New book brings back memories of hunting in years past WANT IT?

Book brings back memories of bird hunts years ago

Date published: 12/26/2008

IF YOU like wing shooting, there's a book that came out this past fall that you'll enjoy reading by a warm winter fire.

Ed "Eagle Man" McGaa is the primary author of "Dakota Pheasant," but the foreword and last two chapters were written by Joel Tate, a social sciences professor at Germanna Community College.

Joel and I go back a long way, some 35 years, to be exact. I was in one of his first sociology classes at Germanna (my kids had him, too) and we soon became friends. That friendship grew when we discovered we had a common interest in hunting. I had good rabbit dogs in those days and Joel, an old country boy from Tennessee, liked to hunt.

There were quite a few Saturdays back in the 1970s when Joel, Larry Schrader (another Germanna teacher) and I beat the bushes to try to jump rabbits along the honeysuckled fence rows of hay and pasture fields in my neighborhood.

Joel liked to rabbit hunt, but he was absolutely delighted when we jumped an occasional covey of quail. Both he and Larry were good shots and we often came home with enough birds for a meal. Eventually our schedules changed, our lives became more hectic, and rabbits and quail all but disappeared from Virginia's Piedmont. Our hunts became less and less frequent.

Joel and I stayed in touch, however. He moved into my neighborhood (buying part of the farm where we first hunted) and occasionally we would get together to play a little music or argue politics. In the mid-1990s, I went to central South Dakota on a pheasant hunt and told Joel about all the birds I found and the great time I had. A year or two later, he called me to get some contacts out there, and soon he was hooked on pheasant hunting.

I guess pheasant hunting in South Dakota was doubly exciting for Joel because this sociology professor has always been a Plains Indian advocate. "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" was required reading in his class.

There are about a half-dozen Indian reservations in South Dakota. They include Pine Ridge, where the Wounded Knee massacre took place; Standing Rock; and Crow Creek, which was near where I hunted.

"Dakota Pheasant" is published by Pine Hill Press out of Sioux Falls, S.D. It can be ordered through local stores by using its ISBN: 978-1-57579-383-2. For more information, go to edmcgaa.com on the Internet.

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Date published: 12/26/2008