The Running Country

A cooling rain had fallen overnight, and at daybreak a gauzy haze hung above the North Dakota prairies. The diffuse light softened the features of the landscape, further muting its subtle palette. It was as if the prairie colors had been rendered in pastel—the gold of the stubblefields, the greens, tans and warm coppery reds of the grasslands.
    Damp and chilly: a setter morning. Even with the summer clip that leaves just the plume of his flag in feather—and even when he’s in top shape, his muscles hard, his wind deep—Ernie runs hot. So I was grateful for the conditions. He’d be at his best in them.
    He’d need to be, because the country that sprawled ahead of us had no practical limit. And the chickens—sharptails, technically, but no one in North Dakota calls them that—could be anywhere: feeding on hoppers in the scrubby alfalfa or on rose hips in the shaggy native grass; hunkered in the dry, ankle-twisting sloughs known as buffalo wallows or bunched in the bristling popple thickets that go by the curious local name “bluffs.”
    This unpredictability—the birds scattered thinly across an enormous island-studded sea—strips sharptail hunting of artifice and invests it with an essential purity. The perfect embodiment of José Ortega y Gasset’s assertion that scarcity is the natural condition of game, it is a sport for men who can walk.
    First and foremost, though, it’s a sport for dogs that can run.
    You don’t have to hunt sharptails this way, of course. The most ruthlessly efficient method is to wait until midday and hunt them under a hammering sun, when they seek out whatever relief from the heat they can find—even the shadow cast by a hay bale. You also can pattern them like ducks, locating the cropfields they fly into to feed—sunflowers are a particular favorite—and focusing your efforts there. Flushing dogs are a fine choice in these situations, even (and especially) cockers, which seem unlikely chicken dogs until you’ve seen their grenade-like effect on a piece of cover that’s stuffed with birds.
    I’ve hunted this way and had a blast. But hunting is about aesthetic choices as well as functional ones, and my idea of chicken hunting is a long walk in big country behind a wide-ranging pointing dog, a dog that hits a hard-driving lick and looks like a million bucks doing it. A dog should be easy on the eyes the 98 percent of the time it’s not pointing birds, and the prettiest breeds in action—the California Girls, if you will—are the pointer and the English setter. The best of them move so beautifully, with such balance and grace, such speed and animation, that watching them is intoxicating. Asked to name my poison, the liquor of a stylish pointer or setter rambling the prairies floats to the top.
    It’s a common affliction: Sportsmen have been tipping from this jug since the late 19th Century, when field trialers, Southern quail hunters and the professional trainers who worked for them first discovered the northern prairies and began establishing summer camps there—an odyssey that in those days meant taking the train to the nearest railhead and then assembling a caravan of horse-drawn wagons. (Now it involves convoys of “duallies” pulling gooseneck trailers the size of city buses.) The epicenter always has been the point where the borders of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota come together; for a couple of months every year, mid-July to mid-September, the names of dusty hamlets like Broomhill and Torquay are wine on the lips of the bird-dog faithful.
    Conditions are primitive, comforts are few and even today communication with the rest of the world remains fitful. But for educating bird dogs there’s no place like it. The standard line of any trainer who’s been there is that you can accomplish more in two months on the prairies than you can in two years anywhere else.
    There are the tangible lessons: learning to use the wind, stay to the front and not to fool with larks, rabbits and other “trash”; developing style, staunchness and bird sense; the list goes on. When a puppy noses up its first chicken and learns it can’t catch it, you can see the light come on. And from that moment forward it grows brighter every day.
    Ultimately, though, the intangibles are even more important. Boldness and confidence, independence alloyed with a rapport that is deeply felt but lightly worn: This is the prairies’ truer reward. It’s the ideal environment for cultivating what the writer A.F. Hochwalt called “that heroic strength of purpose and sweep of power” that are the hallmarks of greatness in pointing dogs.
    These are the qualities that enable a dog to shed its inhibitions and run fearlessly to the limits of the country, testing the boundaries of its blood and breeding, red-lining it all the way until the scent of game, in what can only be described as an act of magic, harnesses that seething kinetic energy and repurposes it as living statuary. To do it well is searingly difficult; to do it unforgettably well is to attain a kind of immortality. Little wonder, then, that the names of the dogs that made their marks on the prairies have an incandescent aura: pointers like Susan Peters, Safari and Texas Fight; setters like Candy Kid and Flaming Star.
    With a loving nod to the piney woods and tawny sedgefields of the Old South, a strong case can be made that our conception of class in pointing dogs owes more to the prairies than any other place. The formative crucible is always at the extremes—the place where the demands are most intense—and as Vereen Bell wrote in “Prairie Dogs,” a 1941 Saturday Evening Post story on the pointers and setters that go north for the summer and the men who train them (what brave days those were, when magazines like the Post published stories on bird dogs!): “Of no sporting animal is so much required.”

Ernie made a sweeping right-to-left cast, topped a gentle rise and faded from sight. The next time I saw him he was curling back to the front, a good 200 yards out. He was digging hard, the wet grass keeping him cool, his flag whipping from side to side like a deranged cane-cutter. There’s no place to hide in this open country; any flaws in gait or animation are not only exposed, they’re also magnified. But Ernie passed the test. He looked damn good—great, in fact—and was running the prairies like he owned them. Other than singing to him now and then to let him know where I was, I sat back and enjoyed the show.
    When you have that kind of confidence in your dog—when you can turn him loose and let him roll—hunting the prairies becomes a kind of terrestrial falconry. The connection between dog and handler is feather-light and infinitely elastic, a tensile filament spun of shared intention and common purpose. You trust your dog’s instincts, experience and training; he trusts that when you call on him it’s for a reason that makes sense. And so he responds.
    As a practical consideration, the physical separation between the two of you is of little concern (especially in this era of GPS collars), and yet it makes all the difference. The thrill is in the distance, in the uncertainty it introduces into the equation—prestidigitation performed at telescopic range. When a dog “lays out,” rimming the horizon, the thread stretched impossibly thin, the hair stands up on the back of your neck. The exhilaration overwhelms you. A dog running high, wide and handsome on the prairies creates its own weather—a cyclonic force that all but lifts you off the ground.
    It’s not about control, really. In fact, it’s the very antithesis of the retriever paradigm, with its grail of handling a dog to a dime-sized spot at a quarter-mile. It’s more about letting go but not quite; about providing a minimal, fluidly defined framework within which your dog is free to operate, adapting to changing conditions and improvising if necessary, putting all its talent, all its native ability, on full display. This is what Bob Wehle, the greatest pointing dog man of all, meant when he said, “The best training leaves no fingerprints.”
    And there is this analogy as well, which seems numbingly obvious but only recently occurred to me: Like a falcon, a bird dog hunts the air. What the dog seeks is not the bird itself, but the molecules of scent that are its airborne tracks, its ephemeral, wind-scattered spoor. The earth is merely the dog’s medium of travel, the platform by which it brings its nose to bear, seining the air for scent.
    Of course this is the case in any environment—but on the prairies, where the dance plays out in plain sight, the choreography is writ large. I remember a morning on a broad grassy plain when Emmylou, Ernie’s grandmother, insisted on making huge looping casts to my right and leaving the ground to my left, which looked equally good, untouched. I suggested that she might want to check some of that country, but she ignored me—rightly, because those looping casts turned out to be the first twists of a noose she was tightening around a wise old cock chicken, a single bird whose scent I’m convinced she caught a fragment of as the prairie wind eddied it along, hundreds of yards away.
    And in that relentless bounty hunter way she had (a quality I’ve seen more of in female English setters than in any other dogs), she wasn’t going to quit until the eddy became a gale and she could nail the bird dead to rights. Which, after getting a fix on the scent and drawing up on it as if it were a taut rope, she did. The bird didn’t wait around to exchange pleasantries, but after a moment of panic I managed to scratch it down with the second barrel.
    Then there was the time Willie, Emmy’s first-born, put a ringing exclamation point on an enormous forward cast, his thickly feathered tail reaching skyward and his muzzle tilted back almost haughtily. He was a piebald speck on the horizon; after squinting to get him in sight, my hunting partner looked at me and said, “Good luck.” It took me a while to cross that great divide, but Willie maintained his style and intensity spectacularly. The chickens were right where he said they’d be, too, and although most of them left early, a “sleeper” tarried a bit too long.
    You tend to remember things like that.

The northern prairies may be the epicenter of the running country, the cradle of its traditions, but there’s more to its geography than that. The savannahs of Texas; the high plains of Montana (where Ben Williams once graciously kept his incomparable Brittanys in the truck long enough for Ernie, then just a pup, to point a covey of Huns on his own); the National Grasslands of South Dakota; even the sandy, oak-stippled barrens of northwestern Wisconsin, where remnant flocks of sharptails hang on among the blueberries and sweet fern and my first setter, Zack, pointed them what seems like a lifetime ago: These, too, are places where bird dogs can roam and be rewarded.
    They are nature’s theaters, stages canopied only by sky where events occur in bold relief and drama inheres in every act. Because of this—and because, I suppose, my orientation as a human male is predominantly visual—when I think of my dogs, these are the places I see them. There was the time I followed Traveler, my gritty Elhew pointer, to what felt like the edge of forever in a bird-thin season, buoyed by the knowledge, even as our shadows grew long and the sun bathed the prairies in that outrageous apricot light, that the chickens had to be somewhere and that every step brought us closer to finding them. And find them Traveler did, slewing into a point on a hillside where the wind ruffled the grass as by the hand of God. I did my part, too, and we were lucky to get back to the truck, weary but happy, before it turned full dark.
    And there was the time I lost Emmylou in the White River breaks of South Dakota. I knew she’d hunt into the wind, and when I scrambled up a little rise there she was, standing on the prairies like a monument, her flag stretched high and tight, her gorgeous face a mask of enraptured intensity. How long she’d been on point I can’t say, but I fancy that if I’d never found her, someone, years later (as in the apocryphal tale), might have stumbled across two piles of bones a few yards apart—one the skeleton of a dog, the other that of a sharp-tailed grouse. As it was, the sharptail came up clucking—kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk, kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk—and when I swung the Fox, I saw the bird and the sky. Then I shot, and there was only the sky.
    Walking the prairies, there are moments when all the swirling elements—the passion and courage of the dogs, the indomitable wildness of the birds, the sweep and scale of the country—suddenly gel. It all snaps into focus then, and I can see what it is I’m truly hunting for: something I can’t precisely name that lies forever beyond my grasp; something as elusive and as hallowed as the birds themselves; something I’d have no hope of understanding without the illumination provided by my dogs and that would have no meaning without their partnership.
    I can’t put a name to it, but the word that seems to come closest is grace.

Far to the front, Ernie flashed through the rain-silvered grass like a stream of pale fire. Awed by the engine of desire that drives him and humbled by the example of his intensity, I followed as best I could, a bit player watching from the wings.

Tom Davis is an Editor at Large for Shooting Sportsman.