Just before I was old enough to carry a gun, we lost our last great hunting Irish setter. We had dogless years, and perhaps worse years with crazy show-bred Irishmen, before we switched to Englishmen. In those years, I learned to mark birds and hunt dead. But on that first quail I hadn’t yet learned these things. So we searched endlessly for that bird my grandfather hadn’t seen fall. He understood its importance. Finally we found it, tucked under a bit of yellow grass, sweet-smelling from milo.

As young hunters we have quantitative measures of success. It takes seasoning to understand that numbers don’t matter much and, sadly, some of us never learn. A couple of years later, what I wanted most in the world was to take a limit of bobwhite quail--eight birds. It was Thanksgiving Day, on the same Ridgeway farm. I think we had one of the crazy Irishmen that we worked with so hard, and I think he worked reasonably well that day. Or perhaps the quail just cooperated. A covey spread out in sedge grass on a finger where two little creeks joined. We had several good points, and when cutoff for Thanksgiving dinner approached, I was pretty sure I had shot eight birds all by myself.

I was never as conservative as Dad in my shooting, so another day I will never forget was my first clean double. I was sixteen and driving, and I had the best bird dog of my life. My grandfather had owned a beautiful, brushy farm in Leavenworth County, his father’s homestead. He sold it before I can remember, and there was some issue with the folks who bought it, but I didn’t know about any of that. I only know that, as a teenager wandering county roads with Sam, my English setter, very few farmers turned me away. So, in my rambling, I chanced across Tom Holton’s farm. He had a dairy herd, and much of the farm was fallow with broad hedgerows and fencelines and a couple of wonderfully dirty creek bottoms. It was lousy with quail, and I wondered why Dad grew oddly silent when I described my find.

Sam and I were working along a weedy ditch just below the ruins of my great-grandfather’s farmhouse when he went on a solid point. I knew by the way he held his tail that it was a big covey, the quail scent so strong he wanted to die. The birds broke right, swinging across a cut soybean field. Shooting a Spanish side-by-side, I dropped the first bird with the open barrel. Breaking Dad’s rule, I kept swinging and caught a second bird with the choke barrel.

Sam had the best nose of any dog I’ve known, and when he pointed he never lied. He died too young, but in the late ‘60s through the mid-70s Sam had a lot of birds shot over him. He was gifted to perfection, and a perfect dog deserves his eccentricities. Hunting dead was a bore, retrieving to hand a demeaning chore. He hunted live, I hunted dead, the pact long established. So he found the first bird of that first double, and he went on to look for the next covey. I found the second one, and there was no point in scolding him. This was early in our relationship, but we both understood our arrangement.