(Digressing and skipping ahead in time and place - Place - A Never to be named Coastal Community in Marin County - Time - The mid nineteen seventies)
One year when Diana was living on the Franklin Farm down by Pine Gulch Creek, she decided to catch a quail for Thanksgiving dinner. Now, quails are protected in those parts, the whole town being dedicated as a Quail sanctuary. So what Diana planned to do was strictly verboten. But she was determined to harvest her own dinner this year and a quail would suit her nicely, going along with her own home grown potatoes, tomatoes, carrots and the baby lettuces she cultivated in small raised beds with deer netting.
She probably would have shot a deer for a meal of fresh venison if she wasn't basically non-violent and refused to have anything to do with guns. She cursed the "rats on hooves" as we all called them in those days, while shooing them away from the garden and strengthening the fencing and netting that was supposed to keep them out but seldom did. That's why the lettuces were all babies. There was no way they would survive to adulthood with the number of browsers in the neighborhood.
Anyway, she planned to catch the quail with a box and a stick and some gourmet quail bait. The box rested on the stick, and when the quail took the bait, the box came down, slam on top of them, trapping the little entre-for-one inside. That was the theory. In practice, the quail took the bait alright - I think it was something yummy like high quality birdseed, mixed with some honey and garnished with millet, to draw them deep into the recesses of the trap - but the trap was never sprung. Each morning Diana went outside to find her bait gone, and to hear the high chirping of quail in the bushes nearby. No doubt calling on her to hurry up and replenish their supply of feed. Their chirping grew in intensity and volume each morning as more and more of them came to the backyard in search of midnight lunch. The plan was not working.
Not to be deterred, - Diana had started this quail hunting experiment in plenty of time before the Holiday to try out a variety of trapping methodologies - Diana persisted with stronger but more easily sprung traps, and higher quality and more irresistible bait, pasting it onto the back "wall" of the cardboard box with the honey to ensure her prey would knock it over on themselves while trying to scrape off every sweet juicy morsel of grain.
Yet, still the quail eluded her and each morning taunted her from their safe haven deep within the Coyote bush at the creek's edge. And each day Diana improved upon her contraption for quail capture, adding suet and blackberries ripe from the vine, maple syrup from the People's store, rich and organic, testing her stick "trigger" for sensitivity to movement and, one momentous evening, getting drenched to the skin, staking out her trap with a string tied around the stick with the other end tied to her wrist so that at the moment the now fat and quite complacent quail entered the trap, she could yank the string and secure the bird.
She lay under a makeshift tent of the remnants of an old blue tarp and some black plastic garbage bags, still as a mouse until well after midnight, when the first confident quail hopped up to the trap.
"Now I've got you," she said to herself, for she was keeping very still and did not want to alert the quail to her presence. She tensed her arm, ready for the tug, when the quail suddenly gave a little flap of its chubby wings, propelling it upwards, and knocking the box entirely over, after which the quail proceeded to feed, giving an annoyed shrieking peep that started the whole flock yelping when Diana rushed from the bushes toward the now sodden overturned trap, adding her own screams to those of her quarry, now settled into a disapproving clucking sound in the deep bushes at the creek's edge.
After that it was three more night until the quail returned to Diana's yard and only one until Thanksgiving. To be continued....
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