For this field on the other side was the wide, open plain; and it was grown over by tiny, half-knee high thickets of tumbleweed with here and there a trifle of sagebrush.  Between these miniature thickets wound narrow strips of sandy soil, like streams and bays and estuaries in shape.  We knew that the quail would lie well here, for they hate to cross bare openings.

Therefore, we threw out our skirmish line, and the real advance in force began.

Every man retrieved his own birds, a matter of some difficulty in the tumbleweed.  While one was searching, the rest would get ahead of him.  The line became disorganized, broke into groups, finally disintegrated entirely.  Each man hunted for himself, circling the tumbleweed patches, combing carefully their edges for the quail that sometimes burst into the air fairly at his feet.  When he had killed one, he walked directly to the spot.  On the way he would flush two or three more.  They were tempting; but we were old hands at the sport, and we knew only too well that if we yielded so far as to shoot a second before we had picked up the first, the probabilities were strong that the first would never be found.  In this respect such shooting requires good judgment.  It is generally useless to try to shoot a double, even though a dozen easy shots are in the air at once; and yet, occasionally, on a day when Koos-ey-oonek is busy elsewhere, it may happen that the birds flush across a wide, bare space.  It is well to keep a weather eye open for such chances.

With a green crowd and in different cover such shooting might have been dangerous; but with an abundance of birds, in this wide, open prairie, cool heads knew enough to keep wide apart and to look before they shot.  The fun grew fast and furious; and the guns popped away like firecrackers.  In fact, the fun grew a little too fast and furious to suit Dodge.

Dodge had beautiful and well-trained dogs.  Ordinarily any one of us would have esteemed it a high privilege to shoot over them.  In fact, I have often declared myself to the effect that of the three elements of pleasure comprehended in field shooting that of working the dogs was the chief.  Just as it is better to catch one yellowtail on a nine-ounce rod than twenty on a hand line, so it is better to kill one quail over a well-trained dog than a half dozen “Walking ’em up.”  But this particular case was different.  We were out for a high old time; and part of a high old time was a wild and reckless disregard of inhibitive sporting conventions.  The birds were here literally in thousands.  Not a third had left the slough for this open country; we could not shoot at a tenth of those flushed, yet the guns were popping continuously.  Everybody was shooting and laughing and running about.  The game was to pelt away, retrieve your bird as quickly as you could, and pelt away again.  The dogs, working up to their points carefully and stylishly, as good dogs should, were being constantly left in the rear.  They drew down to their points—­and behold nobody but their devoted master would pay any attention to their bird!  Everybody else was engaged busily in popping away at any one of the dozen-odd other birds to be had for the selection!