Flint is as hard as a tax collector's heart. Indians made arrowheads from it to shoot the guts out of settlers. Worked, too. Not as well as a .45-caliber rifle bullet, but pretty good for rock.

My appreciation for flint, never great, declined seriously when the nice backhoe man spent three days and $800 of my money to chip two feet of it out of my septic tank hole. "Like to ruint my digger," he said. "Stuff's HARD!"

But flint in the right place is much to be appreciated. The Flint Hills of Kansas is a vast sprawl of rolling country, studded by outcrops of limestone which are shrouded by big bluestem, soil too thin to plow.

It is the last sweep of tallgrass prairie left in the nation, ranging irregularly from Topeka west to Salina, from north of Manhattan to south of Winfield.

For an Ozarker, the tallgrass prairie is an exhilarating carnival ride for the eyes. Tree people get uneasy when they're on the prairie, but I must have flatlander genes. I love the prairie.

I bought a T-shirt in the Cottage House motel gift shop in Council Grove that reads "Prairie Person." It's true. I have watched prairie chickens dance and incant their eerie territorial call from a blind plunked in the middle of a booming ground on Missouri's vestigial tallgrass prairie.

And I've carefully nurtured a quarter-acre mini-prairie on my place where I can watch coneflower and gayfeather enliven the slow, sultry evenings of summer. As long ago as 1846, early traveler Susan Magoffin said the tallgrass prairie was "a waving sea of green." On a windy day, the stiff bluestems, Indiangrass, and switchgrass do sinuously billow like a restless sea.

I'd heard stories about the fabled Kansas quail hunting, and used to think about it when I was fighting my way through yet another Missouri blackberry patch, listening to quail flush invisibly into dense woods.

IT WAS LIKE DON QUIXOTE, riding his scruffy mule, thinking about King Arthur astride a noble stallion. It was the hobo with his nose pressed to the window of the exclusive restaurant. Prairie birds sometimes fly into the open, something a Missouri quail hasn't done since the innocent boyhood days of Sam Clemens.

The Flint Hills, I figured, should be quail heaven for a Missouri bird hunter whose only open look at a quail is when it's on the plate, surrounded by wild rice.

So here I was in Council Grove, Kansas, heart of the Flint Hills. Council Grove was a gathering place for Santa Fe Trail wagon trains which actually started at Franklin, Missouri, about 10 miles from where I grew up. The Santa Fe was the first of the great western trails--more than 20 years older than the Oregon Trail.

The Trail, opened in 1821, wound 865 miles southwest, carrying traders who, in addition to swapping the Mexicans cotton goods for silver, brought Indians things they really needed, like white man's religion, guns, and whiskey.

TODAY, THE SANTA FE TRAIL takes quail hunters, via Suburban, the modern covered wagon, from near Franklin to Council Grove, there to meet with the natives and profit. One such native, Jerry Shivers, is a thin, intense bird hunter with a herd of pointers (16 at last count) and a bristly mustache guarding a weather-beaten face gnarled by 120 days a year in the field. He guides bird hunters (and "bird" in the Council Grove area includes prairie chickens as well as quail).

Jerry took Marc Murrell of the Kansas Wildlife and Parks Department, my son Andy, and me to a ranch northeast of Council Grove where brushy draws reached into the grassed hills. We passed an old farmhouse which must have been a triumph of Victorian architecture when it was built, and which now sags and weathers in the restless wind. Where have the descendants of all those fine families gone? Probably working at fast food restaurants and living in a trailer park. And their heritage rusts away in the wind-battered hills.

It was the next-to-last day of the Kansas deer season and we met a party of deer drivers, half without hunter orange, each with beer in hand. We piled back in the Suburbans and fled. "I don't want to get my dogs shot," I said. "Hell," Jerry said. "I don't want to get shot!"

So we hunted the other side of the farm, walking good-looking habitat for two hours without moving a bird. Then Andy's Brittany, Dacques, pointed a covey at a field corner, but his brother, Chubby, coming from upwind, didn't smell the birds or see his frozen brother and ran through the covey.

IT'S EMBARRASSING FOR A GUIDE when a three-hour jaunt through prime quail habitat turns up so few birds. "We had 120 birds or more here on opening day," Jerry said desperately. He also was, I'm sure, sorry his meat dog, Cheater, the happy result of a love affair between a setter and a Brittany, wasn't present.

After four coveys in five hours, I'm sure he thought I thought he was lying, but there were two factors at work: quail being quail, and Vance's You-Should-Have-Been-Here-Last-Week Syndrome.

Warm weather quail are as elusive as leprechauns. They can be in the middle of big stubblefields and will have flown there, leaving no scent trail for a bird dog. So, while the hunters prowl the birdy-looking edges, the distant quail chirp and peck at grain like so many barnyard chickens.

In the last hour we moved two more coveys. Chubby redeemed himself by pointing a covey in an Osage orange hedgerow. I walked in after them, resigned to not getting a shot (he who volunteers to flush the covey rarely gets a decent shot). But two birds flew through a small opening in the dense hedge, one after another as if framed for a hunter's den wall, and I shot both. Andy shot one. The Missourians preened like bull peafowl.

Then we moved to a prairie chicken hunting area, a soybean stubblefield surrounded by tallgrass prairie. There was a brushy gully downhill from the field toward where the cars were parked and we hunted the landowner's pet quail covey.

Dacques pointed the birds at the head of the gully. Once again, as if welcoming me to Kansas, two birds flushed through an open spot and I dropped them both. Four for four on a pair of doubles, which, for me, is like hitting the jackpot on two successive pulls of a dollar slot in Las Vegas.

BUT KANSAS BIRD HUNTING, like Kansas weather, giveth and taketh away. We moved on to the chicken hunting. We lay along a fenceline, waiting for the birds to fly in to their evening meal.

Prairie chickens can come in a cloud, like a dust devil, a swoosh of birds that takes quick reactions. They sail on the wind like feathered Frisbees.

Two loners came in--no flock--and both flew within range of Murrell's long tom chicken gun...and both fell. Chubby raced to the middle of the field circled the dead grouse as if wondering whether he really wanted to pick up this alien creature, then decided if we shot it we must want it and retrieved it.

Andy and I totaled seven quail for the day. We had flushed four coveys in four hours (and a covey an hour is considered excellent quail hunting in most areas, but not in the Flint Hills where 10 covey days are fairly routine).

The next morning we scraped frost from the windshield in the predawn dark and headed back to the chicken field. It was a reprise of the previous evening, except darker and colder and no one got a shot.

We drove north and west toward Junction City and another ranch. This was a creek valley where cropfields nestled in the lea of the prairie hills.

And this was where the birds were. We jumped six coveys in less than three hours. Only one was a classic prairie covey which flushed into the open. Five birds paid for that genetic folly. The rest apparently were Missouri imports, brush-hugging bombshells that gave us only fleeting glimpses, tantalizing peeks, like a fan dancer in a burlesque house.

THE WIND, NEVER STILL IN KANSAS, was gusting to 40 miles per hour. There were wind advisories for all the lakes and, I'm sure, for quail hunters if anyone had thought about it. After missing a couple of easy shots, I figured that the birds were outflying the shot.

I killed two birds, one over a point from Cheater, Jerry's meat hound. Andy added two other birds. We missed a total that I've conveniently misplaced in my notes. We also flushed two turkeys and a Boone and Crockett buck that had four hours left to worry before the gun season ended.

Flint Hills hunting is tough because every step is an adventure. You stumble over rocks and the tufted clumps of prairie grass, trip on wickets of briar, slip on loose soil in the creekbeds.

A week before, in a north Missouri field, I'd stepped in a groundhog hole that went straight down and was not quite as wide as my foot was long. My momentum carried me forward; my toes bent up painfully and my Achilles tendon stretched like a slingshot. It hurt like hell at the time, then went away. But quail hunting injuries are like the sins of youth. They rise to plague you later in life; in this case, two hours into the second day hunt. My foot began to feel as if someone had run it through a cornsheller. I imitated Grandpa McCoy for about a mile, finally limped back to the car at 1 p.m.

Jerry suggested we head back to the prairie chicken field. "Get there a little early," he said. Words of deliverance, if not of wisdom. Late season prairie chicken hunting is as close to taking a nap as you can get in the field.

I sank into a mat of big bluestem, Chubby Vance at my side. We snuggled up, pretending we were hiding, but really just snuggling up. It was a restful break in the day--lying on thick, soft prairie grass, watching a prairie thunderstorm build to the west, my daydreams undisturbed by anything to shoot at.

ANDY AND I HAD TOTALED 11 QUAIL in two days. Not great hunting (we could legally have taken 32), but satisfying...and for an old prairie person the hunting was only part of it. During the night, rain slashed against the old windowpanes in the Cottage Inn, so Andy and I canceled a morning hunt and drove east, out of the old, unchanged hills.

The best part of the hunt was seeing country that man hasn't slapped and prodded until it's something other than it should be.

That's the Flint Hills...incomparably lovely, harsh and sweet at the same time, changeable as a fickle beauty. The area can move you to lyricism or break your heart, sometimes in the same hunt. The hills can do what they did for the settlers--provide a bounty or be as lean as a pointer's shank.

They are, I guess, what hunting is all about: work without guarantees, but, if you look at it right, invariably with unforeseen bounty.

I want to shoot quail, but I also enjoy seeing hawks sailing on a prairie wind and big bluestem nodding to the clouds and a horizon at the curve of the earth.

But somewhere out there are 10 coveys in a day. It's incentive enough to go back. So head up the wagon train, Rowdy. Line 'em up and move 'em out. We're bound for the Santa Fe Trail...

Sidebar: For More Information

Visitors Bureau, 313 West Main, Council Grove, KS 66846 (Tel. 1-800-732-9211 or 316-767-5882).

Guiding: Gerald Shivers, Route Three, Box 26, Council Grove, KS 66846 (Tel. 316-767-5739). Lodging: The Cottage House, Council Grove, a restored 1870s bed and breakfast (continental). Meals: Several cafes in town, but the Hays House Restaurant, a National Historic Landmark, restored to much of its 1857 decor, is the "night out" eating place.

Public hunting land: Council Grove Wildlife Area 2,638 acres; Marion Wildlife Area (near Durham) 4,341 acres. For information on areas, see "Guide to Kansas Public Hunting," from the Kansas Wildlife and Parks Dept., Route Two, Box 54A, Pratt, KS 67124 (Tel. 316-672- 5911). The Region Four office, which includes Council Grove and much of the central and southern Flint Hills is at 8420 North Broadway, Box 317, Valley Center, 67147 (Tel. 316-755-2711). There also is a unit office at Council Grove (Tel. 316-767-5900).