Flood Tide

by Randy Lawrence

In an earlier blog, we wrote about a precocious little setter, Firelight Kyah, and about the opportunities provided for her in the field.  Admittedly, she had maybe more than her share of the Right Stuff at birth, but, metaphorically speaking, she has entered into the last weeks of her first season runnin' with the Big Dawgs when most others her age are still just venturing off the porch.  

With her smooth, athletic gait, she hunts tirelessly, gradually to more likely cover, staying found, naturally backing her elders, finding her own birds, crowding those birds, learning with every ruffed grouse she couldn't manage to set, and finally pointing, and holding, and retrieving birds she handled correctly...

...at under seven months old.

So let's acknowledge right off that Kyah's partner is Not Your Average Hunter of Grouse.  Nope.  He is what Lynn Dee refers to as a "One Percenter," someone who has arranged his work and his life around a high level pursuit of his favorite sport.  

He knows cover, because he knows ruffed grouse with a naturalist's almost insatiable curiosity about food and cover, habits and habitat.  He has open mind about what constitutes a "birdy spot," and hunts in times and places others simply drive by because it doesn't fit their stereotyped sense of "good cover."  He finds new and different grouse coverts because he has a good set of legs and lungs underneath the keen will and curiosity and, dare I say, pride, in finding more places that give his dogs and him the best main chance.  

He is a minimalist handler, consulting the GPS tracker when one of his setters hasn't come around in a bit, then heads that way, expecting (and this is important), EXPECTING to find his dog or dogs standing a bird.  He doesn't speak to the dogs locked down on scent, loads his double gun when he gets on the scene, and walks in ready to kill a grouse for his dogs and, frankly, for the edge to his hunter's soul.  That he is a crack shot completes the resume.

In short, Kyah's partner makes Real Grouse Dogs in the woods, letting his older dogs and the birds and cover and conditions do the training.   Which brings us to another metaphor, this one from another guy familiar with passionate ambition.

In the play Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare writes, "There is a tide in the affairs of men/Whick taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.  Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows..." 

The bard wasn't writing about bird dog prospects, but he nailed it anyway.  Pups like Firelight Kyah, bred from generations of well-tempered Real Grouse Dogs, come with all the ingredients.  It's up to the people to add ruffed grouse and patience and lots of boot leather, getting them into coverts they can handle on serious numbers of wild birds that they probably can NOT handle...at least in the beginning.

Owners who stay positive, who can accept puppy gaffes as something interesting rather than something vexing, who can carve out enough reps in good country, will succeed.  I would venture to say they will have a Real Grouse Dog sooner rather than later, in fact.  Maybe not Kyah soon, but sooner.

Seems obvious, right?  Unfortunately, it must not be.  Or at least it sometimes exacts more from owners than they are willing or able to give.  How many promising young gun dogs, left on shore during the flood times of their canine learning period, never make it out of the shallows, their owners content to keep them as beautiful side pieces to go with the fancy shotguns and the latest in unscarred boots and upland tactical vests, to pose with the occasional wild bird scratched down any way, any how.

I'm not the first hunter to make the Shakespearean gun dog connection.  Datus Proper did it in his intriguing book Pheasants of the Mind: A Hunter's Search for a Mythic Bird.  But I think of that excerpt every time I see a young dog trying to find herself in the grouse woods, too often with a handler who doesn't really have a clear idea of what he wants the young dog to accomplish.

One must feel for breeders whose labor of life and love is producing exceptional gun dog prospects.  How hard it must be for them to see What Could Have Been turned into a furry fireplace andiron or Santa-hat-wearing honorary family member on the annual Christmas card?  What the best breeders are hoping for from us, beyond a loving, healthy, and involved home life with our dogs, is commitment to do our homework:  establishing a solid, loving, working connection with our dogs, conducting a safe introduction to gunfire, then extricating ourselves from our workaday travels and travails to walk in times and places that give our puppy every chance for wild bird contacts, for learning from mistakes, for going to school on the birds that are to be its life's work.

Lynn  Dee tells about a social media post with a veteran Grouse Hunter posed with his young dog.  The caption read something like, "Yep.  Another pair of boots, the next truck, and he'll make a dog," meaning that only productive time afield can make a Real Grouse Dog.  Our obligation to that goal is to launch our puppy at flood learning tide, making a pact with her to do whatever it takes in helping her use her genetic inheritance, paddling out of the shallows and wag-dancing down off the porch to keep time with The Big Dawgs.

"Better three hours too soon," wrote that unwitting sage of bird doggery in The Merry Wives of Windsor, "than one minute too late."