To the Point

Owners of hunting dogs know of the huge responsibility and frightening expense involved if they keep track of the bills. As the exchequer in our household, I do keep track, which allows me to cook the books, keeping my wife clueless as to how much I really spend on the two setters and one yellow Lab that live with us. Last week I gasped when the mail brought a $1,200 training invoice for Ragan, my young setter. Naturally, I applied standard operating procedure: Write the check; shred the bill. The alternative, though, is unthinkable. To my mind, without a Lab, Llewellin, spaniel or shorthair casting about in front of me, bird hunting is reduced to an armed walk in the field. The same is true of waterfowl hunting. Without a retriever in the duck blind or goose pit to watch for incoming birds, I tend to lose interest and nod off. To be sure, dogs make the difference in the quality of our sport.
    That’s why I was surprised to learn that half of all upland gunners responding to a survey in Michigan did not own bird dogs. I recall, however, my late friend Carl Parker, who kept a meticulous record of every ruffed grouse he killed in his native New York. When I last hunted with Carl some 20 years ago, his tally stood at 647 birds over 29 years, an envious average of 23 grouse per year. Parker never owned a hunting dog, mostly because he lived alone in an apartment and traveled a lot for the Dept. of Environmental Conservation, where he served as chief of the division of fisheries.
    So let’s be honest: To hunt birds you do not need a dog. I know from personal experience, having shot my share of pheasants without them—and that includes those delinquent charges that chased birds onto posted land and left me, red-faced from cursing, far behind. Still, when I think back over more than 50 years of pursuing feathered game, the best memories always involve dogs, especially my own. Let me share a couple of those stories.

The Regal Lady Macbeth
They say we deserve to own at least one good bird dog in this life; I’ve been lucky to own three. One was Lady Macbeth, born in 1981 to Brinka, my first of many English setters. I named the puppy Ron’s Star Point for a Kansas friend who planned to buy her. But Ron was not able to take the dog, and so I kept her. His loss was my gain. During the next eight years Macbeth taught me how to hunt woodcock, her specialty, although she was also good on grouse in our native Michigan. She had all the right stuff I hope for in a pointing dog: She was a terrific bird finder with close to medium range; her points were as solid as a cement-stave silo; and she was a loyal partner bound by the elastic, invisible cord that defines all great ones. Hunting with me and for me, Macbeth always retrieved any birds I could not find or fetch, including a fat ring-necked pheasant I happened to plop in the middle of a farm pond one morning.
    Over the years, Macbeth taught me two important lessons, the first of which was that she knew more about birds than I did. She often looked over the land as though studying it, especially in wide-open places like the Dakotas, and then would hunt it by objective, hitting this plum thicket and then cruising that hedgerow of osage orange. Experience told her where the birds would be, and she wasted little energy finding them. The second lesson was to put full faith in my dog. I recall a windy day in Kansas when Macbeth bumped a covey of bobwhites that flushed wild, caught the wind and sailed out of sight. Giving chase, she disappeared over a hill a long way off. We waited five minutes, then 10 minutes, and when she didn’t return, I announced to my friends, “Excuse me; I have to punish a dog.” I found her, nearly a half-mile away, on a hard point, as tense as a drawn bow. Inches from her nose hunkered a male bobwhite, which I flushed and shot. Macbeth’s perfect retrieve suggested that she had forgiven me for not trusting her. How I miss her today!
    One fall on a Sunday afternoon I flew home from North Dakota, where I had been hunting sharp-tailed grouse. Feeling sorry for Macbeth, who had not come along, I pulled my boots and hunting clothes from the luggage bag and we drove to a local spot that I thought might still hold some woodcock. She found birds, all right . . . and bumped every one while ignoring my whistle blasts and shouted commands. “Damn you!” I yelled and tossed her into the truck after catching her and locking her down with the leash I always carry. While driving home, though, my thoughts wandered to the fantastic North Dakota hunt, and I mellowed. Guiltily, I reached over to pat the setter, curled up on the floor mat next to me. Macbeth craned her pretty white neck, sniffed my pant leg and shrank back to her corner, as far away from me as possible.
    That’s when I realized I had betrayed her. The sweep of North Dakota prairie, there on my trousers along with the odor of birds she had not experienced, of other dogs she did not know . . . . How oblivious can a man be? Fortunately she forgave me, and the next hunt and many more after that were the stuff of dreams. I lost Macbeth in the summer of 1989, on the eve of a cross-country trip on which we were planning to hunt all of the species of native grouse. An autopsy was inconclusive; to this day neither her vet nor I know why she died.

‘The Best Dog You’ll Ever Own’
The only other dog I owned at the time of Macbeth’s premature death was Holly, a sweet yellow Lab (aren’t they all?) past her prime at age nine. A grouse hunting venture called for visits to Kansas for prairie chickens, the Dakotas and Nebraska for sharptails, Montana for blue grouse, Wyoming for sage hens, Colorado for white-tailed ptarmigan, Minnesota for spruce grouse and the other Great Lakes states and New England for ruffed grouse. Clearly I needed a pointing breed—and a well-started or finished dog at that. Unable to find a good setter for less than two grand, I bought Reggie, a five-year-old Brittany, for $1,500. Reggie had a lot of experience with birds, having produced more than 5,000 flushes of liberated pheasants and chukar as the “club dog” on a preserve that offered guided hunts. But would he be able to adapt to those cagey wild grouse?
    During the early weeks of our trip, I seriously began to doubt it. Frustrated at not finding birds every five minutes, Reggie grew bored and took to chasing antelope and jackrabbits. I still can see the little cloud of dust he made out where the earth curves on the horizon. Finally, at 12,500 feet in the Colorado Rockies, he pointed a ptarmigan in a mountain cirque. When I shot that bird, Reggie delivered it to hand without ruffling a feather. In Wisconsin he quickly learned to find woodcock and screw them into freeze mode with his patented Brittany stare. Back in Michigan he crept after grouse like a rust-and-red-colored cat, flattened to the ground, another Brittany trait. Later that fall Reggie literally raced ahead of a sprinting ringneck and turned the bird back toward me before nailing shut the door. Such feats of intelligence are rare in a bird dog of any breed.
    While hunting New England that December I bought a young setter from a breeder in Fryeburg, Maine, and sold Reggie (for $1,500) when I got home. Why? Well at the time I was living in a subdivision with rules, one of which was that outside kennels were limited to two occupants—and I still had Holly and now Dunstan, the new setter. OK, the honest answer: Remember when you took the blonde to the high school prom because the brunette was already taken, and later, when the brunette became available, you made your move? I have been enamored of setters and brunettes my whole life, and there is nothing I can (or want) to do about it.
    Still, truth is a hard teacher. A trainer who knew Reggie and had worked with him called when he learned what I had done. “I don’t believe it!” he said over the phone. “Some day when you’re an old man in a rocking chair, you’re going to realize you sold one of the best dogs you’ll ever own.”
    No, I am not yet in a rocker, but I already have realized he was right.
    And the third great dog? That would be Sherlock, another setter—and that is a story for another time.

Tom Huggler’s Grouse of North America and A Fall of Woodcock won national acclaim and are now collectible. His Quail Hunting in America (Stackpole) and L.L. Bean Upland Bird Hunter’s Digest (Globe Pequot) are still in print.