The Snipe Hunt
I don't recall the year - sometime in the early nineteen-seventies - it was the first day of summer camp at Camp Karankawa. I was a young Tenderfoot scout eager to learn about the mysteries of the woods and nature. Our troop's scoutmasters told us that the best way to master outdoor skills was through the experience of the senior scouts. Sure, they were knowledgeable, but they were also clever in the art of tomfoolery. The older scouts loved to play tricks on unsuspecting, credulous greenhorns like us.
Later, after watching us novices struggle with camp setup, some senior scouts exhibited a little compassion and showed us how to pitch our heavy canvas wall tents, unfold our wooden cots, and set up our mosquito netting. Afterward, one of them, Joey, asked if we would like to join them for a snipe hunt in the woods after sunset.
"What is a snipe?" I asked.
"A snipe is a bird that only comes out of the woods after dark. You can lure the critter to the trails with a special bird call that we'll teach you later," said Joey. "Anyone want to go?"
"I do," I said, thinking this would be my first bona fide hunting trip.
Some of the other newbies, including Timmy, the youngest of the group, also agreed to participate in the quest.
"Good," Joey said. "Let's meet at the trail leading into the woods after dinner tonight."
We had supper in the mess hall with all the other troops at summer camp that week. I don't remember what we ate, but as a kid, I never liked mess hall food. One year, I survived an entire week of summer camp on nothing but Sugar Pops and milk.
After dinner, we arrived back at camp around sunset. Joey was already at the trailhead with a collection of paper sacks he stole from the mess hall and some sticks he gathered from the woods. He gave each of us a bag and a stick to club the bird after we somehow persuaded the mystical two-legged beast to hop into it. Joey taught us a dumb snipe call that sounded a little like toodle-toodle-doo. Our little group of tenderfoots, armed with the trusty flashlights we brought from home, crept along the trails, anticipating an opportunity to flush out one of the creatures from the thick brush.
"There's one! Over there!" Joey said.
"I don't see it," Timmy said.
"Yeah, he's right there, behind those branches. Do you see it now?"
"Yes!" Timmy hollered.
"Now go get him! No, not that way! He moved off to the right!"
"I see him! Rats, he got away!"
"That's okay, you'll get the next one," Joey said.
"I see another one!" Timmy hollered. "Over there behind that bush!"
"I see it, too," I said.
Or I saw something. I wasn't sure it was a snipe, especially since I didn't even know what a snipe looked like. It could have been a rock. We roamed the trails for about an hour, searching for Joey's elusive snipe. First, he was here, then he was there. It seemed impossible to catch one. We hunted until we got tired and finally gave up.
The next morning, while sitting around the campfire after breakfast with the rest of the troop, the scoutmaster looked us over in that wise way that he had, lit his pipe, then smiled and said,
"Did anyone see a snipe last night?"
I gazed around the fire ring to see who would answer first. Suddenly, Timmy stood up, shoulders back, chest forward, and proudly said,
"I saw two!"
There we were, rough and tough snipers for the next five days of summer camp. We had passed the rite of passage and now belonged to an elite group of woodsmen trained to capture and bag snipe. Well, on the last day of summer camp, our bubble burst. The senior scouts informed us that there was no such thing as a snipe. It was a prank. They had made up the whole story about capturing the bird in a bag and clubbing it with a stick.
As senior scouts, we played the same snipe hunt escapade on the younger scouts of our day, as I am sure they did when it was their time to prank their fledglings.
As adults, we discovered that a snipe is, in fact, a real bird and that snipe hunting dates back nearly 300 years, when British soldiers, called "snipers," hunted snipe as game.
As birders, we use binoculars to watch for Wilson's Snipes - as they migrate through the open wetlands of North America - and shoot them only with cameras.
~ Matt
