What do I mean by efficient hunters? How about getting four pheasants with three
shots in less than 20 minutes? It really
happened. Keep reading for the details.
There were five humans with two shotguns and four
dogs. The four dogs were Jolie (the
model for Juliet in my current WIP, "The Deadly Dog Show"), her daughter Schöne (who has, by far, the best nose for
birds in the family), her brother Tyger, and Cloud, a friend’s English Pointer. We were hunting just before the end of the
season so it was pretty crowded and the fields had been pretty thoroughly
hunted over before we got there. We didn’t expect to see (m)any birds on this
hunt.
About two minutes walk into the field brought us to a
German Shorthaired Pointer (GSP) scrum.
Schöne was on a rock hard point, with Jolie and Tyger honoring her
point. Cloud was wandering somewhere
else—she didn’t have the nose of the GSPs.
Someone kicked the bird to flush it, a shot rang out, and we had a bird
falling out of the sky being retrieved by a GSP. Off went the dogs and less than two minutes
later we had another point by Schöne and a replay of the first scene. Less than a minute later Schöne found the
third bird and the scene was repeated once again.
At this point we had three birds in three shots in about
6 minutes. Things quieted down quite a
bit until ten minutes or so later when Elaine noticed that Jolie was
missing. In the terrain we were walking
through, that probably meant she was hunting in one of the irrigation ditches
that lined the field. Elaine tried to
call her in to where we were. No answer,
no response. She whistled a recall.
Jolie
suddenly materialized in a clump of high grass where she had been on a solid
point. There was no way she was going to
come back to us without her bird. She
pounced, got the bird in her mouth, and brought it back to us in perfectly good
condition---no bird shot, no tooth marks.
We
got four birds with three shots in less than twenty minutes. All true!
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