What happens when you put hard work into a dove hunt - a column for Shotgun Life

As a writer, I'm generally bored by happy endings - failure is so much more interesting than great shooting and a fat limit of anything.

But in this case, the journey included enough failures to make that happy ending worth writing about, and thus I present to you my latest column for Shotgun Life.

One note worth adding: It was in writing this column that I finally pieced together something I've been feeling about hunting for seven years - the straight-line connection between my non-consumptive childhood wanderings out in nature and hiking with a gun. It's been hard to figure out precisely why I almost always flash back to childhood when I'm out in places like this, but a sentence spilled out of me for this column that made it pretty clear.

I'd be interested to know whether it's the same for everyone else, or just a case of me being my weird old self. Read it, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

© Holly A. Heyser 2013