The best dog is one that adapts to its master’s temperament and style of hunting, and while I marvel at the English pointers and setters, such dogs have always tiptoed beyond the horizons of my hearing within hours of my owning them, and from that moment on I have had to blow up my face to get their attention. Now that I have retired my sneakers they are no longer right for me. I want a dog that hunts about a hundred yards or so on either side of me and passes within gun range each time it checks in. I usually have an idea where the birds are and would just as soon have Biff go where I tell him to. Not a workable agenda when dealing with the tightly strung violins of dogdom.
Now, when I hunt, I like to think about things like how the trees have grown, the last time I slept with a strange woman, the direction of the wind, and what wine I’m going to drink with dinner; killing is a formality. When I hunt with another person, I want to listen to and talk to that person—otherwise I wouldn’t hunt with him. I want to stop if I choose to without losing the dog or having to hack at it to keep it on a level course. I have done all those things, and after a decade of getting just as pissed off as I did when I played golf, I bought the Brittany with hopes that I won’t feel the fingers of retribution crawl up my backside each time the dog is out of sight. It all comes down to the man and what he wants from his dog. In my case I plan to hunt behind pointers and setters until the day I retire my guns, but they will belong to someone else.
One can argue that, performed with a measure of dignity and restraint, hunting is just as important an issue now as it was three hundred years ago, but for opposite reasons. Hunting is no longer a survival issue for man, but has become a survival issue for the game, because while we have multiplied like rabbits, the game has dwindled tenfold. Our importance as hunters lies in the fact that we as individuals, without affiliations to anything or anyone other than the sport, witness and assess the condition of the game and habitat in this country. Our credentials are that we are out there, in nature, when others are not, and that we are out there because we want to be, not because we have to or are paid to be. Our eyes solicit the traceries of spoors on the earth and of birds in the sky; our spirits are conscious of ravens and long for the restitution of wolves and bears to the land. We are the wildlife thermometers, poking about in rivers and swamps, in the shadows of forest canopies, under the flashes of desert suns, and the force that drives us is our soul.
We hunters, more than any other group on earth, should understand the symbiotic relationship between species and how it has come to pass that, thanks to our destructive meddling, the reflection of a teal on a pond is no longer free of charge. Those of us who understand the complex nature of a teal’s life, the protection and food needed to grow the feathers that send that image darting over the water, also understand what the chase and the kill do to the spirit of man, their rewards and their shames. Because we understand and feel these things more acutely than our peers, it is sacrilegious of us not to protect with all our might what resources remain to be saved. If we neglect our obligations, we deserve the contempt of generations to come.