On the first flush of the morning, the Editor and I both swung to the covey as it rose, with he and the Guide 20 yards ahead of me, and the birds going directly away between them. As we both fired, a single quail momentarily disappeared in a centered cloud of feathers.

Gunners Rick Van Etten (left) and Tom Weaver prepare for a shot as guide Matt Dollar (center) moves in to flush a covey pointed by a brace of the plantation's English setters.

At the shot, I immediately picked up the thundering whir of a second flush to my right and swung toward the sound as, this time, the Publisher swung on a towering double again going straight away. Again, we both fired at nearly the same instant and once more a bird was centered in yet another burst of feathers floating in the cool morning breeze.

With the echoes of the shots still spreading through the south Georgia woods, Editor, Publisher and Guide all turned and looked around toward me with the same probing question on their faces and then asked nearly in unison, "Did you get it?"

"Hang on...I think so," I replied. I peered into the small digital screen on the back of my camera, zoomed in tight to the shots I had just taken and was relieved to discover first one, then two clouds of feathers, both in-frame, each with a Gunner and the Guide.

Gun Dog Publisher Tom Weaver connects on a single in the Georgia pine woods.

I don't know why I should have been surprised that the Editor and the Publisher of a magazine called Gun Dog would both be good wingshots. But when birds started falling from the sky amid clouds of feathers, I had a much clearer understanding of what my friend Bill Bowles, general manager and co-owner of Wynfield Plantation, means when he speaks of "Georgia Snow."

Hunting Wynfield Plantation
I was here at Wynfield Plantation with Rick Van Etten and Tom Weaver, the editor and the publisher, respectively, of Gun Dog, along with Wynfield guide Chuck Turner and some of the finest bird dogs this side of Sirius. It may seem odd, but with their full schedules it is a rare occurrence for Rick and Tom to actually find time to get out into the field together, and this was the first time we all three had ever managed to be at the same place at the same time.

What brought us all here from Iowa, Pennsylvania and Tennessee was the opportunity to quail hunt. And, of course, our friends here at Wynfield.

The author moves in on a point.

We were 15 miles due west of Albany, Georgia, just off Highway 62, amid the sweet Georgia pines, scented sedge grass and stately live oaks adorned with Spanish moss on a refreshingly cool and lightly overcast October day. So now, having had the first covey of the morning duly covered with shotguns and lens, Rick and I switched roles as he took up his camera and I my gun, a little straight-stocked 16-bore English side-by-side which was by coincidence (or not) the same age as my father and engraved, "A. Hill and Son, Horncastle."

No one I have found so far seems to know much about this little double or her makers, but once John Skinner, head gunsmith for the Orvis Company in Manchester, Vermont, had done a proper gun fit for me and had done a nip and a tuck and fitted her with a custom leather butt pad, she fit me like my dad's old shooting vest, and because of that, the birds of southwest Georgia suddenly discovered that life had become a little more complicated than before.