Part 26

A few years ago, Mr. B. J. Warwick was winning all before him in the field with setters of very small size. The blood of most of them was a blend of all the sorts named above except the American strain. That is, they were descended from Ranger on one side and from the late Mr. Heywood Lonsdale’s sort on the other. They were beautifully broken, had for the most part capital noses and plenty of sense, but few of them are likely to breed dogs better than themselves, because they mostly lacked external form and size. Many of them were bred by Mr. Elias Bishop, who ran a better sort in the Puppy Stakes in the spring of 1906,—Ightfield Mac,—more fitted, in his then form, for American than for English field trials. The demand there is for a dog; here it is a little too much for a breaker. It is a question whether allowance enough is made at field trials for the indiscretions of youth. The consequence of judging puppies as if they were old dogs is that, when they become so, they are not a very high-couraged lot, and the winning puppies seldom become mature cracks.

There is plenty of evidence that the encouragement of docility instead of determination in puppies has done more to run down English setters than even in-breeding itself. The doer of the most brilliant work will go out if he makes one mistake. In practice there is always a duffer that does not make one.

That is the worst thing that can be said against field trials, and it has only been true of late years. The old style of judging was to select the most brilliant worker for highest honours, and under it English setters made rapid strides.

This handicapping of great capacity goes farther than merely turning a dog out for a trivial fault. The judges often seem to demand a dog with small capacity—that is, compared with the old demand. Here is a comparative instance. In 1870, when Drake the pointer won the Champion Stake, he and a competitor were turned off in a field through which there ran a line of hurdles cutting the field in two. Drake disregarded the hurdles and beat the field as if there had been none, and did the whole field in the same time that his competitor took to do the half—that is, only one side the hurdles. He did not scramble it, but methodically quartered every inch. Precisely the same kind of field occurred at the National Trials in 1906; but when Pitchford Duke got through the hurdles, his handler, knowing the feeling of judges generally, ran after him, whistling and shouting, to get him back to do the 150 yards wide strip that the hurdles divided from the bulk of the field. It is true that Pitchford Duke did not make as if he was going to quarter the whole field in Drake’s style, but had it been Drake himself the breaker would probably have done just as he did for Duke, and scolded him for what was held to show brains and capacity in 1870 by some of the best sportsmen in the country who were acting as judges, and at a time when everybody knew what dogs should do, because everybody used them.

However, it is dangerous to say a word by way of criticism of an institution to which we owe it that setters and pointers have been preserved at all. We should have had no dog with a will to imitate Drake had it not existed. The only object of saying anything is to appeal for a little more value for “class,” and a little less for trick performers. It is very difficult to give effect to a wish of this sort in judging, because faults are facts, and facts are stubborn things; whereas class is generally, but not always, a matter of opinion, on which judges may hold conflicting views. The author was once hunting a brace of setters at the National Trials, and they had done such remarkable work that the late Sir Vincent Corbet, who was judging, was heard to tell someone “that black-headed dog has been finding birds in the next parish.” Much of this work had been done under the slope of a hill, where the spectators could not see it; they had formed a semicircle at the other end of the last field that the brace had to do, and the black-headed dog came up the field, treating as a fence the line of spectators who had formed up 100 yards or so within the field. He hunted up to their toes before turning along the line, and dropped to a point within 10 yards of several hundred people, who had been standing there so long that they were obviously and audibly quite sure there was nothing at the point. When the author came up, he could not move the pointing dog; the latter evidently thought he was too near already, and he had a brace of partridges, much to everybody’s surprise. This dog, Sable Bondhu by name, was the very highest “class,” and to show how right the judge’s estimate of him was, it may be recorded that he was the performer of a very remarkable piece of work on grouse.

CAPT. H. HEYWOOD LONSDALE’S FIELD TRIAL IGHTFIELD DOT AND IGHTFIELD ROB ROY, WITH SCOT THEIR BREAKER ]

IGHTFIELD ROB ROY (STANDING) AND IGHTFIELD MAC, BELONGING TO CAPT. H. HEYWOOD LONSDALE

The former was victor on Lord Home’s moors near Lanark, in July 1906, over all English-bred pointers and setters. The latter was winner of the puppy stakes at the same time. ]

It was late in the season, and we had been hunting all the morning and finding comparatively few grouse on a beat generally full of birds. At last Sable got a point from the top of a “knowie,” and with his head so high that it gave the impression that the birds must be a very long way off. In starting to go to him, the author happened to see the grouse in a large pack standing with their necks up on another “knowie,” about 400 yards away from the pointing dog. That explained the absence of grouse: they had packed upon a moor where they were supposed never to do so. More with the object of scattering them than expecting to get near enough for a shot, we formed single file, and two guns and a gillie, without going near Sable, started to circle the grouse and get ahead of them, so as to put them between the guns and the dog. Strangely enough, they gradually sank down and hid, and we did get quite close to them, and at the risk of being branded poacher, truth compels the confession that we picked up five brace for our four barrels, and besides, scattered the birds in every direction. Sable never moved until he was wanted to assist in finding the dead birds. Those who do not know what very bad eyes dogs have, might think he had seen the birds, but this was not so. The volume of scent made it recognisable at such a distance, and enabled not a speculative, but a certain, point. The author has many times seen such points obtained at 200 yards at a single brood of grouse, and at more than 100 yards at a pair of partridges. Nothing like this can ever be done by a dog that has not “class”; but field trials often have been won by dogs of no class. That cannot be helped, but it must always be regretted. The no class sort referred to are meetly called “meat dogs” in America, because sportsmen there think there is no object in using them except the requirements of the “pot.”

Since the above was written, it has become known that, when in America in 1904, the author selected a couple of unbroken puppies of eight and ten months old, of the straight-bred sort, for Captain H. Heywood Lonsdale, and that, in spite of quarantine for six months, which damaged them exceedingly, Scott, a capital breaker, has succeeded in perfecting one of them. This dog is known as Ightfield Rob Roy, and with much in hand he beat all the best pointers and setters in the country at the Gun-dog League’s Field Trials in July last, upon the grouse moors of Lord Home.

The author was very pleased with the great “class” shown by Rob Roy, not because the English dogs were beaten, but mostly because he has for some years been pointing out that America was assuredly ahead of us, because of our attempt to breed docility instead of to break it. The writer, in fact, got almost ashamed of comparing the dogs of the present to their disadvantage with the dogs of the past, and felt quite sure it would have been much more popular to have ignored old memories and been satisfied with the best of English field trial work. He was quite aware that this laudation of the days and dogs that are gone was held to be more or less what it so often is. But now that Captain Lonsdale’s fine setter has demonstrated that a single selection of the author’s in America, with every chance against him, has been able to establish the accuracy of his memory, he believes that crossing will result in bringing back all the old “class” vitality and energy, especially if we were, like the Americans, to establish real stamina trials, and, like them, evolve truer formation. Evolution of form is still in progress, just as it was when our ancestors first differentiated the setter from the spaniel by selection of the best workers.

The author is not concerned to make his experiences fit in with recent Mendelian or anti-Mendelian science. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, nor will the crossings of plants, guinea-pigs, and mice conform to experiences with higher animals. If they would, Darwin’s pigeons would have taught the stud master. They did not. That there is this difference one statement of two first generation facts is enough to prove. It is that if pure-bred white fowls are crossed with another race, equally pure-bred, and black, the offspring will all be black chicks and white chicks, with no mixtures. On the other hand, “in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations,” no American pure negro has ever been able to call her offspring a white child.

STRENUOUS DOGS AND SPORT IN AMERICA

In all the countries in Europe pointers and setters are used, but there are districts in Hungary and Bohemia where partridges are so plentiful that this canine assistance is neither required nor employed. The style of shooting in these districts would make the use of any dogs except retrievers absurd, and the writer never has been able to detect the sportsmanship in employing dogs when they are in the way and hinder sport. The truest pleasure is to be derived from getting shots by means of dogs that one could have got in no other way. This feeling for and fellowship with pointers and setters is to be found in the wild Highlands and Islands of the west and extreme north of Scotland, and also in the greater part of the mountains of Ireland. To a great extent it is also felt in pursuit of the rype of Scandinavia, and of the partridge, wherever that bird is scarce enough to require much finding before it is shot. But throughout Europe there is more or less preservation, more or less boundary to be protected, with the growing demands for artificial methods first, and then, a little later, the substitution of men for dogs. There is also a kind of bastard shooting over dogs, in which a line of guns is formed as if for walking up the game, and then one or a brace of dogs is allowed to run down wind, or up, according to the requirements of the line of guns, and with no thought as to possibility of the wind serving the dogs. But under such circumstances canine assistance is in a false position, and it is distressing to see what happens. A pair of dogs could not adequately serve a line of guns, even if they had all the advantage of the wind, and it may be safely affirmed that when any attempt is made to walk up game, dogs are out of place, except as retrievers at heel. On a Scotch Highland hillside it may be a question whether a party of four guns can kill most game by all walking in line or by working in two parties and shooting over dogs, but in the former case there is a better way—that of driving the game to the guns, which saves the walking, and the shooting becomes more exciting because more frequent.

But dog work is conducted in such various methods, some of which are so little removed from treading up the birds, that an idealist must hesitate to affirm that it is always preferable to forming line and walking up the game. There is an idea that the place to loose off the dogs is where game has congregated, or been driven into good cover, so that points may recur at every 10 yards. This is when the heavy shooting occurs, but it is not when the dog is most indispensable. The latter happens when there is no more than one covey to every 500 acres, and you have to find it before you have any sport. Some people say that under those circumstances they would prefer no sport. This, however, is a decadent view. We all of us appreciate sport as its difficulty increases, and a bag that was good enough for the great Duke of Wellington and for Colonel Peter Hawker ought to be good enough for any of us if we desire to feel ourselves sportsmen. The author has no word to urge against big bags except this: they cannot form a feature of everyday life for many, if for any of us, and sport can—provided the anxiety to make big bags because they are the fashion does not destroy our love of sport for its own sake. The writer confesses to being one of those selfish creatures who is supremely happy if he has satisfied his own critical spirit, even in such trifles as a day’s unwitnessed sport over dogs, the stalking of a blackcock or of a stag, the capture of a reluctant trout, or the killing of half a score of driven grouse out of a pack without a miss. He is well aware that either of these may be the harder to accomplish according to circumstances, and his pleasure is based on the absence of anything that might have been done better. Once in his life he sent a stag’s head to a taxidermist, and then changed his mind and would not have it home; and once or twice he has counted his kills during a day, but never made a written note of them. It has always appeared to the author that sport is its own reward, and that records are rather sad reading, and trophies create memories of the noble dead, and not always pleasant ones. It seems easier to take an interest in other people’s records than in one’s own, and to admire trophies that one did not victimise.

Surely a true spirit of sport may be the possession of one whose whole household idols are his gun and rifle, and whose total impedimenta are a portmanteau and gun-case. The greater one’s belongings, and the more one grows to care for them, the less ready one becomes to go far afield for sport, and the more one is inclined to cling to old memories, even without the assistance of trophies and private written records.

Feats of sport that can be forgotten are not worth remembering, for if enjoyment depended upon the size of the bag or the grandeur of a trophy, every day in which the old record was not beaten would be a day lost, whereas, in sport for its own sake alone, every triviality is supreme for the time being, and one is as keen for small things or great at sixty as at sixteen, although—and more is the pity—a great deal more self-critical.

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.

Another charming method of shooting is found still farther South, in Georgia, where there are vast areas of pine forests and quail in them.