...OLD PAP...

When I was about fifteen years old. My friend Jimmy and I went into the Quail raising business. We found a nest of Bobwhite Quail eggs, took them home put them in an incubator we made out of a Boy Scout book and hatched them.

We raised the chicks in a little pigeon coup until my mom said I had to get rid of them. Well I didn’t want to just take them out and let them go. We got to asking around and found a hunting preserve down in Marshall, NC that would buy Quail.

Quail are game birds and you need to obtain a Propagator’s license from the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission in order to raise or sell them. We got our license and soon were entrepreneurs.

We took the first batch to Marshall near a place called Walnut Mountain. The people that ran the place were Andersons. Clyde Anderson, the old man they called Pap and his son Quinton. There were others but I can’t remember there names.

What they would do was release the Quail on the property and feed them at various places so they would stay. Then people would bring dogs and pay to hunt them.

We began going down there pretty regular and got pretty friendly with Quinton in fact he was a banjo picker so we hit it off pretty well.

One day while I was there, some people came down there to hunt but they didn’t have any dogs and wanted to know if they could rent some. Quinton said they didn’t have any dogs either but Pap could find Quail pretty good and he would be glad to go along with them. Well I had to see this so I went along on the hunt. Sure enough Pap could find Quail and stand still and point just like a bird dog. When the hunters gave the sign he would jump around and wave his hands and flush the birds as good as any bird dog I’ve ever seen.

We went to make a delivery one day and met Quinton at the door, he really was down in the mouth in fact the whole place had a somber feeling. I ask what was going on and he told me Pap had been killed a couple of weeks ago in a freak accident. Of course the first I thought was that some careless hunter had shot him but Quinton said it wasn’t like that at all. He said that Pap had been making pretty good money pointing Quail for people and he thought he’d expand his operation so he started chasing rabbits. That way they would have some income after Quail season. Well Pap got to where he could run and bark just like a Beagle. It worked out perfect there for a while. Then things took a turn for the worse. He began acting real strange and started chasing squirrels and cats, almost any thing that would run from him. He even started sleeping out under the porch. He got to chasing granny’s chickens so bad that they almost quit laying. Granny swore that she was going to shoot him and ran him out of the yard with her shotgun. After that things got real bad, he started going down to the highway and chasing cars and about a month ago he was down there at Beacham’s curve and got run over by a truck.