Stop while you're ahead
The rest of the country calls it Labor Day Weekend. Down here in Texas it's known as the opening weekend of dove season. Regardless of what you call last weekend, we called it "sitting on the edge of a sunflower field drinking beer at 6:30 in the morning wondering how many times we're gonna be peppered by #8 birdshot."
This year the season opener took us north up to the Texas panhandle region; west of Vernon, to be exact. Drank way too much around the campfire on Friday night, which was just enough excuse needed to miss the number of birds we missed early Saturday morning. By mid-morning, the birds had shut down and we decided to call it a morning. We had inadvertently left our ziplock bags back at camp, but we didn't realize that until after we had cleaned our birds in the field. Federal law mandates that each hunter maintain possession of his birds until they are bagged/marked (to ensure daily bag limits aren't broken) but, in our drunken haze, we left the bags back at camp (apparently along with our common sense). So five of us, knowing it was a violation of federal game law but also knowing those ever-important ziplocks were less than two miles away, collectively tossed our birds together into one bag and headed back to camp.
See where this is going?
Not 100 yards past the gate, we're stopped by not one but two Texas game wardens. After checking licenses, we're each asked to show our birds.
"Uh, they're all in that bag over there."
"All of them?"
"Yeah."
"Did you turn your birds over to one person and fill out the required paperwork to do so?"
"Uh, no."
"Pull out your driver's licenses, boys. It's citation time."
"But look at this. It's a list showing each hunter and how many birds each one took. That way the landowner knows who's done for the day and who's coming back in the afternoon."
"Think you can talk your way out of this one?"
"Yeah."
"You have 15 seconds. Go."
"Okay, so we may have fractured the letter of the law, but we didn't violate the spirit of it. Not one person here shot over their limit. We kept a list showing who hunted here and how many birds they took. Hell, we even picked up our spent hulls."
"......"
"And might I add that you're a handsome man who represents the state of Texas well."
"Now that's the way you bullshit. Not bad. I was ready to give you just a verbal warning, but you pushed it with the handsome comment. That's why you get to sign this."
"Is it a ticket?"
"No, it's just a warning. You don't have to pay a fine or anything. You just need to remember next time it's smarter to stop while you're ahead."
This year the season opener took us north up to the Texas panhandle region; west of Vernon, to be exact. Drank way too much around the campfire on Friday night, which was just enough excuse needed to miss the number of birds we missed early Saturday morning. By mid-morning, the birds had shut down and we decided to call it a morning. We had inadvertently left our ziplock bags back at camp, but we didn't realize that until after we had cleaned our birds in the field. Federal law mandates that each hunter maintain possession of his birds until they are bagged/marked (to ensure daily bag limits aren't broken) but, in our drunken haze, we left the bags back at camp (apparently along with our common sense). So five of us, knowing it was a violation of federal game law but also knowing those ever-important ziplocks were less than two miles away, collectively tossed our birds together into one bag and headed back to camp.
See where this is going?
Not 100 yards past the gate, we're stopped by not one but two Texas game wardens. After checking licenses, we're each asked to show our birds.
"Uh, they're all in that bag over there."
"All of them?"
"Yeah."
"Did you turn your birds over to one person and fill out the required paperwork to do so?"
"Uh, no."
"Pull out your driver's licenses, boys. It's citation time."
"But look at this. It's a list showing each hunter and how many birds each one took. That way the landowner knows who's done for the day and who's coming back in the afternoon."
"Think you can talk your way out of this one?"
"Yeah."
"You have 15 seconds. Go."
"Okay, so we may have fractured the letter of the law, but we didn't violate the spirit of it. Not one person here shot over their limit. We kept a list showing who hunted here and how many birds they took. Hell, we even picked up our spent hulls."
"......"
"And might I add that you're a handsome man who represents the state of Texas well."
"Now that's the way you bullshit. Not bad. I was ready to give you just a verbal warning, but you pushed it with the handsome comment. That's why you get to sign this."
"Is it a ticket?"
"No, it's just a warning. You don't have to pay a fine or anything. You just need to remember next time it's smarter to stop while you're ahead."
posted by TheBDS at 2:15 PM
3 Comments:
Fly Dovies fly! Fly far, far away where you don't have to constantly live in fear of ending up dead in a ziplock!!
Queenie
(oh ya, I'm back too!!)
Loch, you may be the Charlie Daniels of the biscuit joiner but you obviously don't know jack about online identify protection. After I scanned in the ticket (which was filled out in full by the warning game warden), I erased all sensitive information that some 8th grader could use to steal my identity and money to make himself a robot..."a girl robot". Information like name, address and license number. And for the safety roll stunt, that's Morrow right before he unloads a full clip of .22s into a defenseless junk pile. Not me.
As I recall it was raining the day of the out-of-control bus incident, so that was part of the reason Todd safety-rolled down 15th St. I don't remember much more than that since I had just returned from an afternoon at the
Wheel.
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