Be prepared for long walks in chukar country, where a compass and good pair of boots are more essential than a fancy shotgun.

That's why most late-season chukar hunters, unlike their early-season counterparts, work the ridgelines and rimrocks. If you're already as high as you can go, it makes it that much easier to descend downhill to flush a covey. However, ridgelines and rimrocks are one thing; cliffs are another. Perfectly gradual slopes can, and often do, lead to sheer dropoffs that have an unsettling way of appearing under your feet seconds before you step off into space. More than a few dogs have been badly injured or killed when they chased a covey into thin air. I've arrived at a compromise, sort of, I hunt the base of the cliffs, not the tops of them. That avoids at least some of the problems with careless dogs I might otherwise have. It also prevents me from taking shots at birds bailing off cliffs that I have no reasonable hope of retrieving.

Chukars love to dive off their lofty perches, presenting a shot at an angling, downhill-trending bird moving at subsonic speed, one of the toughest shots in all of wingshooting. I'll tell you how to connect on shots like that as soon as I hit one myself.

That's only a slight exaggeration. This fall Powder struck scent a few dozen yards below a rocky escarpment. After several hundred feet of weaving in and out of clefts in the rock, she finally pinned the bird on a bench between two piles of rubble. I snuck around a boulder and approached from above, figuring that, at long last, I had a bird dead to rights. Instead, it flushed twenty yards to one side, and I saw it sailing away just in time to snap off a shot. Nothing about the bird's flight gave any indication that I'd connected, but something--a sixth sense?--made me wonder. I called Powder in and the two of us struck off in the direction the bird had flown. Two hundred yards later, she slammed into a point. I edged ahead. When nothing flushed, she charged forward and began furiously working scent. A second later, the wounded chukar skittered out from under her, and with two leaps my plucky little Brit had the bird in her jaws.

I've yet to see a chukar behave in the same way twice in a row, but there's one thing you can always count on: The walking will be tough, rocky and difficult. So here's the first of two things you should never do: Never wear ill-fitting boots. If you need to cut corners, buy a cheap shotgun, which will prevent your good gun from being beat to splinters in the rocks. Then use the money you save to buy the best, most comfortable boots you can afford. More than almost anything else you take with you, good boots will keep you hunting.

Rule Two? Apply Rule One to your dogs. No dog, no matter how tough you think his feet are, he can't run over lava rock, granite, and basalt for long without grinding his pads into hamburger. I've tried most of the dog boots on the market, some of which work and some of which aren't worth the shrink-wrapped plastic they're sold in, but for good, cheap protection, you can't beat bicycle inner tubes. My thirty-five- to forty-five-pound dogs use downhill mountain bike tubes. Tape them to the lower leg and let them run long past the dog's toes, or better yet, fold them back up and over the foot and tape them again. When the "soles" wear out, turn the worn side up and you'll get another day or two of use out of them.

The bottom line is that you have to walk to find birds, no matter how far into the boonies you drive first. Chukars, I've determined, just don't live near roads. Except when they do.

On my last hunt of the season, my youngest setter dragged me over a mountainside covered with chukar tracks and chukar droppings, but alas, no chukars. Then, as we were walking along a road and just seventy-five yards from my truck, I kicked up a covey that fluttered into rocks twenty feet above my head. A half-hour later, two of those birds were cooling their heels in the back of my vest.

So I was wrong about the road thing, but you can trust me on this: There is nothing--nothing--like chukar hunting.