20-odd years, if only for a few glorious December days at a time. I see entire families throng the Nazareth volunteer fire department at the end of the day. They come to greet the hunters, locals and visitors alike, handing out sips of homemade schnapps as kids spray the cleaned pheasants with a garden hose.

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Last year, an ESPN.com story featured the Nazareth Swiftettes, the girls' high-school basketball team that, with 18 state championships, is the most decorated in the nation. The writer waxed poetic about the locals' devotion to the team, to the land, and to the community. But there was a darker side to the story. "That writer wrote that the town was in danger of drying up and blowing away," one Lions Club cook complained, as I scribbled notes for my own story. "Please don't do that to us again."