The Complete English Wing Shot

by George Teasdale Teasdale-Buckell

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.