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.