Hunting season is finally upon us. I can tell because the leaves on the ash tree in the yard are turning red, despite a warmish, frost-free fall so far. That’s in my neighborhood, at least.
Montana’s general hunting season opens Saturday, as does pheasant and quail season here, though the first week is for the youth hunters, so I’m obviously not eligible for another week. I’m hoping the ash will be full crimson by then.
That blaze of glory each fall is my sign it’s time to let my dog loose on birds. My current hunting partner, Jade, a 6-year-old English setter, may not notice the turning leaves, but she understands the meaning of the changing seasons.
I’ve learned to appreciate that dogs understand a lot more about what we are doing than they let on. When I first started hunting with bird dogs, I attributed their uncanny ability to find and point birds in a way that perfectly complements human hunters wielding shotguns down to a lovely bit of serendipity; the convergence of instinct shaped by training with the needs of a bird hunter.
Are bird dogs aware and cognizant of what we are doing? I wasn’t sure at first, and I never really thought of it that way, initially. Then Jack, my first English setter, taught me how little I understood about bird dogs and hunting.
Jack wasn’t my first hunting dog. I’d previously had a chocolate Lab, Mack, who had potential as a hunter, but was such a ball of deranged energy that we never quite formed a partnership the way I did with my later English setters. Jack had his share of boundless energy as well, but his share was manageable.
The first sign of Jack’s self-awareness came about in a field across the street from the house in Idaho my family lived in for a couple of years. That field was covered in sagebrush, and young Jack entertained his puppy self, chasing meadowlarks from bush to bush in a silly, but obviously fun game for a playful young dog. The birds grabbed his interest, and this unserious, visual game would eventually pay off.
Then we discovered Hungarian partridge in that field.
When Jack got a nose full of Hun he became a different dog. That’s what real birds do to a bird dog. He was no longer playing his puppy game with the tweeties. Play was replaced by intense, hunting focus.
I might have passed that off as instinct kicking in, but he had more to teach me.
By the time Jack was 3 years old, he was a fine bird dog. But there was one thing he wouldn’t do: retrieve. He always found downed birds; I can’t remember ever losing one, but he’d point dead. He locked up, nose inches from the deceased bird, until I arrived to pick it up. I decided I could live with that bargain.
This all changed on another quail hunt with my buddy, The Long Walker, who had a pair of Brittanys that were fine, fast retrievers. For two days, they were first to the birds. Jack was paying attention.
Then Long Walker headed home a day early and Jack and I had a chance to hunt, just the two of us. We were hunting Mearns quail and the first bird we found flushed across a ravine. I knocked it down.
Before I could say “Fetch,” Jack raced across the ravine, picked up the bird, trotted back with tail held high and stood in front of me, quail in mouth, waiting to drop it into my outstretched hand. It was a perfect retrieve, executed with a tail-wagging aplomb that suggested he thought he could fool me into thinking he’d been doing it like that all along. As far as retrieving goes, Jack just needed Long Walker’s Brittanys to show him the ropes.
It’s the season. Happy hunting.