My father always had bird dogs as long as I’d been alive. We had a veritable pack of Golden Retrievers running through the house at one point, three large dogs and seemingly a biennial litter of puppies that would come and go from these rescue-turned-breeder litters of purebred pups. To say that I was born and raised with bird dogs would be wholly accurate, I didn’t have a single article of clothing not festooned with the oily white blonde hair of a golden retriever until I was nearly an adult. By then carelessness and a troubled home life led to a series of dogs being bred in less than ideal circumstances, first to an AKC Laborador which made for decent dogs, certainly well mannered ones. Then came another incident when my father was out of town, this time with a Rottweiler and our mixed breed dogs. While we saw our litters through and made sure to place the puppies in great homes, my mother never lived down the guilt of leaving out dogs in heat, and we spent many years with bird dogs that were mostly house pets — though without those breedings we would have never had Maybelline, which was our lankiest golden/lab mix dog that jumped like a gazelle and tore apart cover like no other dog we’d seen. She was vicious on wild game… and the neighbor’s cats, but soft to our touch. She was taken too young from us with an intestinal issue that didn’t let her digest her food, and she could never seem to keep anything in her system for longer than a few hours. Doctors said it was some form of canine cancer. I think she made it to five years old, and it was a terrible tragedy for my family and me.
During this time we always took those dogs hunting, primarily for grouse and pheasant but we’d bring them with us when we were popping squirrels in the oak trees near our cabin. It was always seemingly a fight in order for us to get the dogs to work the cover the way we wanted. I was young, so I was sent into the covers like a bird dog anyway with my H&R Topper Single Shot 20 gauge. There was no real expectation I’d hit anything with it anyway. Several of our dogs from the mixed breed litters were gun shy, so the instant that a shot was fired they’d stop working cover and walk beside us in barrel licking range.
My dad, frustrated with this turn of events and wistful of the banner days in the pheasant fields with our Golden Retrievers wanted another bird dog, and settled on setters. He wanted a Gordon Setter, and searched for two years after our Golden/Lab mix Tigerlily died. He wanted the Gordon because of it’s large build and it’s ability to hunt close without being on top of the hunter. Maybelline once ran off to what seemed like the next county after a deer, leaving us missing our dog for nearly a day, and he wanted to avoid that if at all possible. He searched high and low in New York, Pennsylvania, and more or less the entire east coast for field grade setters. With a second dogless grouse season quickly approaching he found an English Setter litter and, as most hunters — in fact most people do, he fell in love with a cuddly mostly white setter puppy. He named her Luciloo, Luci for short. and they instantly bonded as close as a man and hunting dog can.
By this time I was already in college, and had gone from hunting with my dad nearly every weekend to preparing myself for what seemed like a life of cubicle dwelling, spending most waking hours in a computer lab while I worked on my degree in Networking and Systems Administration. I could escape from Rochester, NY for two weeks at a time during breaks in classes and I was happy to head to the PA Wilds. I was happy to meet Luci for the first time, a pleasant respite from graded tests on what I would spend the rest of my adult life doing. She was only six months old when she went on her first hunt on Pennsylvania’s State Game Lands near our cabin. She floated through the woods like something from a science fiction movie, she could glide over and under fallen logs and pivot between bramble bushes with ease. Luci would immediately lock up when she scented a bird, looking back at the hunter with the “setter lip” curled over her upper teeth.
2011 was not a great grouse year in our valley, and we tried our darndest to find birds, going through all of our favorite covers. Luci, while floating through cover like a brown and white speckled aparition, was much more rangey than my father had anticipated so he spent a majority of his time attempting to course correct the stubborn setter. She knew better, going on point several hundred yards into a sea of blackberries while my dad was walking the closed logging roads. It was an educational experience for all involved, seeing as I had been the bird dog for many years I had no problem going off-trail and whiffing shots over Luci while my father preferred the easier walking.
One day after hours and hours walking the hills and getting torn up by briars and cursing my subpar gear we chose to ride up the dirt road for one last short hunt. There was a small field that sometimes had pheasants released in it as a sort of overflow field from the much larger ones up the road. There was a large hill that also allowed the pheasants released in bulk at the top of the mountain to work their way down towards the river over weeks after being chased by coyotes and other predators. Everything in the woods wants to eat a pen raised pheasant. Part of training a dog this young was to ensure that we get them on birds, and until then all Luci did was set on my dad’s chickens at his farmette in New York. Pen raised pheasants were more or less a sure thing this time of year, but they weren’t cooperating either. We kicked through the tall dry grass in the center of the two planted fields before working the edges to get any stragglers. My dad was tiring, but I was working on a second wind and would not be happy until I kicked up a grouse. Adjacent to the fields was an overgrown orchard from long ago. Vines ran from tree to tree, but in the post-frost fall the sweet smell of apples fermenting on the ground and tree wafted on the wind.
I called Luci and entered the orchard, her bell tinkling as she tore apart the cover with reckless abandon. My dad posted up on the field edge with his Browning Superposed at port arms, ready for any bird flying out across the field in the unlikely event that it would break cover and fly across the openness, fully exposed. He had two things going for him, he could rest his tired legs, and the field was downhill from literally everything in the cover, so generally speaking the birds had a non-zero chance to flush downhill. As I spun to avoid the briars sinking into my blaze orange hooded sweatshirt we worked through the orchard to no avail. Not a single bird, though the grapes were ripe and the apples were sweet. We worked our way north toward the edge of the pines when I spotted a small opening in the woods where there was still green fresh grass. A spring seeped up from the ground, likely from the side of the mountain, my boots squished in the mud and made a popping sound as I struggled. My wool socks leeched the muddy water back down to my toes slowly, you could feel the chill creeping in. In one corner of the spring there was a pile of brush with a small opening like something out of Narnia, where Luci was suddenly on point, a hard stop from the full tilt running that she’d been doing all day, over logs, under logs, through cover. It was the first time that her cowbell had stopped, and she was practically vibrating. Her tail and setter lip were unmistakable, she knew there were birds nearby. I walked to her side and got in front of her, entering the small opening to become encircled in brush when a bird flushed directly in front of me, going the only place it could fly, straight up. I spun and flicked the safety off of my Ithaca 37 Pump and ended up taking a shot nearly straight up, the bird dropped. After a lifetime of whiffed shots and shots fired only in the general direction of the king of the forest, I’d finally bagged a grouse, and over my father’s new bird dog! I hooted and came out of the woods with my prize, my father was dumbfounded, thinking that I’d taken a squirrel until I showed him. We marveled over the bird, neither of us ever having connected with one even though we’d both dedicated significant parts of our hunting careers towards chasing them.
In 2011 my addiction was cemented, I was a grouse hunter first and foremost, and hunting over a pointing breed was almost like hunting with cheat codes.
