by Sydney Lea
I don't take much credit for that either, since I learned such permissiveness when I was a kid from an older man, one of the best upland hunters you could want to meet. I'll call him Jack; he never wanted his name, let alone his hunting grounds, identified in print, and I honor that insistence even after his death.
Jack was dour, even rude. He made those Yankee-quick judgments on anyone he bumped into. The one he made on me, within the first five minutes of our acquaintance, turned out positive. Don't ask me why.
I was running my first very own bird dog then. Hector was in his third season, and I had pretty well settled him down, as the jargon has it. He worked good and close, to keep borrowing the conventional terms. He whoa'd at a whisper. I liked that, was proud of it, and I was irritated on my first hunt with my new friend that whenever my dog got out more than forty yards from me, I'd whistle him around, and Jack would shout, in a high-pitched voice, as if he were talking to a baby, "He's all right!" Sure he was all right; he bumped two birds, and the three that went down were birds that Jack flushed as he raced up on points way over in his direction. Meanwhile, I got skunked.
Jack's own dog, a stylish little setter bitch named Millie (I use a pseudonym even for her), had cut herself badly early in the season, so we had to wait for a late October day before we left Hector at home to see what she could do. Which was plenty. I'd never known a dog of any breed that located so many grouse as this one, but she made you labor for them. Or she and Jack together did.
I was in college then, hunting weekends only, drinking my share of beer, chubby and out of shape. Millie operated like no one's idea of a grouse dog that I'd heard about, and Jack urged her to it. We might have been on horseback at some quail plantation. I wished we were, because in that hilly country it was about all I was worth to keep up with the older man as he kept up with his dog. I'd never witnessed anything like it. Often as not, we'd spend more time hunting far off somewhere for her point than Millie herself had spent coming to it. But she held her birds. Jack killed a limit, and I shot three.
Sure, she and I and Jack among us probably bumped that many, or they bumped themselves. But we chased up three of those. They were among the ones we shot over steady points. I couldn't at first understand why her owner would just let Millie rush over to the mark at her own galloping free will, but that's what he did, and by God it worked!
And that's what I have done with my own dogs ever since. Hector never really got the habit. Too late. He remained slow by my revised standards, and by Jack's he was "a vacuum cleaner," one of the snide terms he reserved for such deliberate workers. Another was "sniffer."
My next, Sam, was faster. The first Wes faster still. Gus the fastest, but my later bitch, Annie, was a close second, and I wish I could have bred her to Gus.
Give me a quick, high-headed dog.
Jack's setter was calm enough on the ride home, so long as we stayed on pavement. On the dirt stretches in between, she'd yelp and whine until she drove me almost nuts. She wanted to go hunting, and the rougher roads made her think we were about to, though dark had fallen.
"Pretty eager," I said.
"Better be," said Jack.
Millie came from one of the fanciest bloodlines in the South A local retiree of means had paid almost a thousand bucks for her in the late '50s—a real price for a gun dog in those days—but the old fellow just couldn't handle her. She was too high-energy; she wouldn't whoa; he couldn't stay with her. He had come to Jack for advice. Most people did. Jack had been dogless himself for a brief while, so he offered an opinion, provided he could take the prospect out alone and look her over. The owner hemmed and hawed—this was expensive flesh—but finally consented. Jack returned in an hour or so with Millie, two woodcock and two grouse. The old man blinked.
"What did you do?"
"Didn't do nothin'. You got the best dog in the neighborhood, I'd judge." The old man blinked again. "Trouble is, you're just too used up to suit her. That's all."
I told you he was rude.
The long and short of it is that Jack got Millie for free, and the grouse paid dearly until, at no less than fourteen, she finished her last season and died soon after. Maybe we all ought to give our bird dogs snowshoe hares for feed, the way he did.
"A dog has a pace," Jack told me on the way home from that shoot nearly fifty years back. "Up to you to stay with it, not the other way round." He was hunting the roadside with his eyes from the car, even as the night grew deep.
"Fast is the way, I say," he muttered, and I felt a touch of his contempt for my own obvious exhaustion and unfitness.
Of course Jack's words, spare as they were, fly directly into the face of the usual wisdom: that a dog must adapt to the hunter's pace, which means, in four-legged terms, he must slow down and he'd better stay close. It also means that if he gets scent he'd better start thinking Whoa! He'd better start to sneak. You don't want him to bump that bird!
This leads to the first among several difficulties resulting from that alleged wisdom. I mean false pointing, a habit I detest, but not one I've been much plagued by since the days with Hector, who occasionally practiced it. I let my dogs know it's okay to make a mistake, just as long as they're hunting, really hunting. Lord knows I make mistakes myself. Don't remind me of that straightaway up the brook, of the scores of others like it, when the dogs were solid, fine, nothing to blame them for.
Once you get a dog truly worried about running over a bird, he's going to lock up on the first thing that stinks: an old grouse wallow, a pecked apple gone brown at the edges, not to mention, as I've seen, early season turtles, chipmunks, hares, and even, once, a dead pig in an abandoned well. And when your dog does have it right, when there is a grouse in the cover, he's going to freeze at the first whiff. Then you and your buddies are going to try to sneak up, and the grouse is going to thunder away far in front of you, out of range, and you're going to believe you're better off hunting this particular game with no dog at all.
Joe and Terry are known for truthful men. Ask them if you don't believe me. About eighty percent of the grouse we flush are ones that the dog has located. By this I mean that of course there are some which she or he has begun to work but hasn't locked up on. Maybe the wind has made the game hawky, or, as I swear is the case, a low population has made them so. But these trailing points or soft points are the exceptions. In the first season for one of my dogs, we don't shoot over these "locations" at all, much less shooting at birds that one of us bumps himself.
I'm a selfish hunter, and—however badly it reflects on my character— never a casual one. I'm in it for something other than what's called recreation, something a little like religion, I think, a rather stern, radical-Protestant variety, because hunting for me has something, God knows why, to do with a dim notion of saving my soul.
My circle of regular hunting companions, therefore, have been the precious few, and I do mean precious, who feel the same way, including Terry, for all his easy-going manner. I mention this because I've been acquainted with a much wider circle of "hunters" who've dismissed my claims about proportion of kills to points as simple bragging. But I know from the way they talk how they hunt and handle their dogs, and I've never meant to invite them along to see the truth of my claims. We come from antithetical camps, nice as many of these folks indisputably are.
Furthermore, I've never been in competition when I hunt, except with the game, and with some fabricated ideal of myself. As Jack used to say, "Let 'those people' do as they please. They won't cause the birds any harm anyhow." Why should I care how they find their fun?
Good thing we get those eighty percent points. Some of my small company are consistently expert shots, but none on the regular team— Terry, Joe, and I—shoot like Landy Bartlett over in Sunderland, none like Jack before macular degeneration got him and he had to give up wing shooting, none like my pal Peter Woerner. No, we've been among the truly successful grouse hunters in the region less for spectacular gunning than for our shared convictions about
a dog's moves, and about each other's. If we didn't mean to let our dogs go, to honor their paces, we'd use flushers, which of course must work close.
A certain number of grouse, again, are going to flush wild, dog or no dog. Everyone who hunts them knows what it is to hear the faint explosion of wings a hundred yards away, before you've said a word, before you've taken a step into cover. We know how common is the opposite. It's late, you're tired, the sidehill is steep; you stand around the truck, joking with one another, razzing, whooping, putting off that damned slope with its razor hawthorns and clotted hardhack for another few minutes. At last you plough in, up and back, never a bird—not until you've slipped your guns into their cases, whereupon the bird that had sat downwind, right next to the road, while you tramped away uphill and back, will scare you to death, clapping into the woods.
But the woods are dark now. Time to get home to food and family. And so you head back, that good tiredness in your bones, a mess of game, if you've had the luck, stiffening in the bed of the pickup, the barn lights in the fields off the highway blinking, exotic as stars. You are quiet. You've already gone through the banal repartee.
Terry: "Imagine that son of a bitch! He sat there the whole time!"
Joe: "Waited till we made all our noise and shot holes in the sky at that woodcock."
I: "Who'd believe it?"
We three would believe it. It's happened to us so often, and to you too, no? Or you've been slogging around through a prime part of the cover; the dog has some vague notion, but there isn't anything here. You've been back and forth through it three times. Man and dog alike stop and take a breather by that deadfall. That's precisely when the tree grouse thunders out.
What to make of all this?
I'm not doctrinaire about what to make of it, because I can be as wrong as the next person, but I'll tell you what Joe and Terry and I have concluded over the years. Always be alert, you think, but no. That'll never happen, and we might as well face it. What we've made of it is very simple, that if a number of grouse will flush wild, period, a certain number won't.
In any event, you are not going to creep up on a grouse, no matter how careful you are. You just can't do such a thing if you hunt the textbook cover of mixed hard- and softwood, feed, dense understory. Daniel Boone couldn't surprise an ox in there.Your dog's not going to surprise a grouse, either, not with that bell around his neck anyway. (I guess it's an implicit opinion here that if you have a dog that doesn't need some device to let you hear him, a bell in the days I recall, perhaps a beeper now, you have a dog you don't need.)
So let him go. Let yourself go. Move! Call back and forth to one another, because it's not just a matter of safety; you want to be in position when the grouse takes off. If there are three of you, and one of you on the flank has lagged behind, that's the corner the bird will spill out of, right?
A lot of grouse behavior is mysterious. Think of Crazy Flight in autumn. This is why this game bird is so much fun and such a challenge to hunt; it's why, as well, speculation on that bird is usually just speculation. Though here I'm talking chiefly about things I've inferred from observation, from trial and a whole lot of error, I like to speculate as much as you do.
For example, a grouse at feed in the daytime has to be on guard not only against bloodthirsty types like us and other earthbound predators but also against killers in the air. Three times in my life I've had raptors finish off grouse I'd winged, once in mid-flight.
That stooping hawk is deadly, not least because it can by God sneak up; so our grouse is a little reluctant to fly. He's heavy, his wings are short, and it's a lot easier on him to go on foot and stay undercover. He'd rather hide from a red tail or broad wing than try to outrace him above ground.
And again, he can hear whatever approaches on the ground. If it's the odd daytime bobcat or fox, he can wait until the last minute and hop up into a tree like Lafontaine's crow. If it's some clumsy hunter, he can size up the guy's movements and then as we all know fly off at just the right height and angle to leave the gunner with his teeth in his mouth or cursing over the spent shells at his feet.
The grouse isn't nervous, really. He's not afraid. Or if he is, it's not the fear that we would feel in his place. Like every creature low on the food chain, he's a professional. The thing that makes him jumpy is that damned quiet. That's a reason, it seems to me, for the flightiness of any game on a windy day—it's too hard to tell by sound where the danger lies.
Our hunter has just hissed whoa, if that's possible, his dog has come to a halt, everybody's trying to figure out how to tiptoe forward and surprise the partridge—which of course doesn't know any of this. All he knows is that it's gotten scary quiet. Where have those stalkers gone? Time to get the hell out of here, which he does. Now the sportsmen start trying to blame one another, or shaking their heads in resignation to the fact that there just isn't any good way to hunt ruffed grouse, except maybe to set snares on the drumming logs.
And so I repeat my heresy: Let the dog go. I go, he goes, she goes, we all go. If the bird is determined to scram without stopping to think the matter over, so be it. At least we'll know he was there. Maybe we can get a line on him for a second flush. Maybe, as so often, after a wild flight he'll be as tight now as he was spooky on the first flush. If the dog bumps him by mistake, or because of bad conditions, that's all right too. Again, we know he was there, as we mightn't have otherwise, and we'll try to follow him up yet a third time. And so on.
But we won't, on this flush or the next or next or next, jangle that bird's nerves by vainly attempting a silent approach. We aren't hawks. We and the dog will move at a fast pace, and—who knows?—one of these days our bird dog may pull Gus's old trick, and none of us will have to shoot and miss.
Eight locations to ten flushes. Not perfect. Here I'll join for a moment in the conventional wisdom's chorus and say that, no, there is no perfect grouse dog. A certain proportion of the birds are going to fool you and fool your dog, at which point Terry, or someone like him, if you're lucky enough to have one for a partner, will risk being pummeled by the Joes and Syds among you for speaking the truth: "Well, that's what makes it interesting." But if you thought you could have a dog who was that consistent on grouse, I bet you'd try to get that dog somehow.
A fair amount of what I say is really not completely a matter of dog work, after all. It's up to you. Are you a person who would turn down a free trip to the Bahamas in order to shoot a limit of partridge, or try? Then you have a good chance, following my permissive methods, of having such a pointing dog, because you'll kill some game. And that above all is the important thing for your companion.
You'll kill game because you and he will be in the cover at every possible opportunity, because you'll make time in order to do so, let other things slide. You can't shoot them from your office. I have always had it easy, I admit, as a college professor; as I rose through the ranks, I managed to get a lighter and lighter autumn teaching load. If I made up for that in the spring, that was okay; the trout fishing didn't really pick up until school was out anyhow.
Are you willing to get yourself into better shape than I was on that pivotal day with Jack? You should, because as he said, and as I affirm, it's a matter of determining and honoring the dog's pace, not the other way round. As the season goes on, this will come easier. You'll shed that summer roll and you'll get your eye in as well as it can be gotten in.
And the grouse will sit better—again despite the conventional wisdom— as the brush gets spare. As I say, given a choice, most ruffs want to stay out of the air. If there are plenty of early leaves and brush, however, they're apt to fly off through that good protection, more apt than when, as on that austere day when Gus picked up the live cinnamon, there's nothing between them and the dreadful gray sky but this tuft of browned weed, those clumps of steeple-bush, this camouflage barrier of gorgeous feathers, almost invisible, so closely has God matched them to the woodsy colors of my off-season dreams.
Blessed
> A dog you love should live as long as you do.
How often now have I said this to myself since I began hunting over dogs? That was fifty-nine years ago, when I toted my single-shot .410 on some of my father's shorter forays into the field. At nine, I didn't shoot much game, but when at long last his gun dog died, I recall—more vividly than I do most things from that time—how I protested the plain injustice of it all. Like a father, a dog was surely meant to endure forever.
I have grieved for a lot of dogs since, in ways quintessentially similar to that first time. For Hector, who had that uncanny knack of pointing up at a limb-perched grouse, who still inhabits the brush of memory. For the first Wes, whose toothy smile and plain honesty so endeared him to me. For Gus, who shines with sleet in my mind's eye—a certain fabulous late October hunt, no matter the foul weather, near my Maine cabin.
Bessie. Sam. Annie. Belle. Wes II. And those are only the pointing dogs. There are the retrievers too, somewhat fewer but no less dear.
I recall reading an article in some dreary pop-psych mag, as a person may do in dentists' or optometrists' waiting rooms. Its thesis was that two weeks at most comprised a person's span of heartache after a dog dies, which was at least more than the single week the cat-lovers got. The author of that piece, I suspect, never owned a dog, or at least not a working one, just as so many child-rearing experts—Locke, stock, and Piaget—have never been parents. Maybe I'm the exception who proves the rule, though
I doubt it, but I for one think sorrowfully of all my gun dogs, and I've done so a lot over the decades.
And joyfully too. It's not only that I can summon grand old days with each, and some comical ones, and frustrating too, but I also recognize that if one of those adored dogs had in fact lived as long as I have, there'd be only the one to adore. Death is the mother of beauty, as poet Wallace Stevens famously put it, and true enough, the athleticism, the grace, the quirky personality of every one of my dogs burned themselves into my consciousness, and at length into my remembrance, not least because in my soul I understood how briefly I'd get to treasure them.
