Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310027
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
With a blaze-orange collar around her neck, she is coming into her prime as a grouse dog - much to the delight of her owner, Charles Bays of Roanoke County.
Good grouse dogs are a rare breed. For one thing, grouse can be a difficult bird for a pointing dog to work. You can use words like ''spooky,'' ''smart'' and ''wiry'' to describe this woodland bird, which means that even when a bird dog is doing everything just right a grouse is likely to flush wild. And there are so few grouse in these parts that it is difficult to find enough to hone a dog's skills, not when the average flush rate is slightly more than one bird per hour.
What a grouse hunter must do is find a dog out of excellent stock and get it into as many birds as possible, but if it doesn't prove itself, get rid of it. What a grouse hunter doesn't need for the next 10 years is a dog he has to make excuses for constantly among his hunting buddies.
Which makes Maggie all the more heartening a success story. She hardly was one of those fancy, $1,000 bird dogs when Bays got her. Two people had owned Maggie and given up on her. Bays saw some potential, or maybe he let his heart make the decision his head wouldn't. Anyway, he got Maggie about four years ago, and now he has a fine grouse dog.
On a recent morning, Bays and a couple of companions were walking along some bottomland, looking for a place to cross a creek and get into the grouse cover on the other side. There was time for talk.
``I'm planning to breed old Maggie,'' Bays said, relating how he had found a fine male dog.
Even when you have a dog reaching its best years, you must start thinking about a replacement if you intend to remain a bird hunter. Unfortunately, hunting dogs and hunters don't have corresponding life spans. All too soon a dog's eyes cloud over, its muzzle turns gray and it becomes like an aging quarterback with brittle knees.
The ideal situation is to have a tired, old dog back home in the kennel, an eager pup alongside it and a dog in its prime in the field. That's more commitment than most hunters are willing to make in an era when quail have disappeared and grouse are scarce. But you get the feeling Bays would own bird dogs even if there were no birds.
Grouse populations appear to be up this season, according to the reports of hunters from the upper Shenandoah Valley down through Southwest Virginia. It's nothing like a boom year, but on a decent day hunters are flushing a dozen or more birds. Food is plentiful, which can make it tough to get a pattern on grouse. Some flush from grape tangles, others from groves of oaks where they are feeding on acorns. As always, grouse do whatever they want to do.
On the other side of the creek, Bays and his companions hunted some old fields that had been reclaimed by hawthorns, locust, blackberries and grapes. The thick cover was laced with pines and bordered by hardwoods. It had the kind of look grouse hunters call ``birdy.''
Early in the hunt, Maggie was on point, her tail like an upturned saber, her coat seeming to be illuminated, her nostrils filled with delicious scent.
The grouse flew from cover so thick the gunner said his shot couldn't penetrate it. The next bird escaped, too, a jammed gun this time. The third bird flushed beneath Maggie's nose before Bays and his companions could climb within shooting range.
Maggie could have looked at the hunters with big, brown eyes that said, ``All this work for nothing?''
But she is too much of a lady to do that, and besides, she was off searching for a grouse somebody might be able to hit.
by CNB