Their Secret Dove-Hunting Weapon: Egg Rolls

Each summer as September approaches, a batch of Orange Countians begins to quiver with a sense of great excitement. This is because September marks the opening of the dove hunting season, which signals the final act of summer. Not that summer has been less than enjoyable for some of us--it’s just that after almost three months of anything, most of us are ready for a change.

In early August I got my first anxiety dream about the coming season. According to my informal polling over the years, nearly 80% of bird hunters have anxiety dreams before opening day. Typically, a bird hunter’s anxiety dream involves forgetting your shells, your gun, your dog, or being part of a group of people who refuse to get to the fields on time.

In my case, the dream was even more odd in that I got up early on opening day, had my equipment and dog ready, and got to the field at sunrise. Unfortunately, the field of my dreams was the Big Canyon community of Newport Beach. I stood there and watched a dove flying high above me (far out of range) but shot anyway and of course missed, which is mandatory in hunters’ anxiety dreams.

At this point, the assembled citizens of Big Canyon began having a party unrelated to my hunt in their neighborhood. They pretty much ignored me. Then, a huge cop approached me and demanded to know why I was brandishing a shotgun in the city limits of Newport Beach.

“It’s opening day of dove season,” I explained.

He glared at me. He was wearing an outfit of animal skins and moccasins. He looked like something out of “The Deerslayer.” Then he gave me a nice little leather “license” that had my name engraved on it, and said if I was going to hunt Big Canyon this year, I’d need this.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Thank you, sir!”

My second anxiety dream, a week later, was even worse. In this one, I dreamed that I was hunting in Arizona and my one-eyed dog, Cassius, fell into a flood-swollen river. He was being carried away to certain death. I awoke terrified and realized that this had actually happened just last year. I went downstairs to see if my four-legged soul mate was OK, and he just barked at me like I was The Times delivery person he so loves to torment.

Getting Cassius ready for the season has not been easy. First, about three months ago, I put him on a diet because he’d gained so much weight, he’d begun to look like a sea lion. His idea of a perfect day was to rise, slide on his back down the hillside about 20 feet to wallow in the dirt, eat, then find shade and sleep for the remaining 23 hours.

When I’d remind him it was just a few more months until bird season, he’d lift his head slightly, open the lid of his one good eye, look at me without comprehension, then crash back to sleep, his head hitting the deck like a dropped ham.

Luckily, my brother Matt took it upon himself to get Cassius physically fit for bird season. He walked Cassius up the hill and to the Alta Laguna basketball court almost every day for a month. There they played one-on-one, with Cassius developing quite a flair for defense. Then they’d hike back down the hill to the house, a two-mile round trip for Matt but a three-mile trip for Cassius, who lumbers away every chance he gets to chase lizards.

One of the things I like to do is get Cassius “birdy” before the season begins. This generally means getting a rock-hard game bird out of the freezer and throwing it into the bushes so he can smell it and bring it back. When he was a puppy we’d play this game for hours every day. But this summer he showed no interest in the pathetic icy treat.

The reason, I suspected, is that we have so many quail, dove and rabbits loitering around the house these days. There is food and water for them, and no real predators, unless you count Cassius, who is so bored with them he won’t even look at a covey of 15 birds as they hustle across the driveway. In the old days, I’d say “Cassius--quail!” and he’d bolt after them. Now he just looks at me as if I’m addled, yawns, and falls asleep on the padded patio chair.

I tried to interest him in tennis balls, but he wouldn’t lower himself. I tried a nice new leather softball dunked in quail scent from a local sporting goods store, but he showed no interest in that, either. I tried golf balls, racquet balls, even training dummies, but Cassius would retrieve them only once, then waddle to his water bucket, tip it over and fall asleep in the flood.

Matt solved the problem. He discovered that the only things Cassius would enthusiastically “retrieve” were frozen Chinese egg rolls. He knocked dozens of these into the hillsides with a baseball bat--tasty little fungos sailing into the brush--and Cassius found every one. Of course, he ate every one on the spot, which got expensive and worked counter to the strict dieting intended to make him svelte.

A few nights later I dreamed that I was hunting and Cassius went out after a downed bird but instead brought me back a complete dinner from the Golden Peacock Chinese restaurant in Laguna Beach--minus the egg rolls. I fretted and couldn’t get back to sleep because I was hungry.

Getting yourself ready for bird season isn’t much easier. The trouble with doves is that you can only shoot them for a few days every year, so an entire year goes by between hunts. What this means is that you don’t get anything close to realistic practice for these birds, and every season--at least for people at my skill level--seems as if it’s your first.

So I haunt the local gun range, running up exorbitant bills for rounds of trap. By late August I’m usually knocking down 20 or so clay birds out of 25. But by now I know enough to expect considerably worse results on real doves, because they are fast and wily and can change direction twice a second at 40 m.p.h.

Typically, by the end of a two-day dove hunt, I’ll have wasted so much ammunition that--when added to the gas, food, licenses, lodging and egg rolls for Cassius--my table-ready doves will cost more per ounce than gold and only slightly less than weapons-grade plutonium.

So by now we’re more or less ready--man and dog--to partake in the atavistic ritual of the hunt. We’ve honed our bodies and minds to predatory readiness. We’ve got bold new recipes picked out, should we come back with enough birds to actually make a meal. We look at the doves flying over the house each evening, imagine them marinated and grilling on our Weber. We look forward to doing something that men and dogs have been doing every fall, more or less, since the beginning of time.