Calling the Dove
by Dorinda G. Dallmeyer
My grandfather taught me how to call doves. Growing up in south Alabama, he developed a repertoire of skills, some to earn money, like bricklaying or rafting pine timber all the way to Mobile. Others put food on the table. Doves could be called by imitating their round note. If you were good at it, the males would come to chase off the interloper they heard. If you could call and shoot, that was the start toward a meal. To sharpen his marksmanship, in his youth he learned to pick off bullbats – what you know as nighthawks – darting in the evening sky. Unthinkable as it is to me now – the grandchild who has raised catbirds and blue jays and mockingbirds lost from their nests – I have to admire his skill in pure observation. He watched nighthawks to learn their pattern of wing-beats as they sweep the sky for insects: flap-flap-glide, flap-flap-glide – a waltz of predation in the dusk. If they are going to swerve, they do it on the flap, not the glide, so you shoot them on the follow-through.
But that was his youth. By the time I knew him, his forays with gun in hand were strictly for the table, squirrels mostly, but mostly just walking the fields. One time he passed up the opportunity to shoot a cottontail he nearly stepped on before he saw it, cowering in hopeful camouflage. There was no skill in blundering into a rabbit. It never crossed his mind to raise his gun; he just told the rabbit to go on home.
He taught me how to call doves and doves have been on my mind a lot lately. At home mourning doves frequent our feeders although they prefer to feed on the ground. The pairs whistle in on squeaky wings, dressed in subtle pearl-tones, the male rosier in the breast, both teetering on absurdly small feet atop the feeder roof. They pad around anxiously, unsure just how to make the transition from eave to platform as if, once landed, they forgot they could fly if they fell.
Their nests seem tentative as well, the eggs clearly visible through a minimalist lattice of sticks and straw, a Zen nest on a fan of pine. But if they were that flimsy, we’d have no doves. Although the male makes dramatic beelines to present the female with nesting material item after item, he knows when to stop and she knows what’s enough: that the flex and bend of the bough requires a supple nest, not a massive one.
Pity the doves, who come freighted with more symbolism than their narrow shoulders seem capable of bearing, much less delivering on. The dove of peace, the dove returning with the olive branch to signify God’s reconciliation with man after the Flood, the billing and cooing of courtship, doves released at weddings to symbolize marital harmony. What could they have done to deserve this?
And why have their cousins fared so much worse? The rock doves, “street pigeons,” reviled and persecuted because they squat on the statues of our ancestors, the same people who brought them here in the first place. The homing pigeons, so nurtured and bonded to a place, then dragged off hundreds of miles and released despite weather and predators just to see if they can make it home. To me it’s the equivalent of cockfighting at altitude.
Even the mourning doves we treat Janus-faced. My uncle with his purebred pointers, a man who called it “buhd huntin’,” was a chemist for a multinational clay company running an extensive mining operation in central Georgia. He was a man judicious and measured in life. But each fall the executives and major clients flew down from up North to take part in a Georgia dove shoot. No lawman questioned the baited fields, the birds shot by the hundreds; no one questioned that the doves were retrieved, plucked, and gutted by black men without guns; no one was rueful about the pitifully small carcasses packed into ice chests to be ready to fly (now with some assistance) back to New Jersey. Afterwards, my uncle would appear at my great-grandmother’s house with several dozen doves wrapped in newspaper. She would be gracious to his face but once he left, she had to pluck and clean them all herself, uttering mild oaths, knowing that each one would yield only a few tablespoons of meat most likely studded with birdshot. That kind of carnage took no skill. No one needed to know how to call doves.
Sometimes when I walk the deer paths in my woods, I spy on the doves drinking in the creek or worse, they flush from underfoot in a blast that trips my heart. The bird-lover’s rhetorical question “How could you shoot them?” merges with the hunter’s practical “How could you shoot them?” It reminds me that the dove of peace is a gambler who bets on surprise.
This year the doves are nesting somewhere in the woods away from my house so mostly I see them at the feeder and hear them call from deep in the woods. And I remember my grandfather smelling of Prince Albert pipe tobacco, the white stubble on his cheek scratching my ear, his flannel shirt warm against my back as he bent and encircled me with his arms and shaped my hands just so –- the fingers of the left hand bundled against themselves, cupped by the fingers of the right hand, hands pressed together to form a hollow, the thumbs parallel for the mouthpiece. Put your lips right here on the knuckles of the thumbs and blow. You’ll get it. Keep trying, he says. You’ll get it. And then I hear the round “whoo,” as round as your lips are now, emerge a bit breathy at first and then clear as the dove itself.
published in The Wildbranch Anthology, University of Utah Press 2010
as read at the Paddle Georgia 2011 talent show — June 23, 2011
