A little after breakfast on the third Wednesday in October, Tony Brown knocked on my back door.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go for a drive.”
“What’s up?”
“Thought I might show you my grouse and woodcock covers.”
I looked at him. “You kidding?”
He shrugged. “I don’t get out much anymore. Bum knee. Don’t want the good spots to go to waste.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him. I’d never noticed any limp.
But I didn’t turn him down.
Tony and I had run into each other several times around town. He’d commented on the Ruffed Grouse Society and Trout Unlimited stickers on my car. I’d fussed over the setter named Lilly who always rode in his back seat. We’d talked about going hunting or fishing sometime, but we hadn’t gotten around to it.
On this Wednesday in October, Tony drove a lot of the back roads that I’d driven in the summer. He’d lived his whole life in this town. In his good old days, he said, he’d hunted hard and often, just walking through the woods all day.
Now and then he’d slow down and point. “You can’t see it,” he’d say, “but behind that stand of pines there’s an alder run and a birch hillside. You can drive through that barway and tuck the car out of sight behind those hemlocks.” And: “Doesn’t look like much, but follow that old roadway about a half a mile and it opens to a grown-up field and an old orchard.” And: “See that little stream? It comes bubbling out of a hidden swamp. Flight woodcock.” There were ten or a dozen other patches of cover that had happy histories for Tony. Not a one of them lay more than 20 minutes from my back door.
I could have lived in the town for decades and never found half of them.
When we got back to my house, we spread my topographic map on the kitchen table, and Tony drew circles around the places he’s showed me.
I explored some of Tony’s covers that weekend. Two of them were empty, but looked good enough to try again. All the others held at least a grouse or two, or a scattering of woodcock, or both.
One of Tony’s spots was at the dead end of a nondescript dirt road. My Brittany pointed a grouse while I was still loading my shotgun. There was a field bordered by a screen of pines (where we flushed a pair of grouse out of range), an apple orchard in one corner (another grouse there, shot at and missed), a hillside grown to head-high poplar (four woodcock, all pointed, two killed) that sloped down to a meandering, alder-lined brook (three woodcock, all survivors), a few acres of old slashing gone to second growth (three grouse, one pointed and killed), another field, a screen of pines ...
It’s a classic, really. Right out of a Burton L. Spiller or a Corey Ford grouse yarn or an Aiden Lassell Ripley water-color. Tony swears nobody but the two of us knows about it. It takes an entire morning to hunt it right, and it’s just a 10-minute drive from my house.
Maybe these will turn out to be the good old days after all.
Chapter 3
BURT AT 10
If, like me, you’ve grown leery of dog stories because they always seem to end with the death of the beloved old bird dog, let me assure you that Burt is lying on the floor beside me right now, pretending to snooze but ever alert to the possibility that I might push back my desk chair and say, “Wanna go hunting?”
He’s the best dog I’ve ever owned. He was a puppy prodigy, and if I’d done my job better, there’s no telling how excellent he could’ve been. But he’s still awfully good. He’s got some seasons left in him, and so do I. This isn’t one of those death stories, I promise.
He was the pick of the males in the litter of Brittanies, a gift from my wife, just 8 weeks old when we fetched him from the breeder, a little orange-and-white pup with floppy ears and stubby little legs. When we let him out of the car, he pointed a moth.
I named him after my old gunning partner, Burton L. Spiller, who is known to literate shotgunners as “the poet laureate of ruffed grouse.” “Burton L. Spiller’s Firelight” is my dog’s kennel name. I called him Burt.
I was working at home that summer, an ideal situation for training and bonding with a puppy. A hundred acres of woodland sloped away from the back of our house, and Burt and I explored every square foot of it. It seemed that he only needed to hear a command once to understand it, and he loved nothing better than to please the man who took him into the woods and fed him and allowed him to sleep on the rug beside the bed.
He was housebroken in a few weeks. He came when I spoke his name. He followed me from room to room. Everywhere I went, I took him with me. When I said “sit,” “whoa,” “come,” or “heel,” he did what he was told. “Get-in-the-car” was one of his favorite commands.
I read some books on dog training. Sorting out the contradictions and conflicting philosophies, I concluded that dogs instinctively want to please their masters, that messages should never be mixed, and that without the right genes, no amount of training would produce a good bird dog.
I didn’t know if the corollary would also prove valid. I hoped that my well-meaning but decidedly amateur training program would not negate Burt’s stellar genes. Both of his parents were grouse-trial champions.
The first time I teased him with a pheasant wing on a string, he locked on point. I let the wing lie on the ground. He didn’t budge. I stroked his back and praised him, picked him up and set him down, and he just kept pointing that pheasant wing.
Burt was less than 5 months old, not even half grown, when October arrived. The books all agreed that he was at least a year shy of being mature enough to actually hunt, but I’d made it my policy to bring him everywhere with me, and even if all he did was run around in the woods while I hunted with my partners and their dogs, I didn’t see how that could do any harm.
Besides, Keith Wegener’s pointer, Freebie, would make a splendid role model for Burt, and so would Skip Rood’s Brittany, Waldo. Both Freebie and Waldo were old dogs—hunting their last season, as it turned out. Both had developed into superior grouse and woodcock dogs. They’d slowed down and gone deaf in their old age, and neither of them could hunt more than a few covers before running out of steam. But they still had sharp noses, and both of them would rather point than eat.
Burt and I drove to Maine to hunt with Keith on Opening Day. The woods were tinder-dry, temperatures were in the 80s, and the leaves had not begun to drop. Freebie chugged through a couple of our best woodcock and grouse covers. They were empty. Burt had himself a nice morning of trotting around on his little legs and snuffling the air. It might have been my imagination, but he seemed to be watching Freebie out of the corners of his eyes.
We quit at noon, and as Keith said, “Burt did as good as Freebie.”
The following weekend we hunted with Skip and Waldo. Our first cover skirted the edge of a pond. Burt and I followed the hillside, while Skip and Waldo took the string of alders that rimmed the pond.
We’d been hunting barely 5 minutes when I heard the quick explosion of a flushing grouse between us. I never saw the bird, but Skip, 100 feet off to my right, fired. A moment later he said, “Oh, hell.”
“Miss him?” I called.
“No, damn it, I got him. Dropped him in the middle of the pond, and old Waldo sure as hell won’t fetch him. I guess I’m gonna have to ... wait a minute.”
“What’s going on?”
“Burt’s swimming out there. I’ll be damned. That bird is bigger than he is. He’s got it in his mouth. He’s swimming back with it. I don’t believe this.”
I hustled down to the edge of the pond, and I got there just in time to see half-grown Burt dog-paddling to shore with a full-grown grouse in his mouth. He brought it straight to me. I took it from him and thanked him. He kind of shrugged, shook himself dry, and looked at me, and it was pretty clear what he was saying: “Let’s try that again.”
Burt pointed his first woodcock that day. Actually he pointed his first six woodcock that day, and when I dropped one in some thick grass, he demonstrated his attitude toward
retrieving woodcock. He flash-pointed it, crept up on it, then stood guard over it until I picked it up.
That afternoon, he and Waldo pointed at the same time. Waldo crept forward. So did Burt. From different angles they pointed again.
“They’re roading a grouse,” said Skip. “Waldo goes slow on grouse.”
“Maybe that’s what Waldo’s doing,” I said. “Burt doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“I think he does,” said Skip.
The two dogs—the deaf old Brit and the half-grown pup—moved forward on tippy-toes, creeping, pointing, creeping again, converging from different directions. Finally they both locked onto a clump of juniper at the edge of a dirt road, about 100 yards from where they’d begun.
“Ready?” said Skip.
“I don’t believe this,” I said.
The grouse burst out and flew straight down the road, the easiest kind of straightaway shot.
I mounted my 20-gauge double and looked down the barrels. The grouse was flying directly at a house.
I lowered my gun. Skip had done the same.
“Would’ve been memorable to kill that bird,” I said.
“Oh, I doubt we’ll forget it,” said Skip, “the way those two dogs worked.”
Later that season I took Burt to a hunting preserve. We spent the day with a guide and one of the preserve’s dogs, a lovely shorthair bitch who hunted planted pheasants and chukar every day. Burt had never sniffed a pheasant or a chukar.
The sleek shorthair and little half-grown Burt took turns pointing birds and honoring each other’s points. I have no idea where he learned to do that.
That winter Burt grew up, and by spring he was long-legged and thick-chested, a dog, no longer a puppy.
In May, his breeder invited us to go for a run with one of his littermates to celebrate their birthdays. We met at a state wildlife management area and let the dogs out.
Zoom. They both disappeared. Now and then we caught a flash of white in the distance, one or the other of the two Brittanies crashing through the underbrush, running at full tilt, heading for the horizon.
I yelled. I screamed. I cursed.
They just kept running.
“I don’t know what the hell got into him,” I said. “He hunted beautifully last fall.”
“He’s doing great,” said the breeder. “He’s making wide sweeps, covering a lot of ground. He can really run. You should enter him in a field trial.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, moaning. “He’s acting like a crazy dog. He’s forgotten everything he learned.”
“In grouse trials,” she said, “the dogs are supposed to run big. Burt looks like a winner, assuming he’d point if he found a bird. Would he?”
“Last fall he did. He loved to point. He pointed a damn moth the day I brought him home. Now, I have no idea what he’d do.” I was thinking that my little prodigy had turned into a monster.
The breeder explained how Burt’s superior grouse-trial genes gave him that terrific nose and those uncanny instincts, but they also gave him strong legs and boundless stamina and the burning desire to range as far as he had to—and as fast as he could get there—to find birds.
When he was 5 months old, she said, he had everything except the legs.
Now—and for the rest of his life—he’d have the legs, too, and I better get used to it.
We’ve had a lot of adjustments to make. Well, I have. I’ve struggled to convince Burt that he should hunt with me, that if he runs out of sight and beyond the sound of his bell he’s not doing us any good. The classic grouse dog, I tell him, goes slow and hunts close, the way old Freebie and Waldo did, the way he himself did when he was 5 months old.
He doesn’t buy it, and I remember that when Freebie and Waldo were in their prime, they liked to range pretty wide, too.
I’ve considered—and rejected—investing in a shock collar. I know that if I use it properly I might be able to convince him to hunt closer. But I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s not so much that I don’t want to hurt him, although there is that. Mostly, I can’t bring myself to punish him for doing what’s been bred into him.
So I yell and scream and cuss, which doesn’t seem to do him any harm and makes me feel better.
When flights of woodcock have settled into our covers, Burt works like my version of a classic upland bird dog. He hunts methodically, moving from point to point, looking over his shoulder now and then to make sure I’m with him, and if I want him to poke into some part I think he’s missed, he doesn’t seem to mind, although he makes it clear that if there were birds where I wanted him to look, he would’ve found them without my help.
He still refuses to retrieve a woodcock. He’ll find it, sometimes point it, and then he’ll stand guard over it until I pick it up. If it’s still alive, he’ll gently hold it down with a paw.
The trouble is, in our New England grouse and woodcock covers, birds are scarce more often than not. Burt has no interest in barren cover, so he does what his genes tell him to do—he ranges wider and wider, searching for bird scent. He’s the dog, he’s got the nose, and his job is to find birds. I’m merely the man with the shotgun. My job is to shoot them.
Burt doesn’t mind when I shoot and miss, but he hates it when, after all his work, I’m not in position to shoot.
I can’t count the times when his bell has faded in the distance and I’ve been left standing there in the woods surrounded by silence. I listen. Not a sound.
So I do what any amateur dog handler would do. I yell.
Sometime later—a few minutes, maybe as much as 15 minutes later—I hear the bird flush in the distance, and pretty soon Burt comes trotting in.
We sit down and have a conversation.
I tell him I wish to hell he’d hunt closer. Pointing birds a quarter of a mile away from me, I explain, doesn’t do us much good.
He tells me that I’m a slow learner and it’s pretty discouraging. When will I start to trust him?
I ask him how he’d like to have one of those electronic beeper devices attached to his collar.
He says it would no doubt help me to find him when he’s on point, but that infernal beep-beep-beep would be an abomination in a grouse cover, and on that subject, at least, we are in agreement.
Last May Burt turned 10. He’s still in his prime. He can run like the wind and do it all day. He lives to find birds and point them for me.
I’ve come to understand that my job is to try to keep up with him.
Sometimes I dream of the day when Burt will slow down and hunt close, the way Freebie and Waldo did in their final seasons, when they were lame and deaf and on their last legs.
But that reminds me of stories where the dogs die in the end. I don’t like those stories.
Chapter 4
SPILLER COUNTRY
Three or four times a year I take my old friend’s shotgun from my gun cabinet, break it apart, check it for rust, and give it a good cleaning. It’s a Parker 20, VH grade, a nice gun—beautiful, in fact—and perhaps modestly valuable. It looks like it’s been hunted hard, and it has. Its bluing is worn shiny around the breech and at the ends of the barrels, there are dents in the stock, and the recoil pad is beginning to crumble. I’ve never bothered to have it appraised. It’s not for sale, so why bother, although men who know its provenance have offered me what I’m sure is ten times what a shrewd gunsmith would pay.
I fit it together, snap it to my shoulder, trace the hard flight of a grouse cutting across the wall of my den, and remember all the birds it’s shot—and all those I’ve missed with it. Then I sit back, lay the little Parker on my lap, close my eyes, and indulge myself in a moment of nostalgia—for the days when I tromped the uplands with Burt Spiller, and for the days when ruffed grouse prospered in Spiller country.
According to my father’s meticulous journals, I hunted with Burton L. Spiller for the first time on November 10, 1951. Well, I didn’t actually hunt in those days. I was 11, too young to carry a gun in t
he woods. Instead, I followed at my father’s heels all day—through briar, alder, and mud, up hill and over stone wall and around blowdown. I didn’t mind. Grouse hunting in those days was exciting enough even if you were just a spectator.
One English setter, two men, and one boy flushed 23 separate grouse that November day in Burt’s string of southern New Hampshire covers. Burt, who was 65, walked the field edges and shot one of them with his sleek little Parker. My father dropped three.
Dad’s journals suggest that was an average day back then.
In the 1955 season we became a regular threesome. At 9 every Saturday morning, Dad and I pulled up in front of Burt’s white frame house in East Rochester. A leg o’ mutton gun case, a black lunch pail, and a pair of well-oiled boots were already lined up on the porch, and when Dad tooted the horn, Burt came out, waved, and lugged his gear to the car. “Hi,” he always grinned. “I’ve been expecting you. It looks like a wonderful day.”
Burton L. Spiller was born on December 21, 1886, the right time; in Portland, Maine, the right place.
The 19th-century Maine farmers had opened the land. They moved rocks to clear pastureland and piled them along the edges to make Frost’s “good fences.” They planted apples—Baldwins, Gravensteins, Northern Spies, Russets, and Pippins. Second-growth birch, popple, alder, and hemlock pushed in when the farms were abandoned. Just about the time young Burt was old enough to carry a shotgun into the woods, classic grouse cover was everywhere. No wonder Burt Spiller became a partridge hunter.
He blasted his first grouse off the ground with his father’s 10-gauge duck gun when he was 7. “Many, many times I have stood as I stood then,” he wrote in ‘His Majesty, the Grouse,’ his first published story, “but there has never been another grouse or another thrill like that one. The kick is still there, as I presume it still is in the old 10-gauge, but—well—we are a little harder around the heart and shoulders than we were then.”
Upland Autumn Page 3
