The morning of my first hunt was clear and cold.
“Perfect snipe weather,” said Rick Huffines, veteran hunter of the mysterious bird.
Huffines is director of the Tennessee River Gorge Trust, but that day, he traded his conservation hat for a tweed deerstalker-style cap – an important part of his ensemble as a self-proclaimed “gentleman hunter.”
We bounded west from Chattanooga, over Nickajack Lake and into Jasper, Tennessee. Alongside Highway 28, Huffines turned his truck onto private farmland. There, we parked at the edge of a vast flat field, dappled with mud and frozen soybean stalks. Two more trucks followed, the other members of our hunting party, which included a biologist, a professor, a train engineer and me, the journalist, carrying a notepad in lieu of a shotgun.
Rick Huffines uses a 20-gauge single-shot Holland & Holland shotgun, made to order in London in 1889.From the tailgate of his truck, Huffines began to assemble his 1889 English single-shot shotgun.