From the Editor in Chief: For Love of the Hunt

Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,

My travels offer me opportunities to meet people I feel you should know too. Summer Edwards is one of them. 

Born and raised in St. Matthews, South Carolina, Edwards is a farmer, her life spent fully immersed in the cycles appurtenant. She grew up raising hogs not far from her Bridal Wreath Farm, originally a hobby farm where Edwards, her husband, daughters, and son raise chickens for their green, brown, and blue eggs and Coturnix quail for meat. Then, a few years ago, Edwards says, “Someone just mentioned to me that they thought I would be great at raising bobwhites. I ordered about 200 eggs, then I ordered 400, then I ordered 600, and it just went from there.” The Bobwhites “turned it into something that we can actually make a little bit of money off of,” and now Edwards provides 7,000 to 10,000 bobs a year to two nearby hunting preserves and sources the remainder they need for them. 

Farmers, particularly meat farmers, know well that death is part of life, a truth we hunters share, inflicting it as we do upon the animals we swear we love. The farmer’s life is not one so far from ours, simply carried out on a grander scale; the blood-hot intensity of our pursuit supplanted by the patient love of everyday service to another species. But ultimately, we arrive at the same place: the stripping of feathers, the rending of flesh, and the snap of bone, then the sizzle of flame, fat, and meat. It’s something folks more removed from the places where their food is born, raised, and killed may not always recognize, but reality is reality regardless of one’s awareness level, and Edward’s is a good life, one spent close to the land, living by the rhythms of her birds and the people who love them. 

But life has a way of taking you places you never expected, and two years ago, the farmer became a hunter. Of sorts. Not exactly. But also, precisely. More on that later, but as it often does for bird hunters, it all began with a dog. Of the first of her four English cocker spaniels, Edwards says, “I really had planned on just having Hank for a pet. I knew nothing of hunting—just raised birds. But since he’s glued to my side all day, he started hunting. Birds get out every once in a while, and he gets birdy and finds them.”

Then the head guide at Lang Syne, a private preserve to which Edwards provides birds and where I had the pleasure of hunting with her courtesy of preserve member and Tom Beckbe Field Journal contributor Oliver Hartner, asked her, “Do you think you could just drive the buggy and help me maybe put collars on the dogs and stuff?” With a life spent around animals, the farmer figured she could. Now she’s finished her second season guiding hunts behind her pack of four English Cocker spaniels.

Aside from being the first woman guide with whom I’ve had the pleasure of hunting, hunting with Summer Edwards and her dogs was some of the purest fun I’ve had in the quail woods. But Edwards is a unique guide in another way. “I don’t hunt at all. I mean, I know my way around a gun and stuff, but I don’t like to kill things. But I absolutely love hunting. Isn’t that crazy?”

A farmer and hunting guide who doesn’t kill? 

“I’ve never killed a thing. I wring birds’ necks, of course, but those are mercy kills in the field. I just don’t like seeing things shot. Go out and kill it—I’ll clean it, we’ll eat it—but I don’t like to kill it. But I went out there, and it brought everything full circle for me. I put a lot of work into these birds. Seeing them fly and thrive makes my heart smile. And watching people have such a good time, laugh, and enjoy these birds? I didn’t even realize how much fun that would be. Then you throw the dogs in there, too. It’s like heaven.”

You would be forgiven for asking how someone who doesn’t hunt guides hunters.  

Edwards says, “I know the birds. I know where they are, where they move around the farm, because I see them while I’m out there or I’ll see where they have coveyed for the night. I can’t really explain it, but when you don’t have to fight something so hard, it’s where you’re meant to be. I’ve never been anywhere else but where I am. I don’t know if I’m doing it right or not. All I know is I have fun; the people with me have fun, so it must be going good.”

Summer Edwards has reached that fifth and final stage of a hunter’s development, the Sportsman, in which Boone and Crockett say, “the urgency to take game or a trophy fades to the background as the total hunting experience now offers its highest rewards.” After only two seasons, and without pulling a trigger, Edwards understands what some people never do: “You go out there, and the whole world is turned off. You could have every problem in the whole wide world lying on your shoulders, and you go out in that field, and you forget about every single thing. You’re all equal. I could be hunting beside a millionaire—and frequently am. It doesn’t matter. We’re out here in the field. There are no titles, there’s nothing.” 

That sense of fun, of being both unified and leveled alike by the love of the birds, the dogs, and the sound of briers across a pair of brush pants, that’s what Edwards hunts and finds in spades and of which she says, “Next season, you need to come out at the beginning of the season when you can see my birds. It will make your jaw drop, I promise. You’re talking coveys of 60 birds getting up at one time. I have had people come out to hunt who couldn’t even shoot their gun.” 

She smiles and shakes her head, “I don’t know what I’m going to do when hunting season’s over.”

We know Summer, we know. 

Yours,

Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe Field Journal