The eastern Iowa weatherman continued to ramble on as I hit the off button and sat down to put another pair of thermal long underwear over the first pair. "You're really going outside in this?" my wife asked in the tone she uses when I'm about to do something stupid.

It was cold, no doubt about it--and not just your normal, everyday cold, but an eastern Iowa cold, complete (of course) with a relentless northwest wind that combined to drop temperatures to around the -20 to -30 degree mark. Airports in the Midwest, including Omaha and Midway, had been closed due to the extraordinarily low thermometer readings. Cars wouldn't start, buses didn't run.

"Yep," I told Julie as I shrugged into a pair of insulated Carhartt bibs and pulled an orange toque down over my ears. The birds have to be somewhere, I told her, and Maggie--our go anywhere, anytime black Lab--doesn't mind the cold. "We're going just across the street, and if we get cold, we'll come home." She just shook her head and walked away.

Stepping out the back door, I quickly learned that the weatherman had been right: It was brutal. But as I'd assumed, Maggie was ready to go and didn't hesitate to jump onto the shotgun seat of my grandpa's old Chevy pickup, which, surprisingly enough, turned over and started. The five-minute run to our first field did nothing to shake the chill I'd collected in the short walk to the rig, but the sight of a big rooster ducking into the sawgrass and cattails along the creek warmed things up in a hurry.

Opening my door, I quickly slipped into my vest and dropped a pair of high brass No. 5s into the over/under. "Easy, Maggie," I whispered. She'd seen the cockbird too and was trying to wiggle herself in half while simultaneously squeezing out through the two-inch gap at the top of the window.

Putting my ace assistant at heel, I walked through the six inches of snow at the edge of the cut cornfield until I cut the rooster's track where he'd disappeared into the thick cover. "Get 'im," I quietly told Maggie, who immediately broke and bull-chested her way into the waist-high grass. As I suspected, the old cockbird hadn't gone far--they often don't in cold like this--and it wasn't 10 seconds before the raucous cackling of a highly agitated rooster pheasant broke the bitterly cold air.

Even with the advance warning, I still had a bit of accuracy trauma with the bottom barrel, but the top tube found its mark, and the bird crumpled onto the frozen surface of the creek, a contrail of brightly colored feathers left in his wake. Violently shaking grasstops told of Maggie's progress, and within a second or two she appeared at the field edge, the bird clenched in her jaws.

"Let's find another one, Mag" I told the Lab. I stuffed the rooster into my game bag and discovered that my plastic water bottle, room temperature when I'd left the house not 20 minutes earlier, had already turned to slush ice. That's cold.

A half hour later, our opening scene was repeated, and with our second bird in the bag, we headed for home.