BAPTISM BY QUAIL The hunting party and a wagon of dogs head out in the morning for the quail woods.

A HUNTER JOURNEYS TO THE FAMED RED HILLS IN PURSUIT OF THE STORIED BOBWHITE, THOSE DOING EVERYTHING THEY CAN TO BRING IT BACK, AND HIS OWN FAMILY’S LEGACY

By RUSSELL WORTH PARKER

IF HUMANITY IS BORN OF CLAY, MINE IS SURELY RED. I was born in Northeast Georgia, and any Georgian who knows the business end of a shovel knows the grip red clay exerts on the roots within it. Nonetheless, I left rolling hills and pastures for three peripatetic decades spent wherever the Marine Corps sent me before settling on the black mudbanks of a North Carolina tidal creek. I come by my restlessness honestly, through my mother’s family, a fact amusing and perplexing to my paternal grandmother, Imogene Parker. “That’s the Russell in you,” she would say, laughing. “Y’all like to go places!” She recognized before I did my instinct to redraw the borders of home. So it was I found myself driving north on Miccosukee Road outside Tallahassee, Florida,…

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Garden & Gun (Digital) - 1 Issue, October/November 2023

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