The other day, I said something remarkably stupid.
To be fair, I say stupid things every day; my only saving grace is that they are not frequently remarkable. Just stupid.
"I wouldn't buy a dog from someone who didn't keep a hunting diary," I announced airily...to the person who has sold me some of the best gun dogs I've owned in over a decade, a person who resolutely keeps no record of birds moved or points made, let alone any ledger on shots attempted or birds taken.
What followed was a patently pregnant pause giving birth to a more courteous question than I deserved. "Why is that?"
I blurted, “How else do you really know what you're doing?", already aware that Lynn Dee Galey has a firm handle on her dogs' work over the seasons. She simply has never been interested in reducing the experiences to data.
"I never figured you for a numbers guy."
I bristled at that, but kept entering info. "I just like to have a sense of the day," I harrumphed. "Don't you keep track, you know, of how you're doing?"
Suddenly, I could hear Ted Knight's deep baritone from the movie Caddyshack when he asks Ty Webb, the Chevy Chase character, what he shot that day on the golf course.
"Oh, Judge," Ty answers modestly, "I don't keep score."
Knight, in his role as Judge Smails, is aghast. "Then how do you measure yourself with other golfers?"
Of course the movie answer, famously, is "By height." But is that really what we're about when we keep a hunting journal? Measuring?
Well...no. And yes.
The two best grouse hunters I know have a combined record of 95 years hunting with their English setters. Recorded are coverts or sections by name and location. If there are landowners of whom permission was asked, their names are logged in for coming back in the future (or not) or for a thank you note, maybe a Christmas card or small gift. The weather is always marked, too - temps, prevailing winds, precipitation, etc.
The dog work is, of course, central. Time is kept. Points and backs made, birds moved for x number of flushes, perhaps a mention of unusual performances, good and bad. My friends have a complete record of not only every dog they’ve hunted through the decades, but every guest dog that has run with their crew.
From all of that, both men can tell you on good authority how their setters perform under what conditions, over what sort of ground, on which species of birds, at what stage in their career. Those stats afford them an informed perspective on not just individual dogs, but generations of their bloodlines. They know when to cut slack and when maybe a dog as slacking. When either fellow offers an opinion, for example, on likely scenting conditions under certain circumstances, only a fool wouldn't listen.
They keep track of their shooting, too. Each guy knows his percentages of kills to misses on every type of bird over every sort of terrain in all kinds of weather. If either of them shares shooting stats with you, you know you've reached a very rare level of friendship. For them, field shooting is decidedly not something to be measured against the prowess of others.
That’s why God made trap and skeet and sporting clays...so's we can measure us'n's against the other'n. My guys only care what they do in honoring good dog work.
Each one keeps careful record of birds found and birds taken in a specific locale, an important part of his stewardship of wild places and wild game. They know exactly how many times they’ve visited a particular covert during a season and what it's yielded. From that, they can not only decide whether a spot is worth another visit, but also if they need to lay off a particular area altogether, with far more intel than just a vague sense of "enough."
Their journals mark a learning curve of which they’ve never tired. At the end of every season, each fellow tots up the numbers from every outing. Each knows exactly how many hours and days his dogs have actually hunted. They know how many discreet spots they've visited. They know how many bird contacts each dog has logged for the year, as well as how many points, backs, bumps, etc. They make note of how they fared with birds on the run, which braces hunted best together, maybe what game bird had this dog's number or how that dog improved on a species from one year to the next. Every litter they’ve bred over time has been informed by those numbers.
I envy my friends’ file cabinet drawers of hunting journals. They can reach in, pull a particular year and be there again through their notes and numbers. Dogs that have long left them are alive and working again. Faded snapshot memories, faded by years, return in vivid colors.
I used my friends’ habit as a model for a number of years but finally gave it up. I have neither the discipline or commitment to keep track of my hunting in that way. Once upon a time, I wrote in a fake leatherette "Gunning Diary" I bought out of a magazine The pages were a soft faux parchment tan. William Harden Foster images decorated the margins.
I wrote in it every night after a hunt during the season, taking notes during the day, then transposing them into the Official Journal when I got home or while sitting at the scarred desk in some backwoods motel near where the birds were. At the end of the day or trip or season, I'd write some sort of assessment about a dog's progress or my shooting woes or the State of Bird Numbers in various ports of call.
I dug it out the other day and was reminded that (a) we traded shotguns a lot in those days; (b) we were not shooting grouse only over points then; (c) I didn’t know what I didn’t know about effective grouse dog performance and couldn’t begin to help my dogs in any meaningful way; and (d) my friend's pointer was constantly either missing or on point or missing and on point. He found most of the birds; we spent a great deal of time trying to find him.
I misplaced that journal for a time, and from then on, record keeping was a catch-as-catch-can exercise that I only did from trip to trip. I stopped the end of the year commentary, and until computers came along to store stuff, whenever I got a nagging itch to keep track, I‘d buy one of those pocket spiral notebooks at a gas station or keep tabs on cocktail napkins. I even started using a little pocket recorder, but then seldom got around to transposing my dictation. Stray pieces of data sometimes got folded in plat books or written on map margins, or slipped into whatever novel I was reading. How many times have I pulled a book from the shelf and an artifact of hunting shorthand falls out?
I have thought the magazine articles and anthology essays and blog posts that see print could serve as some sort of record, but it is absolutely not the same. Narratives cherry pick events; stats are narratives that don’t blink.
I confess that Lynn Dee Galey's reasons for not crunching numbers are maybe more in tune with how I am today. At the risk of slipping into throwback hippie woo-woo here, the experience in the now doesn't need the numbers. She knows from living closely with her dogs for eight generations just who they are, how they've evolved, and what about their performance and personality she's tried to breed on from litter to litter.
A cynic might sneer and label all of that more serendipitous than scientific; that's fine. Cynics make for lousy hunting companions (among lousy other things). Galey doesn't make stuff up, that is, she does not write checks her dogs can't cash. In her own way, she knows who she is, who her dogs are, and represents both with candor and savvy insight. It's a different way of knowing, but by gadfrey, she knows, and it works for her.
For the record, Lynn Dee is also unfailingly generous, even when I am remarkably stupid or when she looks over and I'm punching numbers into my cellie during drives between coverts. Old itches still need scratched from time to time.
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