(Editor's Note - I wrote this piece in the fall of '03 for Dakota Country. I consider it one of my best pieces of writing.)
How to Mesmerize a Pheasant By Tony Dean
The world comes together like a giant jig saw puzzle in the fall, for it is then most of the things I care about land prime time slots. Wetlands and prairie marshes; stubble fields and geese; tree stands and whitetails; bird dogs and pheasants. I’ll spend a few days on a prairie wetland, savoring the delights of ducks hovering over my decoys. . The rapidly flying birds, suddenly locked up, and for an instant, the length of an eye blink, time stands still. You wonder how you can miss but we’ve all done it. I’ll spend a few more mornings contemplating the world from a prone position in a North Dakota stubble field. Each time I watch a sunrise paint stubble, I remember Tim Peterson saying, “Sunrises and Dakota stubble fields were created for each other.” Time permitting, I’ll be up in my tree stand too. I love the sound of an approaching deer and the tinge of cool in the evening air. Notice that each of the things that make these experiences special, are not limited to the ultimate act of trigger-pulling or string-loosing. But I’ll readily admit that I will spend more days walking CRP, cattail marshes, grain fields and shelterbelts, because of my dog, Dee, than anything else. Let me explain why.
Since Dee came into my life, I’ve moved pheasant hunting up the scales to the top rung on my outdoor autumn loves. That’s saying something because those close to this writer know how I feel about hunting whitetails, something I’ve managed to keep off television so that I could have at least one sport without a camera following me. And until a year ago, ducks ranked number one, and on certain days, still do. I prefer them over geese and especially on the table.
But Dee, a black lab that’s on the smallish side as labs go, is the daughter of Jewel, another small black lab who owns my friend, Steve Halvorson. She’s a pointing lab that lays waste to the claim that this skill is the sole domain of breeds such as Brittanies, English Pointers, Setters and several others. That the trait is hereditary appears true, and was reinforced 127 times by Dee in her first fall hunting season. I’m not normally a counter in fishing or hunting, but I made an exception on her points. As a 9-month-old, she frequently blundered. At 10 months, she did better, and in December, at 11 months, she worked like a veteran. The whole thing was a lot like watching a kid make the leap from toddler to 25 in three months, if you know what I mean.
Let’s admit to an advantage here.
Any dog that has good basic instincts and minds well has a huge advantage if it lives in South Dakota. In a single season, such a dog will get in front of more pheasants than most dogs will in a lifetime. Most retrievers retrieve and all you do is polish their skills, controlling them with hand signals. And you can teach obedience but the simple truth is, you cannot teach bird savvy. And there’s no place on Earth when things are right where you can put a young dog in front of more birds than in South Dakota. Not Iowa, not Nebraska, not North Dakota or Kansas and certainly not Minnesota where pheasant hunting is a nice walk in the fall most of the time. While any of the other states offer fair to occasionally good pheasant hunting, South Dakota has always been the mecca. Smart dogs learn “savvy” when they get lots of experience on wild birds. A dog that doesn’t will never be an exceptional bird dog, regardless of how much you drop with a professional trainer. And it all starts with canine intelligence.
Those of us who cherish South Dakota pheasants should tattoo “preserve prairie and winter cover” on the backs of their hands and maybe even have it checkered into their gun stock, because if you take it out of South Dakota, we’re Kansas with a few more hills.
South Dakota’s pheasants are why most hunters would kill to own Dee or her mother. This duo can enter a field that contains several hundred birds with neither intimidated by the literal maze of scent. How do they do it? Damned if I know. But there’s more to a great hunting dog than breeding, training and natural ability. In spite of how my very intelligent pointing lab makes me feel on some days, I know that I am smarter than she is. At least I think so. How much is open to honest question.
A respected dog trainer once told me that all training is designed to accomplish one thing, and that’s to make the dog obey commands when its every instinct says no. In that respect, Dee is already a great hunting dog. She doesn’t chase rabbits or deer though she’d like to, but when I say “no,” she knows what it means. And I guess the thing I enjoy so much about her is that I don’t have to shout the commands. A normal voice will do nicely, thank you. In fact, if I raise my voice, I might as well beat her.
I do use an electric collar but only rarely. It was a good training tool and let this headstrong pup know that even if she was a hundred yards away, I was still in control. I swear by Tritronics. And for those who think it’s cruel, do what I did. Before you use the thing, shock yourself at each level so you know what it feels like. You discover that anything over 2 is, well, somewhat unpleasant. And with Dee, the number one setting, which is a slight tingle, is all it takes, a gentle reminder that she should pay attention to what I am requesting. But if you use this tool get even with your dog, you should be sent to whatever that country is that chops hands off.
A couple of autumns ago, I watched a nice golden retriever cower everytime she entered a field. All she knew about fields and pheasants was that she was going to feel pain no matter what she did. I wanted to punch her owner in the nose and then hold him down, put the collar on his neck, while I pressed the shock button at every setting.
There are two things Dee hasn’t done as well as I’d like; retrieving and swimming. What, a lab that doesn’t like to retrieve or swim? Well, let me put the first in perspective. She didn’t like to retrieve a year ago. This year, she does, even mourning doves, which aren’t a favorite of most dogs. Maybe this is a sign of her growing maturity. But it’s swimming that worries me most. Her aversion to water probably is the result of an early experience in the Missouri River last March. She saw another dog playing in the water in front of our house and dove in herself. The water was around 33 degrees. She wouldn’t willingly get into the water again until this fall when she was playing with Galen Geer’s dog. The two were running at high speed and continued their chase down a boat dock when Galen’s dog veered. Dee went head over tail into the lake. Fortunately, this time the water was warm. I think she’ll come around.
I know there’s a lot of conjecture on the part of dog enthusiasts about pointing labs, but do I care? Dogs either point or they don’t and mine does. No, it’s not as stylish as an English Pointer, nor do they cover as much ground. But what they do cover, they cover thoroughly and efficiently. The nose isn’t as good as it is on pointing breeds. But I live in South Dakota where it’s not uncommon to have hundreds of birds in a single piece of cover. I can tell you this. I’ve seen pointing dogs with great noses go to pieces in places like that. A lab, even a pointing lab, takes things like that in stride. And, on average, they’re better retrievers, even Dee. Besides, any of the retrieving breeds are friendlier. I’ll admit to having seen a few affectionate pointing dogs but most seem bothered when you try to love’em up. Retrievers come back for more. And more. And more.
Dee sleeps inside, at the foot of our bed. Aww hell, she actually sleeps in an old, overstuffed chair. She’s part of our family but on our days in the field, she’s all business. And to enter a field with Dee and Jewel is pure joy because you know they are about business and their business is finding birds.
Let us take a look at the quarry.
The ringneck is a magnificent bird. I can’t think of another with feathers of so many colors. I love to hold a cock bird and turn it, watching the sun paint the glistening feathers as I change the angles. This is nature’s kalaidoscope, a bird that almost makes a drake woodie seem drab. I look at the bird and ask how something with so much color can be so hard to find in an autumn field. I look again at this long-tailed bundle of rainbow and ask how I can bring myself to shoot one. I can’t answer but it’s a question I’m not ashamed of asking, anymore than I am ashamed of shooting it. In fact, if one of those cocktail party wierdos happens along to ask such a question, I try to avoid it. If I can’t, I come back with something like, “I just shoot’em so I can hear the thump when they fall.” Or, “I like blood, don’t you?” Such conversations rarely last very long. The truth is, if I do not feel a twinge of regret each time I see one fall, I will start to worry about my role in all of this.
The flush is explosive, raucous. The bird appears longer than it is but do not be fooled. This is an illusion. The actual kill zone is small and it’s imperative that you are able to penetrate the front portion of the breast with several pellets. The bullseye, if it were painted on one, would barely measure 5 inches and that includes the head and neck.
Beginners nearly always shoot behind the bird on crossing shots, something I suspect is the result of that illusion. Others don’t have the foggiest idea of where they’re shooting. Sometimes it is because of the noisy flush, other times, the color display and still others because they flock shoot, the inevitable result of too damned many birds in the air in such a small piece of air space. My friend Cleve Trimble of Nebraska has a neat way of illustrating the follies of flock shooting. He tells his golden retriever Annie, to sit. Then he flips small crackers in her direction. She never misses one. Finally, he tosses three and she can’t catch even one. The moral, says Cleve, is “don’t flock shoot.”
Some birds, I remember. Like the pair of roosters I bagged while hunting alone in a public hunting area in western Beadle county. They were flushed by Abbie, my aging golden retriever. I wasn’t going to let her hunt. She was 12 years old and fading fast, but when I stopped the truck and opened the rear, the whining let me know how she felt about that. So, I thought, why not? After all, we’d hunted together many times over a dozen years. We hadn’t gone 30-yards when the two roosters flushed. Course, scoring a double is great fun, even if you’re alone. Abbie retrieved the first bird then went back to get the second. She was half the way back to me, exhibiting a little bit of a prance, the way she always did on retrieves. It was like she was saying, “Aren’t I pretty?” Suddenly she stopped, shuddered, and dropped dead. I buried her there, in that cattail marsh, and one of the birds with her. Then I sat and wept. I wondered about the injustice of a man and his dog not aging together. I took the other bird home and ate it one evening, remembering with each mouthful, the two birds in the air and Abbie’s stylish retrieve. I close my eyes and replay that scene. Two years passed before I again hunted pheasants.
Abbie’s pup, Tide, so named because of his fondness for ripping open boxes of detergent, finally coaxed me back into the pheasant fields, and on that first day, I remembered why I enjoyed it so. It wasn’t just the pheasants, it was the dog and the pheasants and how they interacted. Tide gave me several more seasons, but unfortunately, he was 8 years old when I started hunting him, something that was my fault, not his. And when we finally had to put Tide down, I didn’t hunt pheasants that fall.
The next year, I was going to do a show with Kent Hrbek and was looking for a place to hunt. I’d met Steve Halvorson at the Pierre Chamber’s grouse hunt earlier in the fall and called him about doing it on his farm just south of Kennebec, SD, in the heart of the best pheasant range. He invited me down and I was amazed at the pheasant numbers. The hunt with Hrbek fell through but Steve and I got to be good friends. We hunted together several times and I commented about how impressed I was with his dog, Jewel. Dee was born a few months after the season and when Steve called with an offer I couldn’t refuse, there was never a doubt about whether or not I’d be back in the dog-owner ranks again. Oddly, my wife, Dar, didn’t want another dog. Her heart was still with Tide, but it is amazing, truly amazing how this little pointing lab pup has bonded with her.
I remember Dee’s first point. Nothing stylish but a big moment, so much so that I felt like passing out cigars. Steve and I were hunting together, doing a show segment, in fact. A few days later with snow on the ground, we hunted a cattail marsh and one of the guys crippled a rooster. We had a half-dozen good hunting dogs in that marsh that day and they all got on the trail. Dee veered off from the rest and headed to a 4-foot-tall snowbank and literally dove into it. Seconds later, we saw her back out with the tail of a rooster in her mouth. The very much alive cock bird wasn’t happy and it was the kind of thing you remember.
I don’t want to imply that I spend my hunting seasons looking for the meaning of it all or any kind of that deep stuff some weepy writers thrive on. What I want is simple. It’s satisfaction, really. It’s watching Dee sniff out roosters in the cattails. It’s slogging through waist deep CRP or switchgrass. It’s saying to yourself, “Man, I’d rather be here, doing this, than be anywhere or doing anything else in the whole damned world.”
So what is it that actually happens when Dee…or any other pointing dog…goes on point. What is taking place between the dog and bird?
I asked Bruce “Wickerbill” Crist, the owner of a trailerful of pointing dogs.
“I think it mesmerizes them,” says Wickerbill.
And that’s not much of an answer because most of the guys I hang around with can’t pronounce the word, spell it or have the foggiest idea of what it means. And I don’t know how Dee would react if I said, “C’mon Dee, let’s go mesmerize a few.”
On the other hand, if I say, let’s go shoot some pheasants, get out of the way, even if it’s mid-July. Good hunting dogs are like that.
Pheasants are pretty good to eat, too. Save the legs for soup. The breasts are another matter. Unlike ruffed grouse, the bird has little flavor of its own, so you have to add it. However, tossing a bunch of pheasant pieces into a couple cans of cream of mushroom soup should be against the law.
Try this.
Salt and pepper the breast and wrap it in bacon. Cook it on the grill until the bacon is crisp. The bacon will keep the bird moist and delicious.
Here’s another. Pound the breast with a mallet. Salt and pepper it and roll it in flour. Shake off the excess flour. Heat a saute’ pan until it is smoking hot. Then add just a couple tablespoons of olive oil. Saute’ the breasts quickly, both sides should take less than 2 minutes. Set them aside, add a chunk of cold butter, then your choice of a few ounces of port wine or brandy. Stir and cook until you reduce the sauce by half, then pour it over the breasts. Serve with a green vegetable. If you canned some garden green beans, they’re perfect. Add a baked onion. I like to core a sweet onion such as a Vidalia or Walla Walla, fill the cavity with a piece of butter and worcestershire sauce and cook until soft at 350 degrees. Pour a glass of cabernet or merlot if you prefer a red wine…or a pinot gregio if you like white wine. Either goes well with pheasant.
I’ll turn 63 this fall and could collect social security if I applied. I’d rather collect shotguns and dogs and ringnecks. But as long as I can be out there, I’ll have a bird dog who’ll help me “mesmerize” about three of those gaudy chinese imports on each occasion.
