“I’ve got to know what it is now.” Trey was poking a limb at the pile of leaves in curiosity. We had entered the North Louisiana lowlands that morning with high hopes of my bird dog doing what she is supposed to do best, which is find birds. Particularly, we were after a small, fat-bodied upland game bird called a woodcock. They have other colorful names like timber doodle, brush snipe, and bog sucker. They are an awkward looking bird. If they were an insect they would be more like a bumblebee. Sporting stubby wings and a plump bod, they don’t look like they could take to the sky at all. They migrate at night only to land in fields and woodlands to suck the moist soil for earthworms with their beaks as long as a dollar bill is wide. Bird hunters like them because they flush like a quail and fly like a dart and make a tasty woodland meal.
To watch the mating ritual of a woodcock is much like watching Jack Black dance. They waddle to and fro making a meeeep sound turning every so often to face a new direction with their big eyes placed too far to the back of their heads. This earthbound display is disrupted by a quick shot into the night sky only to come back down in concentric circles like a downed helicopter making a high pitched twerpling sound. That’s not a word but it is a descriptor.
Well, we didn’t find any of these birds. Instead, my dog treed the five squirrels we harvested and was now intrigued by the thing Trey was poking with a rotten stick. Whatever it was found itself burrowed under leaves in the crook of a fallen oak’s limbs with the snout of a Wirehaired Pointing Griffon in its face. The yip in my dog’s voice revealed it was not a squirrel or a woodcock. We were curious.
I held my dog’s collar to keep her from getting skunk-sprayed or lashed by a raccoon while Trey pressed on the pile of leaves. Whatever it was made a guttural grunting sound neither of us had heard before.
Trey pushed further in and got physically closer, his hand toward the base of the stick for leverage. “Maybe if I pry under . . .”
When the swear word came flying, Trey’s gun and his feet were simultaneously in mid air and in different directions. The armadillo came straight at him like a small pig lunging for its life. Trey’s eyes revealed the terror of it lunging for his life. The armadillo hit the ground and made the decision to veer between Trey and me and into the thick palmettos and briars.
My dog twisted under the pressure of its collar to get at the armored ‘possum as I doubled over in hysterics.