In all the countries in Europe pointers and setters are used, but there
are districts in Hungary and Bohemia where partridges are so plentiful
that this canine assistance is neither required nor employed. The style
of shooting in these districts would make the use of any dogs except
retrievers absurd, and the writer never has been able to detect the
sportsmanship in employing dogs when they are in the way and hinder
sport. The truest pleasure is to be derived from getting shots by means
of dogs that one could have got in no other way. This feeling for and
fellowship with pointers and setters is to be found in the wild
Highlands and Islands of the west and extreme north of Scotland, and
also in the greater part of the mountains of Ireland. To a great extent
it is also felt in pursuit of the rype of Scandinavia, and of the
partridge, wherever that bird is scarce enough to require much finding
before it is shot. But throughout Europe there is more or less
preservation, more or less boundary to be protected, with the growing
demands for artificial methods first, and then, a little later, the
substitution of men for dogs. There is also a kind of bastard shooting
over dogs, in which a line of guns is formed as if for walking up the
game, and then one or a brace of dogs is allowed to run down wind, or
up, according to the requirements of the line of guns, and with no
thought as to possibility of the wind serving the dogs. But under such
circumstances canine assistance is in a false position, and it is
distressing to see what happens. A pair of dogs could not adequately
serve a line of guns, even if they had all the advantage of the wind,
and it may be safely affirmed that when any attempt is made to walk up
game, dogs are out of place, except as retrievers at heel. On a Scotch
Highland hillside it may be a question whether a party of four guns can
kill most game by all walking in line or by working in two parties and
shooting over dogs, but in the former case there is a better way—that of
driving the game to the guns, which saves the walking, and the shooting
becomes more exciting because more frequent.
But dog work is conducted in such various methods, some of which are so
little removed from treading up the birds, that an idealist must
hesitate to affirm that it is always preferable to forming line and
walking up the game. There is an idea that the place to loose off the
dogs is where game has congregated, or been driven into good cover, so
that points may recur at every 10 yards. This is when the heavy shooting
occurs, but it is not when the dog is most indispensable. The latter
happens when there is no more than one covey to every 500 acres, and you
have to find it before you have any sport. Some people say that under
those circumstances they would prefer no sport. This, however, is a
decadent view. We all of us appreciate sport as its difficulty
increases, and a bag that was good enough for the great Duke of
Wellington and for Colonel Peter Hawker ought to be good enough for any
of us if we desire to feel ourselves sportsmen. The author has no word
to urge against big bags except this: they cannot form a feature of
everyday life for many, if for any of us, and sport can—provided the
anxiety to make big bags because they are the fashion does not destroy
our love of sport for its own sake. The writer confesses to being one of
those selfish creatures who is supremely happy if he has satisfied his
own critical spirit, even in such trifles as a day’s unwitnessed sport
over dogs, the stalking of a blackcock or of a stag, the capture of a
reluctant trout, or the killing of half a score of driven grouse out of
a pack without a miss. He is well aware that either of these may be the
harder to accomplish according to circumstances, and his pleasure is
based on the absence of anything that might have been done better. Once
in his life he sent a stag’s head to a taxidermist, and then changed his
mind and would not have it home; and once or twice he has counted his
kills during a day, but never made a written note of them. It has always
appeared to the author that sport is its own reward, and that records
are rather sad reading, and trophies create memories of the noble dead,
and not always pleasant ones. It seems easier to take an interest in
other people’s records than in one’s own, and to admire trophies that
one did not victimise.
Surely a true spirit of sport may be the possession of one whose whole
household idols are his gun and rifle, and whose total impedimenta are a
portmanteau and gun-case. The greater one’s belongings, and the more one
grows to care for them, the less ready one becomes to go far afield for
sport, and the more one is inclined to cling to old memories, even
without the assistance of trophies and private written records.
Feats of sport that can be forgotten are not worth remembering, for if
enjoyment depended upon the size of the bag or the grandeur of a trophy,
every day in which the old record was not beaten would be a day lost,
whereas, in sport for its own sake alone, every triviality is supreme
for the time being, and one is as keen for small things or great at
sixty as at sixteen, although—and more is the pity—a great deal more
self-critical.
The author has not ventured to trouble the possible reader with these
personal reflections without a purpose—a purpose of making small things
interesting, if that may be in an atmosphere of fashion and big bags.
An American prairie chicken and a quail are very small birds, and
nowhere are they to be had in the abundance of Norfolk partridges or
Yorkshire grouse. But they are as keenly pursued as any game in this
country, and the writer was at least as gratified with small-bag
successes as he has ever been with bigger bags in this country.
There are many reasons for the appreciation of even small bags of
prairie chicken or quail. One is that the birds are for the most part
for those who can find them. The actual shooting is so much the smaller
matter. You find yourself on a prairie apparently as big and as flat as
the Pacific Ocean. In the far distance you may observe a thin line of
smoke as of a steamer hull down; you guess it at 10 miles, expecting to
be told you have doubled the distance. Instead, you are informed it is
the Trans-Continental railway train, which you know to be 40 miles away
by the map. You may shoot to it, driving your waggon all the way, as the
dogs work to the sky-lines on either side of you, never stopping until
they get a point or come to the waggon for water. When they do point,
you drive to them, it may be a mile, before taking the gun from its case
and descending from the waggon. You judge of your dogs, not by their
“treading up” the game, but by their sense in only hunting the habitat
of game, and by the instinctive straightness of their course, first to
the whereabouts of birds, and second to the game itself. With that 40
miles of unbeaten prairie in front, you are not reluctant to leave
behind unbeaten ground that your dogs repudiate, especially as you see
they do believe in what lies ahead, and you have reason to know that
they are as reliable in their sense of “bird ground” as in their powers
of smelling the game itself. The Americans value them for the former
most uncommon quality, which they call “bird sense.” In practice it
means both the greatest expenditure and economy of canine energy.
Change the locality to the South, in those winter months when all the
Frozen North is mantled in white, and when the Ohio and the big lakes
are solid ice. The autumn has passed, and Christmas has come and gone,
before a shot is fired at the quail on many plantations. The brush has
been too thick, to say nothing of the standing corn and the cotton, into
which it is not “good form” to ride. You have exchanged your waggon for
a saddle-horse. The flat prairie has given place to much broken and
rolling ground, much natural covert, but distances are still wide; quail
are plentiful for these parts. That is to say, there may be a brood to
every 500 acres, perhaps to every 100 acres. As your dogs are sent off,
you take care that they are not deceived as to the way you are riding.
They will have no other indication as to your whereabouts in half an
hour’s time, by when they will assuredly have been seen once or twice.
Their sense of locality now becomes of as great importance as their bird
sense. If they had not the former, they could either not go out of
sight, or, doing so, would be lost. They may be the other side a hill
and through a wood and half a mile away, but they can come straight back
to you from any point, provided you ride straight. If you turn when they
are out of sight, you defeat them, and they lose you. In such country as
this it is not surprising that one school of shooters prefer what they
call close ranging dogs, which, however, are not quarterers, but merely
dogs of lesser courage, or those that fear to be lost. But, every other
quality being equal, the field trials are won by the fastest stayers of
the wide ranging variety, but such as do _not_ lose themselves and _do_
find game. In the Champion Stake for previous field trial winners that I
assisted to judge in 1904, the rules insist on three-hour heats, and in
practice competition demands these heats to be run at top speed
throughout; but this speed in no sense means racing, but the most
strenuous hunting for game.
Although the close ranging school condemn high ranging on various
grounds, it is interesting to note that when they breed a litter of
puppies the sires they use are those which have won these Champion
Stakes. They are wise enough to know that, given the natural canine
energy in their young dogs, they can turn it to advantage either in
close or wide ranging, or merely in staying longer at a slower pace.
The broods of quail are not easy to find, because of the strenuous
canine work required to cover so much ground, and the bird sense
necessary to enable the dogs to select the right ground on which to
hunt. When the brood is found and flushed, it scatters. Then any slow
dog can find the scattered birds, and this is when the bag is filled;
but it is not the valued canine quality, for the very reason that it is
common property, whereas bird sense, sense of locality, and covey
finding in the highest degree, are rare traits by comparison.
One day when the writer was shooting in Tennessee, his host had out
three handlers of dogs, each mounted, and each working a brace of field
trial winning setters at a time, with frequent changes. The sound of the
horn was indicative of a point, and a long gallop had frequently to be
taken to get to it. When the beat is in progress, the horses usually
travel at a fox trot, or about six miles an hour. But even six crack
dogs proved none too many for sport, so scarce are quail in some parts,
and in this particular part they fairly swarmed in comparison with much
of the Frozen North.
These high-couraged dogs that seem to take no hint from their handlers,
but to think entirely for themselves, nevertheless have but to see their
handler off his horse to take it for a signal to quarter the ground
closely for scattered quail, or to hunt like a retriever for dead birds.
Then upon the handler mounting again, their natures seem to change upon
the instant, and they shoot off in a mighty hurry to make some cast that
they have had “in mind” probably all the time they have been doing what
is called “bird work,” as tamely as and obediently as any English field
trialer.
Some people look upon this riding to pointers and setters as new, and
think these dogs were never intended for any such purpose. On the other
hand, it appears probable that they could not have invented their bird
sense and sense of locality, which are doubtless instinctive and
hereditary. It is the fashion to think our ancestors were slow in their
movements. So they were, no doubt, when they could not be quick, but
others besides Colonel Hawker knew the advantage of bustling along after
partridges by means of a shooting pony and quick pointers; and others
besides Joe Manton have found that “going slow” was not the royal road
to success, nor buttermilk as good for pointers as for points. It was
not fair of the Colonel to prepare certain failure by means of
buttermilk. Used in this way, the shooting pony in conjunction with
pointers and setters is not often seen now in England, but it certainly
was very common when the ridable portions of the country were mostly
shot by the assistance of those dogs. It is probable, therefore, that
this American form of shooting, brought to perfection there by means of
field trials, is really more like English shooting at the dawn of the
nineteenth century than our own shooting over dogs is like it.
But whether that is so or not, the writer is certain that this strenuous
work is the right method to maintain the generations of the dog, and
that there would be no sense in the theory of evolution if these
Champions were not the best dogs to breed from. At any rate, although
the Americans owe to us all their breeds of pointers and setters, no
recent importations have been able to win there, and, on the other hand,
the first American cross-breds to be brought over have annexed some of
our field trials. The reference is to Mr. A. Hall’s Guiniard Shot and
Dash, victors in a brace stake in 1905, and good enough with a little
luck, and in the hands of any but a novice, to have beaten the best
running in our trials that year, although they were only four days over
the age of puppies when they competed against old dogs.
Another charming method of shooting is found still farther South, in
Georgia, where there are vast areas of pine forests and quail in them.
Here it is common to _drive_ through the pathless woods. The waggons are
often driven over a fallen tree that to English eyes seems to bar the
way. It is an article of faith that if the horse can get over, the buggy
will follow.
There is naturally a limit to one’s range of vision amongst straight
stems, although there is no brushwood to interfere, and the way free
rangers when upon the point are found in these woods, as also in the
brushwood outside, is by means of other dogs; there may be half a dozen
hunting together, and several spare animals in the buggy. If careful
watching does not discover the last direction taken by the dog on point,
it will do so of one or other of the backing dogs, and, failing that,
another is turned out to look for the out-of-sight brigade. January
sport is like driving in the English pine districts on an early
September day, and shooting partridges in the woods (for the “quail” or
“bob-whites” are partridges, and not quail) and the bracing freshness of
the pine-laden air has, with good reason, caused New York fashion to
winter in the pine districts of Georgia, of which Thomasville is a good
specimen, for sport and health.
Since writing the above, a puppy the author selected in America in 1904,
then eight months old and unentered, has beaten all the pointers and
setters at the grouse trials on Lord Home’s beautiful Lanarkshire moors,
in August 1906. This is Captain H. Heywood Lonsdale’s Ightfield Rob Roy,
and very fully confirms a view expressed above, that the severest tests
are the best for keeping up a breed. This dog comes of the remarkably
in-bred race referred to in the chapter on English setters, and it need
not be mentioned further, except to say that the pure breed as
first-rate performers came to an end in this country owing to
in-breeding, without at the same time selecting as severely for vitality
as the field trial system does in America. Selection has negatived the
well-known influence of in-breeding in everything except in size. This
pure bred in-bred race was originated over there by the author’s
selection for Americans of dogs all descended from those six setters
named in the chapter on English setters, and picked and recommended from
the kennels of the late Mr. Tom Statter, the late Mr. Laverack, the late
Mr. Barclay Field, Mr. Purcell Llewellin, and others. In the exported
originals they were Laverack and Rhœbe crosses, like Mr. Barclay Field’s
Rock on the one hand; Laveracks, like Mr. Laverack’s Victress (Dash and
Moll); Laverack and Rhœbe crosses like the late Mr. Statter’s Rob Roy;
Duke and Rhœbe crosses bred by Mr. Statter, of which strain two big
bitches were sent out; and others of the three crosses, Duke, Rhœbe, and
Laveracks, like Mr. Llewellin’s Druid and his Count Noble. The demand
for them arose in consequence of some letters the author had written in
the American sporting press referring to the superiority of these three
strains over any others of that period. The author even ventured to give
them a title, namely “the Field Trial breed,” and that was the sole
reason why they were kept uncrossed with other blood in America. It is
this uncrossed blood that is represented in Captain Heywood Lonsdale’s
Rob Roy, but that this race of in-breds is still valuable (and in
America by far the most valuable) is owing to those three-hour stamina
trials by which the sires are selected. It was because of the severity
of those tests that the writer felt sure that he could select in America
superior material to any our breakers have to work upon. That idea was
not very popular when it was first stated some five years ago; but those
who had taken the opposite view were generous when they saw Rob Roy’s
performance, and, as one of them remarked, they “took it all back.” The
crosses of this energetic strain cannot fail to improve our setters, and
if we could only import the severity of selection of the best winners by
further more severe stamina trials, we should not be long behind
America. There the breed has a Stud Book registration to itself, for
which any cross whatever disqualifies. They are registered as “Llewellin
setters,” which was for some reason substituted for the “Field Trial
breed” which the author had given. In conversation they are spoken of in
America as “straight-bred,” and in England the best designation is “the
American straight-bred setters,” since it is necessary to know that we
are not speaking of the same breed as Mr. Llewellin’s recent field trial
representatives, which are crossed, and could not be registered in the
American Stud Book as Llewellin setters or straight-bred ones. About
thirty-five field trials for pointers and setters are held every year in
America, and honours rarely, if ever, fall on any other race except
setters, either straight-bred or having 90 per cent. of the blood, and
on the pointers.