After a great opening day the week before, the doves and now-legal teal went AWOL. Does the success of the hunt depend only on the birds taken—six doves and one teal? These pictures argue otherwise.

Here is the whole story. Tom and I were impressed by the number of teal we had seen while hunting during the dove opener. I wanted to try the early season teal, and Tom didn’t want to be left behind. He came up with a way to blend time with his recently increased family and a hunt. We had a very pleasant late afternoon tailgate before trying doves on Saturday evening. We had just discovered a new bed & breakfast in the old Famers State Bank building in Sedgwick, a small farm town just down the road. It turned out to suit our overnight plan ideally. When it was obvious the Sunday morning teal hunting wasn’t going to be productive, Tom and I went back to pack up our family and find a picnic spot along the South Platte River on the way home. There are no illusions that this plan can be repeated in December or January with snow on the ground and temps below freezing!

To understand where I have come from as a painter, it helps to know something about those who have had the greatest influence on my own career. From time to time, I’d like to talk about those giants. I’ll start with Tom Lea, a legendary Texas artist/author. Tom was a family friend in El Paso. As a teenager, I read his novel The Wonderful Country and copied many of his pen and ink chapter illustrations. When I graduated with a painting degree from Washington University in St. Louis, he graciously welcomed me to his studio to see my portfolio of school work. It gave me my first exposure to the workplace of a professional artist other than that of my commercial illustrator uncle in New York whom I visited the summer I graduated from high school. Tom knew the hard road I had ahead of me and went out of his way to help. He facilitated several portrait commissions, a contact with the King Ranch to make a mural proposal for a bank in Kingsville,Texas, and book illustration assignments with Little Brown & Company and The University of Texas Press. When I applied to graduate school, he wrote such a strong recommendation it probably resulted in my quick exit after a single quarter so I could eagerly get on with my own career. It’s scary to imagine where I’d be without Tom’s wonderful help early on.

This is the kind of outcome that makes it fun to go to the studio. Here is Tom’s Gundogs column in the latest Sporting Classics.