Chukar Hunting the Old Way

My long- time Canadian hunting correspondent, Alex Sharif, who I met through Valerius Geist, is primarily a sheep hunter and a mountaineer. But when he sent me a few photos from his cousin Afshin in Idaho,I was intrigued. Afshin is a Goshawker, and he hunts Chukar in the kind of country they have always inhabited, in Central Asia, where everything is vertical He put us in touch, and Afshin sent me this exciting portfolio,as well as a couple of short YouTubes that show his young Elhew pointer and the difficulties of hunting that terrain- watch the bird plunge into the abysss.

Zhinoo points

The proud falconer (technicaly of course, "austringer") with Tooran- two hawk's profiles!

Great Dog Pic

Daniel's Boone and Maggie nap.

Tim Murphy

In a just world, North Dakota's Tim Murphy would be not just the Poet Laureate of his beautiful Siberian state, our truest North; he would be the Poet Laureate of the USA. Good (but lesser) honored real poets, like Dana Gioia, know and say this,..

But like any cradle Catholic, even one lapsed or "relapsed", he knows this is not a just world. Nevertheless, he sings his songs...

Besides, says the academy, he writes poems about HUNTING DOGS. Says I, so did the Greeks.

Tim has honored me by giving me some of his yet unpublished longer poems, and one for Easter Week. But I thought I would start with these four, from his Hunter's Log, one of my "Book of Books" 100. Resist if you can...

And NO, I am not going to TYPE them!

I will put the third on Ataika's grave if I live long enough.

More to come..

Weekend Doggage

Daniel, with his new Civil War beard, trains one of his astonishingly beautiful pointers, art married to genes... look at that tail!

More Doggage

Daniel Riviera's younger pointer is not as well- mannered as Boone (see below).

Meanwhile,  in Laramie, Carlos and his dogs take a walk and a nap: "They ran up the trail and came back, laughing the contagious laughter of dogs in snow..."

Doggage # 1

Before Nhubia and company: Mark's wirehairs in the early eighties, and the first alligator they retrieved, in a damper part of Texas...

A little more photoblogging...

From Scott McNeff,  to cheer us all by demonstrating how a bird (Sharpshin "Boomer") and a dog (viszla "Fran", after Fran Hamerstrom) can bond quite on their own.

He writes: "... One day last week, "Boomer" caught a bird on the wing - the dog had steadied up at the flush, and I watched as the little hawk carried his catch back around to the dog and landed beside her with it so that he could eat his reward.  He has been a really fun little hawk to fly.  In truth, he brings me more joy each day than anything else that I do."

Another Poet

Tim Murphy is not just one of our finest living poets, and the only one I know who celebrates what I have called "our Siberia", the chilly plains of North Dakota. He is a living rebuke to stereotypes: a farmer, a businessman, a Yale graduate who studied under Robert Penn Warren; a classicist who writes about dogs; a gay man who is a practicing Catholic; perhaps above all, at least for subjects, a passionate bird hunter who has written the only poetry collection I know of that is dedicated to hunting. I have written about him in my book of one hundred books. Here he talks about all these subjects and more on North Dakota TV.

Training

Very busy and a bit under the weather, so expect photos and no long text. Here are pics of Daniel's recent training. Call me provincial-- I didn't know they had places like that in California.

"A Pointer of the Veronese School"

The words are Datus Proper's; the dog Daniel Riviera's Vi:

Speaking of pretty guns...

Andrew, using my former Grant, has a great day in the field.

"It's taken dumber birds already, but the Grant got its first wild birds today -- and in style, limiting out on sharptail on our first day out.

"It was a rough day with winds gusting well over 20mph.  Despite being on private land that we've run on a bunch of times and should in theory know where the birds are, three dogs didn't find anything in the first 2.5hours -- including Momo and Jozsi who you've met.  I put down Dog #4, the bitch we co-own and a very nice dog in her own right, and we immediately started trailing a covey for over a mile, never getting closer than about 75yds in my guess.  I actually watched them fly off of their own free will (we were downwind, they couldn't hear us) and turned upwind to back towards the truck.  We hit a scattered covey of five -- but being wrong-sided on the wind, the poor dog didn't scent the first two contacts, but being well mannered stopped on the first bird's flush and as I walked in, shot the second bird (twice), and then she finally was able to get a point in on a third and the rest is history."

Hunt & Doggish News

Not a dove on the plateau here--- though major elk season is started. But Daniel Riviera is coming down through Montana after training in ND...

With Bailey & ancient hammer Purdey, a happy man...

(Last photo by Katherine)

And though it is still hot in Alpaugh, it is almost time to run. John Burchard still has a couple of Russo- Arabian pups to go-- nice examples of the breeding theories below, with Kazakh Semirichenia and COO Arab hounds genes wedded in their ancestry.

Very Good Dog!

One breed I no longer have but continue to love is the field English springer. Here is a photo of Jerry Scoville's little Springer Skookum last season, who has retrieved way more than his weight in geese. He is no Chessie-- he weighs around 28 pounds, like Taik.

Says Jerry: "He slept for ~30 hours after chasing geese all day.  In this image he is with 15 white-cheeked geese.  Snow, and White-fronted Geese were also harvested.  Skookum weighs in at 27-to-29 pounds, and the big geese weighs in at 8--to-12 pounds.  He has to run backwards when bringing big geese to hand over uneven terrain." He actually retrieved 38 in all, because he was the only dog working all that day!

Jerry likes 10 bores-- maybe he will send pics of one too.

For a good springer read try A Rough Shooting Dog by Charles Fergus,  # 36 in the Book o' Books .

Need I say no change in TOWN water, though it is beginning to look like monsoons are imminent.

Dog Quote

"Dogs are like people. Not too literally, of course, but in the sense that the dog population contains a virtually infinite range of individuals – distinctive in physical structure, temperament and past experience. As a group, they are more loyal, more forgiving, more generous, yet less neurotic than people. Our relationship with each of them will be different; and it will be dynamic and change every day. We can make many generalizations about dogs, just as we can about people; but we must be thankful, rather than upset, when something works with one dog and doesn't with another. It is this powerful range of individual variation that makes bird dogs of sustaining interest for a lifetime."

Earl Crangle, via Daniel Riviera

Christmas with Dogs Plus: Daniel

D and his team are returned from the High Plains to the wine country. My big computer is down for repair; our own Christmas stuff plus a whole lot of book reviews will return through the weekend...

Pointing Dogs

There are breeds other than tazis that I love, and places other than New Mexico. Daniel Riviera's team is on the Northern Plains.

Upland season

Reader and friend Kirk Hogan from Wisconsin evokes the essence of a northern upland season in a few terse sentences...

14 - hours hunted in 2 days (losing light)
8 - small Brittanies, 3 probably from Herve's original lines
43 - flushes per 5 minute rule (5 minutes between flushes, so probably not re-flushes of the same bird)
28 - fiery points (an amazing number of points in a year one - year off cycle lows, with next peak predicted 2019 - 2020)
14 - birds shot at (towards)
10 - Hail Mary's (prayers in thick balsam fir trees)
3 - to eat (butter, salt, pepper, a little calva, wild rice)
1- shameful shot (too early on a bird that could count to two, and then flew around in the open for a while)
1- shameful non-shot (gloved thumb slide over safety on rare easy one)
2 - maledictions (including math whiz grouse)
3 - pounds gone
7 - elk from remnant herd re-introduced in early 80s to bright hopes for future hunt now wolf chow
1 - wolf track, scat, and ADD Brittany, probably beaver hunting, cleared out of cover
0 - newly damaged joints
6 - ibuprofen lunch
The weather is dicey, the days short, the sport, company and aesthetics unlike anything.

Also see Shooting in Brittany for the dogs and food.

Heidi Brown, 1999- 2012

George Calef's great old Labrador Heidi Brown, who was based in Whitehorse in the Yukon but hunted all over North America, has died at thirteen. She probably hunted more species than any other living dog; here are some thoughts from George.

"Heidi Brown passed away early this morning in the cabin she loved, and knew as home, secure and peaceful in Brodie’s arms. She was born on the Ides of March 1999 so she was 13 year 6 months and 16 days old, and had begun her 14th hunting season, in a career that began with two green winged teal on the Big Salmon river when she was 6 mo old and ended with a fool hen here in her home valley, which we will have for dinner tonight. As of last Dec. Heidi had hunted and retrieved 65 of the 73 species of legal gamebirds in North America. With the possible exception of Virginia rail and Trumpeter swan, I figure the remaining 8 species have no bird dog tradition associated with them, and in the case of Chachalaca and Snow Cock, a dog would even be a liability instead of an asset. She hunted everywhere from the winter prairies of Canada, where she retrieved in icy, whitewater rivers, and sat in wind chills of -80, to the deserts of Arizona where she bravely held up her paws for me to pull out cactus thorns. She dove out of a boat 15 miles offshore in the winter Atlantic and swam hundreds of yards for ducks she couldn’t even see, simply because I told her to, and she had faith that I would be there to pull her in when she came back. She fought her way through water hyacinth too thick to swim through in alligator infested swamps in the Deep South. As Steve Bodio once told me: 'Heidi is the luckiest dog that ever lived.' "

"Some good "Doggie" news !"

...writes John Hill, "Johnny UK" of Norfolk: an anecdotal antidote to the gloom in the post below.

"It was the Finals Day at the Wildfowlers Gundog Training classes yesterday... June decided to come as well, as she had been to a few classes, and wanted to see how Poppy competed... We all registered,and were all given numbers - pretty formal! Poppy did pretty well, I thought, stopping on the whistle, being directed.

"The judges then called back two dogs for a runoff-- Poppy was one! There was a toss- up for a first runoff, and the Judges marked them equally... so they set a more difficult task, and we tossed again for first try.

"The other guy, with an 18- month old, huge, yellow dog, was a professional "picker up" on shoots, and won the toss, so went first. His dog missed the long- distance dummy, thrown over a ditch with a pistol shot, into long cover... waiting patiently, and steadily, Poppy , 15 months, marked hers perfectly, went straight to it, but lost it in the cover. I stopped her on the whistle, sent her to the spot, she made a perfect retrieve, and was adjudged "FIRST!".

"Only time I have entered a dog into a working test, and she won !! I have a trophy for the year, a bag of Skinners dog food, and a plastic trophy to keep, but it might as well been solid gold!! Bit like winning the Olympics!!"

I must scan some pix of John here in the "old days".

Jean Craighead George and Jim Marti: RIP

Old friends and heroes are dying faster than I can write about them. Jean Craighead George, author of one of my favorite childhood books*, My Side of the Mountain, and sister to the even better- known conservationists and falconers , the twin brothers Frank and John, died last week at 92. NYT here , Wiki here , her own home site here.

Jim Marti of North Dakota was a few years older than me, and not only the best trainer of pointing dogs, mostly setters, that I ever knew, and author of the best contemporary training manual, but a better novelist and storyteller than most in his generation. He circulated his manuscripts like Samizdat among his friends and laughed about selling them; his Dog Town, funny and poignant and tough- minded, was as good or better than most that sold and were praised in reviews. Apparently he and his partner Jet Collins had some difficult health problems the last few years, but I never heard a word of complaint. If you know her, or if you just appreciate good dogs and writing, drop her a card; Baldwin ND would probably get there, but I will send you an address.

* When I told Frank that his family had been one of the biggest influences on my life, at the brother's 80th birthday party in Jackson Hole, he quavered (he had advanced Parkinson's): "We-e- ell... I h- h- h- hope we d-d-d didn't r- ruin it entirely!"