Where Paradise Lay

 by Randy Lawrence

The snow held off until after Christmas, a whirling, heaving curtain of white that buried southeastern Ohio and threatened to cut short our late season grouse hunting.   But just as we were stowing gear for the next year, a Chinook came through pushing a forty degree rise in temperature.  Fourteen inches of snow turned to deadly flooding that washed out bridges and closed roads.  When we finally could get into the backcountry, we were cut off from several promising spots we’d found just before the winter storm.
 
We were working stiffs back then, Lyle and I, hunting only weekends.  Six days later, we were back, and literally followed a county road crew picking up “road closed” barriers.  Not only were we back in business, we were among the first bird hunters to return to this vast section of overgrown strip mine auger benches and quarries, remains of the leviathan coal shovels that had cut the land into an Appalachian version of Monument Valley.
 
For thirty years after WWII, Big Coal surface mined Ohio’s Appalachian foothills into a wasteland, blighted country that John Prine wrote about in his classic ballad, “Paradise,” about an idyll lost:

 
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
 

Those great shovels had names:  The Mountaineer.  The Big Muskie.  The Tiger, Silver Spade, and the colossal GEM of Egypt, land-devouring machines with heights measured in stories, that boasted their own internal elevators so their crews could ride to the operating deck to operate buckets big enough to hold two Greyhound buses.  At its height of operation, GEM of Egypt tore through the countryside to the tune of 200 tons of coal per bite of its huge bucket.

*And Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down the Green River where Paradise lay

 Well, I’m sorry my son but it’s too late you’re asking,

 Mister. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.  *

The cost of cheap coal was a region left to erode into spoil banks, despoiled farmland, streams choking in silt, communities like John Prine’s Paradise, Kentucky, abandoned over polluted water and acid mine drainage.  It was only through the activism of the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Farm Bureau and Grange, as well as the community of Ohio universities and allies in the steelworker and mining unions that pressure on the strip mine industry midwifed the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency and the beginning of strip mine reclamation in parts of Appalachia.
 

But while Big Coal fought a rear guard action against the cost of reclamation,  Ma Nature was already on the job.  Hollows and sidehill flats, abandoned farmsteads and orchards, came back to tulip poplar, thick tangles of blackberry and wild grape, rhododendron, greenbrier, and hawthorne. The result was the cradle of a grouse population boom that would flourish for some twenty five years.
 
One area we hunted in the mid-‘80’s centered around a sprawling coal-devouring power plant, its towering stacks belching waste from emptying more than one hundred train hoppers of coal every day.  A promising spot we had barely explored before the snow we called “Lovers’ Lane.”  The pull-off was a pad of cinders littered with empty beer cans, cigarette butts, and condom wrappers.  From there we organized the dogs and hiked single file a few hundred yards through a narrow opening between two sheer highwalls…and tumbled out into a hillbilly grouse hunter’s version of Paradise.
 
The highwalls were like a mammoth coliseum surrounding a huge, undulating expanse of gnarly, tangled cover.  The hunting was as easy as Appalachian grouse hunting gets, with overgrown benches broad enough for two hunters with dogs tough enough to scramble up and down on each side.  We’d barely touched it at the end of an afternoon a month earlier;  this day, we intended to have all of it.
 
And have it all, we did.  Lyle ran his flashy white and liver pointer Dixie;  I had Arran down, an eye-patched Aspenglow setter with a steady, ground-eating quartering gait that perfectly complemented the slightly wider pointer.  Dixie wore a beeper, Arran a pair of Swiss collar bells, and on this magic day they traded solid points and intense backs like jazz cats in berets and shades swapping licks in some uptown basement juke joint.

                              

     

Never again in our Ohio grouse hunting would we have birds in those numbers in one covert.  It was as if every ruffed grouse in the region had yarded up in this bowl-like bottom.  The cover was dense, the birds held tight, and the shooting was fast and sporty.   For two hours, Lyle and I didn’t speak to the dogs or to each other, almost as if we were afraid to break the spell.

 

The part I remember best had us pushing toward the steady tolling of Dixie’s beeper.  Lyle found Arran first, her lanky frame low and arrowed into a tangle of grape vines. The pointer had pinned a grouse fifteen yards beyond Arran’s nose, and my friend waited for me to catch up before he swung wide to the left and I to the right of Dixie’s twisted frieze of a point.  We walked ahead farther than we could imagine the bird might lit before turning back in toward the dogs.  When the grouse clattered out from just in front of Dixie’s quivering pose, Lyle had no shot.
 
I did, a brown blur crossing left to right and rising, and I pushed the little 16 gauge hard in front.  The first trigger felt good, but the bird powered on.  My second shot I knew was well behind, even as I marked the grouse’s flight.
 
Both dogs had broken at the flush, so keyed were they with all the action we’d had.   Lyle asked if I’d hit the bird; I shrugged, fishing for two more purple shells from my vest.  We corralled Dixie and Arran back to where they’d stood the bird and kept them for a long minute before walking them at heel, downwind of the grouse’s flight.

A quiet word from Lyle, and Dixie burned off.  I made Arran hold, tapped her on the head, and watched her push into a long stretch of sawbriar, her bloody tail tip cracking through the thorny mess
 
We were micro-managers then, hedging our bets.  “Deeeeeeeead,” we chanted.  “Deeead in here.  Hunt deeeeeeeeeeeead.” 
 
Noses up, the dogs’ casts went small and focused with deadly intent.  Dixie was slightly up ahead, checking out a black pile of sodden deadfall, when I saw Arran pause, then point more as a question than a statement.  I moved up alongside her just in time for her to relocate, then stop at the edge of a young thicket of black locusts, dark branches bristling with spines.
 
Again, the point was more pro forma stop than “boom-there-it-is”, and I was almost even with her again when the big dog reared on her hind legs like some circus bear…to stare and snuffle at the limp body of a ruffed grouse, dead where it had wedged itself into a tight, head-high fork of the little tree.
 

Arran dropped to all fours and begin to dance and jump at the tree.  I reached in with the leather glove I wear on my left hand and pulled the bird free.  It fluttered but once as I offered it to Arran to carry at heel, and we stepped off to find Lyle and Dixie, waiting where more paradise lay.

* "Paradise",  by John Prine, from the album German Afternoons on Old Boy Records. 1986

 

Lone Tree Christmas

 by Randy Lawrence

I loaded the dogs and left Ohio early on a Sunday the week before Christmas.  An unabashed sentimentalist, I kept punching up stations playing holiday music all the way ‘til the only two channels the truck radio could fetch were mariachi music and a Top-40 megawatt blowtorch from somewhere in Canada.  I was almost to the motel reservation on the edge of a small town on the northern plains before I ran out of tunes.

 My friends Gary, Nancy, and their Aspenglow setters, staying in an adjacent room, had left the door to mine unlocked and a key on the dresser.  They tumbled outside when they heard me backing up to the front of the motel, and we shared a cold, quiet reunion while I aired my dogs and tossed duffles and gun cases into my room.  We would meet for plat book reading over cereal and Nancy’s signature Scotch eggs in just a few hours.

 The three of us hunted in flannel shirts and hunting vests the first couple of days, basking in unseasonably warm weather in this little pocket of pheasants and a few Sharp-tailed Grouse well off the “glamor spots” we all know from the where-to magazine stories and chamber of commerce press.  The bird numbers are surely fewer, but so are the hunters, competition for land access, and pay-to-play leases.  My friends have been hunting this county for decades, building relationships with land owners into an annual homecoming.

 We had known about the weather change predicted for Day III before any of us had left home, blizzard conditions barreling down from the northwest.  On the eve of the storm, our long early evening ride back to the motel featured jittery pheasants lifting and settling up and down out of CRP grasslands and low sloughs, as nervous about getting buried in the coming snow as we were.

 That night the wind howled, the snow blew, and our little motel shuddered and quaked.  I lay in bed worried about whether or not we could even travel the roads in my friends’ well-outfitted Suburban come the morning.  But the worst of the snow had finished before dawn, the wind died, and bright sunshine turned the landscape to blinding waves of drifted white sparkling in single digit temperatures.

 Gary had mapped out our morning with the storm in mind, and we tramped shelterbelts and the edges of small sloughs.  Skittish pheasants lifted well out in front much of the morning, but enough of them cooperated with fast dogs that knew their business.  We broke for lunch, then cleaned birds inside the truck with the heater running.

 The afternoon had been set aside for one of my friends’ favorite spots, a broad expanse of prairie centered by a solitary ancient tree.  As we drove north, the sky darkened and heavy snow, forecast for the evening, cheated in early, blowing across the fields.  Pheasants huddled in gnarly copses of Osage orange, the cockbirds glowing like Christmas ornaments on bare branches.  By the time we reached the pull-off to my friends’ “Lone Tree” area, a full-fledged storm was raging.

 The spot below the truck was drifted.  Gary strapped on snowshoes, took a dog, and shuffled in that direction.  On the other side, the wind had swept clear a picked sunflower field and piled snow in a long stretch of switch grass.  All along the field margin, dozens of black bowling pin looking things milled and bobbed, pheasants spooked by the storm and activity around the Suburban.

 Nancy put a beeper collar and a thin fluorescent orange vest on her mostly white dog Dawn.  “We must be out of our minds,” she laughed as we masked our faces and leaned into the wind.

 The pheasants broke on our approach, cackling and clutter-calling as they flew in undulating streams across the picked crop field.  Dawn pointed three hen pheasants, but we couldn’t manage a rooster as we hunted the grassy edges to the field’s end, made a wide empty swing, then turned to hunt a long hollow that drained toward the truck.

 The snow had piled up in places, the switch in yellow spikes just above the white.  When Dawn’s collar sounded “point” the wind stole its tolling on down the draw.  She was up to her flanks in snow and a patch of silver buffaloberry, visible only because of her orange vest, head and tail high, the snow around her broomed by the wind.

                                                                                                                      Aspenglow Dawn

But Dawn had them, a pack of grouse burrowed in the snow.   The first bird flushed in a spray of white before tumbling to Nancy’s 20-gauge, the shot a hollow pop in the hard blow.  But that was all the rest of the pack would take. The snow all around Dawn erupted into chuckling, clucking sharptails, silver shapes launching as singles and pairs before three lay birds flushed almost under the dog’s nose.

 Dawn snuffled and pounced through two more retrieves before Nancy sent her on downwind.  We all three were wearing down, with the truck a faint, dark smudge some distance away.  But the grouse we’d made at the head of the drainage had careened down the wind and reburied themselves in the snow.   Some flushed far ahead, but Dawn kept hunting, three times catching scent over her shoulder, whirling, and pinning a grouse between herself and her hunters.

 We staggered to the truck and huddled on its lee side, panting and giggling like lunatics, our coats heavy with game and Dawn dancing in her goofy orange vest, begging for her warm crate tucked behind the front passenger seat. 

 “Merry Christmas!” Nancy laughed, digging for the truck keys deep in her brush pants pocket.  “Santa comes early on the prairie!”

       Nancy and Gary Johnson and their Aspenglow Setters

Come Here, Dammit

By Lynn Dee Galey and Randy Lawrence

In a heartbeat Lil Rip, our little bundle of fur, goes from “Amazing!  He listens so well!” to “OMG, he is flipping me off and ignoring me!”  Same puppy. Same owner. Same command and situation. What changed?

Lil Rip is growing up, more ready to explore the world where he wants to, when he wants to. And frankly, as the world becomes more interesting, you and your wishes become a bit less so. Remember, this is a dog bred to reach out and cover ground so that you do not have to, so expect it to happen. And face it: as they grow we actually want to encourage that certain independence and managed drive when afield .

The key words are “certain” and “managed.” Coming when called is perhaps the single most important command for any dog. It is a safety issue: when a car is coming down the two-track you need your dog to come to you to ensure that they are safe. It is a sanity issue: when you are ready for bed and let Lil Rip out in the rain for a quick pit stop, you do not want to stand in the doorway in your jammies yelling until the neighbors’ lights come on.

So, when your five month old Firelight pup is out in the yard and surprises you by turning a deaf ear to your call, what do you do? First is being honest about background.  If you’ve established the kind of rapport with your young dog where Good Things Come To Those Who Come, then you’ve got a foundation upon which to build.  Second is a quick trip back to boot camp for a refresher course.

Get out that very long rope and just like you did when he was 8 weeks old; let Lil Rip trot around the yard dragging the cord. Practice “Come when called or I’ll give you a corrective tug if you don’t” a couple of times a day.  Hey, sometimes we all need to be reminded to follow rules. (At least that’s what they used to tell me in after-school detention.)

Then, let pup know that yeah, I may not be able to reach you with my hands but don’t think that means that you are out of my “reach.”   Prepare an empty water bottle or can with some pebbles in it and have it on the porch just waiting for this moment. Or maybe you can use that nice fresh snow to make a snowball. Or if you are lazy like me and wear slip on shoes, you can use one of them in a pinch (In winter, don’t throw your car keys in a fit of pique;  they disappear in the snow…or so I’ve heard).

Settle down, pacifists. I’m not talking about whacking your dog with the can/snowball/shoe. And, in fact, it is rather bold to assume that we can chuck an empty, noisy-rattling can 70 feet and hit our target. We are just sending them a message, a signal. The tossed item is to surprise them and break their focus on whatever was distracting them. We send the message, they look up, we immediately and sternly say “Come!”  (retaining the corollary “Comeheredammit!” for the very rare moment).

If we have done our boot camp refresher course well, they will come. If they don’t, then I hobble with my one bare foot across the lawn to Lil Rip with very clear body language that I am enforcing a rule.  With the relationship that we have built with this 5 month old tractable, biddable companion the message will be very clear that I mean business and am willing to back up any message that I send.

If done properly, one or two of these ‘reach out and touch them’ incidents is usually sufficient. Lil Rip learns that you mean what you say, that you have powers beyond your fingertips, and, most importantly, that you will follow through on enforcing commands. That is a huge message.

A common problem for families is a puppy that will mind some members of his human pack, but not others.  “Mom is the boss;  Dad (or the kids or Uncle Steven) works on the same pay grade as I.” The monks of New Skete Monastery live and work near Cambridge, New York.  Among their missions is the development of training programs meant to offer common sense companion dog training that helps owners forge a more complete connection with their animals. A drill they use is called the “Round Robin Recall,” described as an “experience in animation and praise.” 

The exercise has family members (or interested, cooperative friends who can follow instructions) space themselves in a circle around Lil Rip who is dragging the aforementioned “reminder line.”  The monks use a 20 cord. 

“The object of the exercise,” they write, “is to call the dog (using the decided upon command)…praise him (when he comes), and toss the rope to the next person in the circle.  This person then calls the dog and repeats the process.  The tossed rope is to ensure a prompt recall by the dog.  If he does not come after being called twice, give the lead a quick pop and call the dog, (gently reeling him in and) praising him warmly as he trots to you.”

The monks don’t spare the praise and don’t mind the use of treats in this exercise.  You shouldn’t either;  give the command, then clap, drop to a knee, or whistle and give praise, lots of praise as he comes. The monks recommend this drill twice a week, gradually broadening the circle gradually to the limits of the “reminder line.” (“The Round Robin Recall” from How To Be Your Dog’s Best Friend, 2002, Little, Brown, and Company, New York).

It doesn’t matter who you are:  sooner or later, your Firelight puppy is going to test you.  You’ve encouraged him, nurtured him, emboldened him into a happy, independent partner.  That’s the key word, though:  partner.  In fact, Lil Rip is the junior partner in your relationship;  he works for you, under your direction.  Surely one of the cornerstones of that partnership is a dog that comes when it's called – the first time, every time...eventually without your having to retrieve your shoe. 

When The School Bell Rings

by Randy Lawrence

Author's Note:  When I submitted this essay for consideration in "Firelight Reflections," Lynn Dee thanked me, but confessed to being uncomfortable, thinking it was too much about her to be posted on her own blog.  I responded with my usual light, empathetic touch: "Get over yourself.  It's not about you.  It's about the dogs and how we can all always get better at handling them in the field."  Then I offered to write a disclaimer.  Here it is: "If this gets posted, know that it was over LDG's ingrained New England reticence and modesty."

The cover was at least a week away from being frost-flattened.  Aspen brakes shimmered with a full head of gold leaves.  Any dog working more than 30 yards away was a faint impression moving through brush.   Whatever shooting to be had would be fast, with birds started over a dog’s point hurtling behind a thick early-autumn scrim.

But it was October, it was familiar North Woods cover in a decent ruffed grouse year, and my dog Deacon and I had come to jump start our bird season, guests of Lynn Dee Galey and Deacon’s Firelight Setters kin.  As bonus, we’d enjoy ringside seats to a breeding program arranged around one woman’s notions of how best to make game with a particular kind of pointing dog.

The pace is measured. Lynn Dee knows cover, knows and trusts her dogs.  She walks with her little gun broken over her arm because for her,  shooting is a points-only enterprise.  When the bell stops or beeper tones, there’s plenty of time to load and close the action while walking to the dog.

Lynn Dee doesn’t talk to her setters on point.  She doesn’t fondle them on point.  That way flagging and false pointing lie.  She tries to walk in on, rather than by, the stand, and she’s all business when she does.  When the dog is stopped, Lynn Dee moves.   Her part of the bargain is to put the bird up, and she is brisk and thorough, doing all she can to make certain the bird either gets into the air or has given us the slip.

A Firelight hunt is quiet.  There’s no manic whistling or shouting to “handle the dogs.”  To an observer, it’s more like her “handling” is about trust and support.  The dogs hunt;  she intrudes on their business only when a change of course is needed.

I came to grouse hunting without much background.  In the beginning, I wanted a dog I could see all the time, preferably in gun range (couldn’t risk missing a chance to shoot, don’t you know).  I would lose my mind when my first setter, a wispy, trial-type goer, showed any semblance of initiative.

It took a couple of years of angst and a day tagging along with a truly legendary Ohio grouse hunter named Nelson Groves to set me straight.   Tired of my constant hacking and checking and cautioning the dog, we stopped to regroup.  That was when I asked for input.  Nelson quietly suggested stuffing my whistle in a place where surgical removal would have been necessary later.

“Let the dog go,” Nelson Groves chided.  “He’s supposed to hunt.  You’re s’posed to keep found, keep up, and kill the bird when you find him standin’ there.” 

Nelson weaned me into rangier dogs that “checked in without coming in.”  Lynn Dee’s Firelights work like that, swinging ‘round in fast, sweeping casts, keeping track of her even while they are pushing on.  Within that general program, each setter she put down during my weekend visit flashed his or her own signature run under the Firelight marque.

Lynn Dee’s senior crew member, Storm, is a big dog with a smooth, reaching gait that belies her size.  Storm stitches cover in wide, fast swaths and goes to game with a bold, almost arrogant, swagger. 

Deacon’s compact dam Sally hunts a little differently with casts more linear and deeper than Storm’s on this day, but quickly settling into an efficient, deadly earnest rhythm.  She did, however, make one opening hegira that might have triggered a less savvy hunter into full metal fulmination. 

Not Lynn Dee.  She waited.  She listened.  She checked the GPS collar and rolled her eyes. 

But she knew Sally would come looking for her, sooner rather than later.  She didn’t stand there blowing whistle blasts that only give some dogs a reference from which to keep running their own program.  Instead, Lynn Dee kept quiet, and when Sally came looking, Lynn Dee called her into our line of march and on we went.

But it was Firelight Seth behind whom I'd most wanted to hunt. A clownish, almost anxious fellow when he’d spent some time with me earlier in the year, I’d seen firsthand what one flight of woodcock had done to his dormant “on” switch.  Months later, he was more confident, more relaxed, than I’d seen him.  When it was finally his turn to be down, Goofy Partydawg Seth hardened into a business-like stager who virtually punished the dense cover, lasered into looking for a bird to point.

I left Michigan a day later with a better sense of what Lynn Dee has spent her adult life trying to accomplish with her setters.  Over the years, I had become increasingly disenchanted with much of what was being passed off as a “Ryman-type setter.”  Too often, that designation seemed to have been appropriated by ponderous dogs that for all their classic looks simply weren’t built physically or mentally for hard hunting in tough country with scattered birds.  

The late Robert Wehle once described for me how an imported outcross strain of his great Elhew pointer line came a cropper: “It was as if they didn’t care whether school was in session or not!”  I became convinced that very few of today’s “George Ryman setters” could have made the cut in their namesake’s hunting string a century ago.

That won’t do.  When the school bell rings, I want a dog that rises to the head of the class - a bird dog athlete with a quiet mind that trains naturally.  I want a dog that hunts and points with a fever, one I can admire on the move and in repose, one that claims me as a full partner. By Firelight – Storm, Sally, Seth, my Deacon and the rest - I believe I’ve found that sort of companion gun dog.