HUBBARD, Texas – Allen Morehouse's veteran pointer was busy. The dog was covering Hill County's rolling terrain with the economic gait of an old pro, working into the cool, humid wind, checking out every logical place that a quail might hide.

With knee-high ground cover, scattered mesquite trees and densely wooded draws, it was easy enough to recall the glory days when covey calls rang from fence row to fence row on this 1,500 acres.

Days like the hunting season of 1981, when Dickie Sorrells and his hunting buddies bagged 1,500 wild quail and never left Hill County. Sorrells is a bird dog man. He still gets the point, even if the wild birds are long gone.

"Somebody told me just the other day that they'd heard a covey calling behind their house," said Sorrells. "I warned him not to tell anybody the location of that covey. A man would be hard-pressed to find enough wild quail to make a hunt in Hill County these days."

Like most longtime observers, Sorrells believes a combination of factors ganged up on the north central Texas bobs. Farming practices got a lot more efficient. An outbreak of avian disease may have devastated year classes of quail.

Insecticides sprayed by farmers hurt the quail and the insects favored by their chicks. Native pastures like the pristine area we were walking through were converted to coastal Bermuda pastures that are good for cattle but impossible for wildlife. The spread of fire ants didn't help matters. Neither did the spread of people.

Hubbard is less than 90 minutes from Dallas, 20 minutes from Waco, two hours from Austin. That's good news for Morehouse and his German shorthaired pointer. The dog suddenly acted interested up the hill and eventually locked into a quivering point that left no question that birds were right under his intense nose.

My wife, Emilie, walked to the right side of the point. Her hunting partners from Austin, Roy Bechtol and Jason Parrish, covered the left flank. Morehouse sent his Chesapeake Bay retriever to do the flushing honors.

Eight birds boiled up in front of the flushing dog, then split to either side. Morehouse could not have designed a better flush had he drawn it up on a chalkboard. Everybody got some shooting, and the retriever made short work of the fallen quail.

It went that way for the rest of the morning. We walked at a pleasant pace that made conversation possible, watching the dog roam ahead in a zigzag pattern, finding covey after covey. Of course, the birds were pen-raised and they didn't act particularly wild. They didn't run like banshees from the pointing dog. They didn't fly as fast as wild birds, nor as far.

Still, the experience was a good one, particularly for my wife, who is not a gung-ho, purist upland bird hunter.

"The pace was perfect," she said. "We didn't have to run after the birds, and we weren't always hurrying to try and find the next covey. The birds didn't flush in that mass covey rise that's a little confusing for hunters like me."

Wild quail season began Oct. 28. Reports have ranged from bad to terrible. The brutal summer heat and a drought that started last fall took its toll on wild quail, even in West and South Texas.

Quail hunters this season may be forced to hunt liberated birds. Morehouse, who calls his operation Heart of Texas Hunting, strives to make the experience as natural as possible.

"This ranch we're hunting on has some of the best natural quail cover left in Hill County," he said. "We release birds throughout the season, even on days when we're not hunting them. The birds that have been flushed repeatedly start acting a little wilder than quail that have just been put out.

"What we're selling is a hunting experience, and we're trying to make it as close to the real deal as we possible can."

E-mail rsasser@dallasnews.com

Call Allen Morehouse at 254-717-2946.

Internet: Check www.TexasHuntFish.com or www.WingShootingUSA.org, which lists over 1,000 shooting preserve hunts in the U.S., including nearly 100 in Texas.