A Bird in Hand

One of the stock scenes in TV sitcoms is the close-up of the character who reacts to something off-screen: the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island when native headhunters grab his Little Buddy and melt into the jungle; Jill on Home Improvement when Tim the Toolman holes up in the garage to work on his hot rod. You hear all kinds of crazily inappropriate noises—yowling cats, snarling chain saws, flushing toilets—but the only things you see are gestures and facial expressions. Your imagination fills in the rest.
    That’s kind of the way I felt when the rooster—which had spun down into the cut corn only to hit the ground running—scampered into the same ditch he’d fl ushed from and disappeared. A second later Butch, my English setter, followed suit. This ditch was wide, deep, choked with towering horseweeds, and littered with woody debris, meaning,that there was no point in me wading into it as well. One of my maxims is that if you’re not in a position to make a productive contribution, you should just stay out of the way; and I was trying to live up to that.
    So I planted my boots in the black Iowa loam and, with the Superposed crooked in my left arm and my back to the raw November wind, played it by ear. I heard horseweeds snapping and water splashing; I heard skim ice clattering like broken glass and the splock of paws sucking mud. There was Butch’s urgent panting, too, and the white noise of undifferentiated vegetative demolition. I’m sure my face registered a range of emotions—from bafflement to wonder to that had to hurt—but because I was hunting alone, you’ll have to take my word for it. Gary Sawin, my host, had a bird’s-eye view from his parking spot on the high road next to the bull pasture, but he wasn’t close enough to make out any details.
    Knowing how tough a wing-tipped rooster is to corral, especially once he’s gotten to cover (there’s a reason the Brits call such birds “runners”), I put the odds of Butch’s pursuit at even. Like most doubting Thomases, I tend toward pessimism, but when the frantic crashing was replaced by a steady rustling—a rustling that seemed to be heading my way—I grew cautiously optimistic. And when Butch emerged bearing the soggy fugitive, now plucked of tailfeathers, I was downright elated.
    “Good dog, Butch!” I cried, bending to take the rooster from his mouth before he could drop him and give him a chance to get his legs under him again. My happiness was Butch’s: His brown eyes danced, and his jaws parted in a loopy grin.
    Just like that, the whole complexion of the event had changed. Instead of beating myself up for a sloppy shot and a lost bird, I could feel good about putting a rooster in the game bag; instead of making excuses, I could cite facts; instead of speculation, there was proof.
    What a difference a dog makes.
    In waterfowling it’s all about the end result: the harvest. Collecting the birds and bringing them to hand. The
dog plays no role in “production” (with an asterisk in the case of the Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever). Its job is to recover what falls, period. As Nash Buckingham famously declared, “The best long-range duck load is a well-trained retriever.”
    In upland bird hunting, however, the dynamic is different. Here the emphasis tilts toward the front end of the equation: the production side. The dog’s primary role is to make game—to find birds scattered across the landscape in a fashion that allows them to be “put before the gun,” as they said in those brave days when sportsmen rode to the shooting grounds in palatial Pullman cars and wore neckties, waistcoats and fedoras once they got there. The writer John Madson crystallized this attitude in his oft-quoted observation that men don’t really hunt for quail—they hunt for the dogs that are hunting for the quail.
    The apotheosis of this ideology is found in the pointer/setter camp, whose members exalt semi-intangible qualities like “style” and “class” and tend to wax poetic about the most elusive and abstract aspects of their dogs’ performances. (It’s strikingly similar to the way double-gun wonks rhapsodize about arcana like hidden third fasteners, Southgate ejectors and the Beesley action while everyone around them goes, “Huh?”) In their view, skills like retrieving and hunting dead are mundane, the province of “meat dogs” or of breeds—Labs, cockers, Boykins and so on—that specialize in this dirty work.
    To those who don’t share this view—the hard-liners who measure success chiefly by the number of birds you pull from your vest—such values are at best incomprehensible. At worst, they’re the delusions of raving madmen.
    It’s a matter of priorities, of giving more weight to certain qualities than to others. As the greatest pointing-dog breeder of all, Bob Wehle, used to say, “It’s hard to get all the coons up the same tree.” Natural retrieving ability being way down his list, it wasn’t something he selected for in his breeding stock. His Elhew pointers are dazzling in any number of respects, but desire to retrieve is typically not among them. Like most pointers, many English setters and a sprinkling of Brittanys and German shorthairs (especially those that have been “bred up” for field-trial competition), they chafe at being made to do anything that impedes their quest for the next bird.
    They can be trained to retrieve, of course, and many are. But a lot of them resent it.
    At the other end of the pointing-dog spectrum, members of the Drahthaar crowd prefer their dogs to point the things they shoot . . . but they don’t get their britches in a twist over it. They insist, however, that their dogs not only retrieve everything up to the size of a small farm animal but also track wounded game, whether it wears feathers or fur, for as long and as far as it takes. As a Drahthaar fan once needled me, “Pointers and setters have to find a lot of birds. You only get about half of them back.”
    As a pointer/setter guy, I’m willing to admit there may be something to this. I love a dog that slashes the cover and throws mud when it runs, a dog that’s so fast and fiery that you can hardly tear your eyes away from it. And to my mind the point—the bridge that connects the dog’s world of scent with our world of sight—is the most thrilling, magically resonant act in all of sport.
    The danger is that you can become so swept up in the aesthetics that your feet leave the ground. When you’ve invested deeply in preparation and incurred considerable expense along the way, it’s not unreasonable to remind yourself from time to time what it is you’re really hunting for. This is a question every sportsman has to ask himself; and although there are many answers, none of them wrong, it’s all too easy to dismiss the most obvious: the satisfaction of knowing your aim is true—a satisfaction fully realized only when the bird is in hand.
    More and more, I find myself thinking of Rick Bass’s wonderful line: “If your intent is to gather birds, you’ve got to raise the gun and step up and fire, not write poems about how pretty they are.”
    So while I want a dog that stirs my soul and gives me the chance to step up and fire, I’m increasingly inclined to value one that can reliably complete the circle and even clean up my messes—a fixer, if you will. No one anchors every bird they shoot at any more than LeBron cans every jumper, Tiger splits every fairway, or Roger Federer paints the line with every forehand. Sometimes you need a little help.
    And some of us need all the help we can get.
    That’s undoubtedly one of the main reasons I’ve come to a deeper appreciation of a dog that can round up the strays: I’m just not the shot I was 10 years ago. Hell, five years ago. It’s hard to put a finger on why exactly (it’s not my eyesight), although I think a big part of it is a lack of focus, an erosion of intensity. This may be a symptom of advancing age or of a kind of general mellowing; it’s hard to say. Some men just go soft, although I hear there’s a pill for that.
    I haven’t put in the practice time either, frankly, and instead of sticking with one gun I’ve developed the ruinous habit of playing musical chairs with them. Especially in the grouse woods, where I’m likely to shoot the Fox for a couple of days, switch to the Grulla, put the doubles away and break out the Remington 11-87. I’m a mess, in other words—a Gene Hill story in the flesh—which only makes it that much more important that the dogs pick up my slack.
    Another factor is that, at least in the places I hunt, there simply aren’t the birds there used to be. Woodcock have been declining for years, grouse are in a protracted cyclical slump, the ethanol boondoggle is putting the squeeze on pheasants, sharptails are more bust than boom, Huns have all but disappeared east of the Missouri, and as for bobwhite quail, let’s not even go there. I realize that every generation of sportsmen utters more or less this same lament, but whether it’s fact or fancy, it magnifies the significance of those opportunities that do come your way—and increases the pressure you feel to make good on them. It always stings when you can’t recover a bird you’ve knocked down or hit hard, but it hurts even worse when the prospects for redemption are iffy.
    When I lost a quail in Iowa a couple years ago, I felt like I’d lost the cure to cancer. I’d hit it solidly, but it had fallen into a horrible marshy mess where even Butch, who was about as good as a setter gets at this stuff, couldn’t dig it out. I was so distraught that Terry Barker had to talk me down, like a police psychologist coaxing a jumper off a ledge.
    No one was to blame; it was just one of those things that happens—a convergence of action, reaction and environment that couldn’t be anticipated. Sometimes, though, you can foresee an unhappy ending and head it off. A day or two earlier on that same Iowa hunt, a rooster had flushed from the lip of a riverbank and curled right to left in the void above the channel. It was a makeable shot . . . but the bank was high and steep, the current was fast, and as I shouldered the Fox, it occurred to me that if the bird fell into the river, it might be swept downstream before we could get a dog into play to retrieve it. I decided I didn’t want to take that chance and held my fire.
    My mind doesn’t normally work that fast.
    Of course, we hunters are forever inventing new and creative ways to lose birds—and birds, bless their wild souls, will forever strive with every flicker of life to escape and gain their freedom. We wouldn’t want it otherwise. All of us have had the experience of extracting a “dead” bird from our game bag and finding it revived, and if you’re not on your toes, things can get interesting. Pheasants are notorious for flopping out of your grasp and making a run for it—yet another good reason to have a dog on call—and someone was telling me not long ago about the time they were driving back from hunting, glanced in the rearview mirror, and met the beady-eyed stare of a very peeved-looking cockbird. The driver pulled over, and “measures were taken,” as they say.
    And where did I read about the pheasant that somehow got left in an SUV at the conclusion of a trip and wreaked breathtaking havoc on the upholstery before expiring?
    Still, maybe the best story I’ve heard along these lines was the time my friend Donny Steffin, having returned from one of his infamous “little loops” in the Wisconsin North Woods, pulled a grouse from his pocket and, as if he were a magician releasing a dove, watched it fly right out of his hand.
    On second thought, I witnessed one almost as good. A guy was bending down in a corn-stubble field to pick up a Hun—a bird that looked like it had been clobbered. Just as his gloved fingers touched the bird’s feathers, vrroom!, it flushed and hammered away. He didn’t shoot, although I don’t recall if it was because he wasn’t loaded or because he was stunned into paralysis.
    I think every hunter who has any experience with Huns would agree that there’s no tougher cripple. I remember tracking a wounded Hun in the snow that left a blood trail worthy of a deer. It flushed after a 200-yard chase up a fencerow, although it was flying pretty weakly by then (and in short order flew no more).
    I’m speaking in the grossest generalizations here, but Huns, like pheasants and most types of quail (with blues leading the pack), typically run when crippled. Ruffed grouse run, too, although they rarely go far before ducking under some kind of cover. Prairie chickens and sharptails go either way, sometimes hunkering down, other times sneaking off (they don’t “run” as we normally understand the term). Woodcock will sort of trundle away without making much of an effort to conceal themselves; the hardest woodcock to recover, ironically, are not the cripples but the birds you stone that fall in places where there’s a lot of leaf litter, frost-browned ferns and dried grasses—stuff that their cryptic plumage blends perfectly with. Woodcock also drop through the ground cover in such a way that the cover springs back and “seals over,” rendering them utterly invisible to the naked eye. Without a dog to sniff them out, you’d need to have the luck of a lottery winner to find them. And even with a dog, an air-washed woodcock can be devilishly tough to locate, especially on a warm day when the dog’s breathing heavily and scenting conditions are marginal. It seems like every season my partners and I lose a woodcock or two via this scenario, and believe me, we’re not the kind to give up easily on a downed bird. They’re just too precious, too achingly hard to come by.
    The scales have a way of balancing, though. Something else that seems to happen a time or two every season is that I’ll kick around in front of a solidly pointing dog and not fl ush anything. I’ll tell the dog, “All right,” giving it the OK to relocate, but it won’t budge. So I’ll kick around some more—and in the same way that you realize you’ve been looking at morels without seeing them, there, in death’s repose, will lie a woodcock, a bird that had fl own in the general direction but given no indication that it was hit.
    These episodes have taught me that you don’t miss as many woodcock as you think you do—and that even if you’re unsure whether the bird flinched at the shot or whether you imagined it, you should follow it up to make sure. The same goes for grouse. I have an uncanny knack for hitting them in a vital (but not instantly lethal) spot without breaking a wing, or breaking a wing without hitting them in a vital (but not instantly lethal) spot. Either way, if I didn’t have a dog to do the heavy lifting, my game bag would be even lighter than it usually is.
    And, yes, the thought of getting a dog that’s stronger on the retrieving side has crossed my mind. I’ve been threatening for years to get a cocker: The breed’s hyperkinetic style satisfies my requirement that a dog be a joy to watch the 98 percent of the time it isn’t making game (the reason a lot of highly functional breeds just don’t do it for me). Plus cockers are relentless trackers of wounded birds, and by virtue of their size and tenacity, they’re adept at rooting out holed-up cripples that dogs of other breeds can’t reach.
    Having said this, though, I doubt I’ll ever be without a pointer or setter. Style matters to me, and now that my 50th birthday’s in the books, I can say without fear of contradiction that I’m too damned old to change. Still, I’m increasingly reminded of that mossy chestnut about golf: “Drive for show, putt for dough.”
    Substitute “point” for “drive” and “retrieve” for “putt,” and you’ll know exactly where I’m coming from as I shuffle toward the next flush, step up and fire.

Tom Davis is an Editor at Large for Shooting Sportsman.