reflections and redirections

[trekmoor]

This period in my life was a good one for me. I had four dogs , 2 labs , a Brittany and a G.S.P. all still very much of working age and all of them had either competed in their respective Championships or had qualified for them. I had land I could shoot over whenever I wanted to and could therefor keep my dogs at trial standards.
I think having somewhere to go where dogs can be shot over outwith "proper" shoot days with many other people and dogs around is just about essential .
I like to train for trials either on my own or with just one or two other like minded people around.

I was doing a lot of "guiding" during the grouse and partridge early part of the shooting season for paying guns on big estates. This was not only very good dog training work it was financially rewarding too. To begin with I didn't know which end was "up" and was doing this work for the same money as a beater or picker up receives but I was doing it all on my own for parties of up to eight guns . That many guns is definitely not a good idea when working pointing dogs, I will come to that later.

To begin with I went to an estate near Greenlaw down in the Borders and the estate had two gamekeepers who took it in turns to accompany the shooting party and myself around the estate. The keepers soon discovered they could leave their dogs at home , my HPR's and labs did all the gamefinding that was ever needed. Then the keepers decided they could stay at home too for I now knew my way around the estate well enough and could manage the shooting parties all on my own.

I had to begin to insist that at least one keeper went with us , these days were all spent walking over fields, through woods and over moorlands and carrying the game shot by a party of guns while at the same time handling the dogs and the shooting party was just about impossible. It was considerably more difficult to control some of the shooting parties than to manage the dogs for most of the shooting parties were Italians .

Although I have been out shooting with some great Italian sportsmen those shooting party lads made my hair stand on end. Maybe one or two of them had a few words of English but I had to try to communicate with them using sign language. When one of my dogs went on point every single Italian in the party would literally run to the point and when a bird was flushed every damned one of them would fire at it. Sometimes my dog had pointed a covey of partridge or grouse and that was when the real fun started.

Back then 5 shot semi-automatics were available on an ordinary shotgun certificate and every Italian seemed to have an automatic. That was bad enough but it wasn't enough for some of those Italians. They had converted their semi-autos to fire as many as ten shots by extending the magazine tube's length. When a covey flew off those lads kept on firing until the magazines were just about emptied ! It sounded like El Alamein ! They would continue to fire for as long as birds were still in view , often pricking birds that were 70 or more yards out when they fired. Entire coveys were completely wiped out. I did not like that.

I tried to get the keepers and the man who had taken a lease on the grounds to ask the guns to send just two guns forward when the dogs pointed. The Italians weren't having that , they'd paid for their shooting holiday and they were damned well going to have it ! The man who had the lease on the land was no help at all, he came from Sicily and was rumoured to "have connections" to certain other Sicilians !

It was the most dangerous shooting I have ever taken part in . Sometimes, if I didn't get to a point before the guns did , they would form a circle 20 yards back from and all around the pointing dog and point their guns right at her to wait for the game to flush ! Sorry to swear on here but I did my F-ing nut when they did that ! I really tore into them and when they replied " No understand" I used sign language to emphasise what I was going to do to their noses if they did that again. Even that only worked to a limited extent.

I was never hit by any pellets but one of the keepers was. We were supposed to be walking in line along a gully but the Italians turned this into a race, they were desperate to be the first to any game or to any point up ahead. A pheasant got up from the gully bottom and went towards the keeper at about his height. One of the guns at once fired at it just missing another Italian and taking the keepers deerstalker hat clean off his head. I stopped the line by adding my angry roars to the keepers. The hat had been shot by a few pellets but no pellets had injured the keeper ..... so one of the Italians said "We make lot of fuss over nothing !"

I hastened to intervene as the keeper went for that Italian fists at the ready. The keeper calmed down a bit , then said something like.... " Here you bunch o' buggers ! You might as well finish the job " then threw his hat into the air ..... where one Italian did duly shoot it ! It was about the only time I saw those Italians follow instructions !

I had one serious altercation with one of those Italians. I'd picked up a few words of their language like Lepre (hare) , phesani (pheasant) and starne (partridge) and it was the word "starne" that caused me to do my nut at one Italian. He spoke no English and I had noticed that although we had been out for nearly two hours he hadn't yet fired a shot .... the other guns always beat him to the points. I knew that about 100 yards up ahead there was a partridge release cage around which a covey of birds often hung about. I pointed towards the distant cage and said the magic word "Starne" then showed the gun a previously shot partridge in my bag. Somehow I managed to convey to him that a covey might be near that small pen.

Off he went like a greyhound from the traps with me hurrying along behind him. I didn't want my dogs too near what was about to happen so I called the Brittany back into heel where she joined the labs and the GSP. That man was even more desperate than I'd thought . When we were about 25 yards from the cage we saw a covey of partridge moving off at a fast run. The man at once made ready to shoot them on the ground so I clapped my hands very loudly and the birds , thankfully, flew off. He emptied his magazine at the covey then turned to me and with his forefinger pointing directly at my face in an admonishing manner ,he said ...." You no ......" and clapped his hands ..... " You no ....." and clapped his hands. He was angry I'd warned the birds to fly !

That lead to a real big argument and the keeper rushed to intervene between us. In a way it was probably a very funny tiff to listen to because I didn't understand the names he was calling me and he didn't understand any of my extensive collection of cuss words either ! To give me a chance to calm down the keeper went on with the shooting party while I stayed behind for 5-10 minutes searching for the dead and injured partridges. The gun had brought down 5 birds from that covey.

The main culprit in this sorry state of affairs was the Sicilian bloke who advertised the shooting here over in Italy. He was only in it for the money, in his mind it was a case of "the more guns the more profit." He spoke pretty good English but not if I tried to reason with him ! I did manage to get him to tell his shooting parties only to shoot hares if they were prepared to carry them around for the rest of the day themselves. I'd had enough of lugging hares about for miles !
He "organised" some let days on a grouse moor and off we all went. It was certainly not a prolific moor in terms of grouse numbers but that is normal when shooting over pointers. Things went pretty well there until about our 4th outing.

I was hunting Eva the GSP around the contour of the hill with the wind more or less in our favour when coming towards us from the opposite direction came an English Setter and another large shooting party. It turned out the Sicilian geezer had booked in a party of French guns accompanied by their own dog plus a local sheep farmer onto the same hill we were shooting over. Pandemonium ensued ! It was a three way battle of different languages !
Broad Scots was spoken by me, the keeper with me and the local shepherd so that was O.K. but the supposed English speakers among the Italians and the French may have known the English language but broad Scot's was incomprehensible to them ! After a moment of this complete guddle of what was actually four different languages (English, broad Scots, French and Italian) my sense of humour came to the rescue of all of us . I saw and heard what was happening and found it very, very funny so I burst out laughing . Somehow laughter can convey meaning and we began to fraternize with the enemy . It all worked out O.K. but one of my party of Italian's was a wee bit different to the rest of them.

He took me aside. He spoke and understood much more English than I'd thought. He was also the Chief of Police in a large Italian city. He'd been told there were grouse not only on the moor but way down below out in the turnip fields ! I informed him that although that was not impossible , it was extremely unlikely ! He'd also been told he'd get a trophy bird , a Blackcock . That really was impossible , there were no blackgame at all in that area.
I began to feel sorry for this man who had travelled so far to experience game shooting in Scotland. His English was good enough to read between the lines of what I said in reply to his questions , he was not a fool. He told me he thought the Sicilian was a "very big rogue !" I did not disagree.

To compensate for his poor holiday experience with a rogue operator I asked him to believe that it was not the Scots that had misled him and to prove it I took him out onto my own ground 40 -50 miles away from there two days later. It meant a lot of taxi service driving for me but I didn't want him to go home with the wrong impression of the Scots. My ground was also an extensive area of moorland and it certainly wasn't teeming with game. I'd only seen blackgame on it a few times but The Good Lord must have smiled down on my efforts that day for the Italian and I shot a few head of various game and then we saw a point way off in the distance .....the man got his Black cock trophy bird and I think I was even more pleased than he was !!

He invited me to stay with him any time I went to Italy and said we'd go shooting together and he would organise everything for me including a shotgun. I never did take him up on the offer , I've still never been outside of Britain in my life except for holidays in southern Ireland.

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to be continued
Wullie

[jeffD]

I did one days guiding for Italians, goose shooting many years ago in north east Scotland, once was enough I told the normal guide who was a friend never again their 12g auto's seemingly could bring down geese at over a hundred yards. I have never seen so much lead fired skywards for no result.

My brother in law is Italian and I asked if it was normal he explained that they shoot sparrows and finches at this range which are cooked and eaten whole.

[trekmoor]

By this time I had met several pointer/setter trainers, all of them field trailers and a few of them rather successful field trailers. I had been out on grouse counts with them and they had enjoyed shooting rabbits over the same dogs I worked the grouse with. They discovered during one conversation what I was getting paid for doing guiding work on various bits of ground. They were shocked. A beater or a picker-up back then got about £15 and that was also what I got for the guiding work I did on the moors and everywhere else.

They weren't sure what should be my wage for work on pheasants, partridge etc. but they were sure I should be paid considerably more for grouse moor guiding considering I was not only "guiding" the shooting parties but working my dogs as hunters, pointers and retrievers completely on my own and carrying the grouse that were shot. On "dogging" moors it is seldom that many grouse ever get shot so I cannot remember ever carrying more than about ten ....it was usually less than that.

As my pointer working friends pointed out, by hiring me, estates did not have to send a gamekeeper along with a lab or a spaniel to retrieve the shot game so the estates saved quite a bit of money by hiring me. Usually what happened was the estates sent a gamekeeper along the first few times until I knew the ground , he probably also reported back on how competent my dogs and I were. My friends told me (both of them had grouse moors and brought in clients to shoot on them) what guns paid to shoot grouse over dogs and suggested I should begin to ask for a wage rise !

I continued for quite a while with what I was already receiving because I was too embarrassed to ask for more.....but I was beginning to become very disenchanted with working for the guns the Sicilian had as clients. They were dangerous to each other, they were dangerous to me and they were dangerous to my dogs.

A new shooting party arrived from Italy one day and once more the keeper and I did our best to explain gun safety before we went out. Our talk to the guns was probably incomprehensible to most or maybe all of them. It was conducted using sign language !
That day got off to a very bad start but not because of gun safety issues. I think the guns were under the impression I was some sort of lowly servant for a few of them wanted me to carry their spare cartridges and even their waterproofs just in case it rained ! I refused and an argument started , the guns felt I was not providing the services they expected .....perhaps they'd even been told by the Sicilian that I would be doing that ? The gamekeeper came over and defused the situation by carrying their cartridges for them ....they seemed to think they'd need at least 50 extra cartridges each . They either wore their raincoats or left them behind in the vehicle ....even the gamekeeper drew the line at carrying them.

Off we went and the safety went right out the window . Even in my teens as a know nothing marsh cowboy I was nowhere near as dangerous as those men. I threw myself flat in the heather once and whenever the shout of "Lepre ! Lepre! " was heard it was wise to be at least a 1/4 of a mile away . Those men tried to chase hares firing as they went ! They "surrounded" one hare and walked in towards it facing each other and ready to fire. I tried to prevent this and so did the keeper but all to no avail.

Then they began to shoot the few birds we found right off the end of my dogs noses and I blew my top. I even brandished my fists at them for that offense . It didn't work . My Brittany went on point down in a little hollow and I arrived on the scene a few seconds too late . Some of the guns were nearer to her than I was and they got there first. They had no intentions of waiting for me to get there and they were all wanting to shoot whatever got up before the man next to them did. Right off the end of my bitch's nose a little snipe took fright at all those approaching men and jumped into flight.

Every one of the guns fired at it and for the first time in her life I saw my Brittany flinch to shot ..... I don't blame her ......but I did blame those men. I was extremely angry to put it mildly and discovered I did know a few Italian cuss words to use along with my plentiful supply of English ones. When I had finished ranting even those guns looked a bit subdued but I'd had enough. I told the keeper "Thanks for having me mate but I am leaving right now and I won't be coming back again." The keeper and I parted good friends ..... I think he wished he could just walk off too. Nobody should run a shooting holiday business in that way. Guns that don't speak English and guides and gamekeepers that don't speak Italian just should not go out shooting.

I had already begun to work as a guide on Cromlix Estate and if you think the Cromlix name is vaguely familiar to you then it is probably because it was once a rather famous name among field trailers and among breeders of quality pointers and setters, spaniels and retrievers. More field trials were held there per year than on any other estate in the whole of Britain. The lady who owned the estate was gundog crazy but it is probably fortunate that I never met her because she would not even allow a HPR onto her land ! She detested them so I am told.

Stories and rumours concerning her are numerous but whether or not they are true I could not say. It is probably true to say that if she took a dislike to you then you could be in trouble. She was ,apparently, so in control of the gundog scene that she just used to tell the K.C. that she had held a trial on such and such a date on her estate and the winning dogs were ............ ! Try that on with the K.C. nowadays !

I came on the scene after her death and her son , Mr. Eden, was now the estates owner but it was a diminished estate due, I think, to death duty payments. It still had root fields and wheat fields and woodlands and ponds and, of course, the moor and the hills behind it but not as much land as it once had.
I would describe Mr. Eden as the perfect country gentleman . He was never anything but polite, courteous and grateful to me . He once found one of his relatives berating me for entering the big house kitchen area by the wrong door, she said the servants entrance was for me while looking down her nose at me as if I were something the cat had dragged in .

I took a deep breath before giving what would have been a blistering reply and that's when Mr. Eden who had heard his relative as he approached along a corridor, arrived. He nipped my reply off before it got started and "Had a word " with the lady. When I came back off the moor about 7 hours later , Mr. Eden got hold of me as I was about to head home. I was sweaty, I was dishevelled, I was covered from head to toe in heather pollen and my boots were covered in muck but Mr.Eden insisted I went with him into the "big house" and into a very posh and very large conservatory. A table was laid in there and Mr. Eden sat me down at it then rang a little bell. I wondered if this was a posh way of sacking me !

In came a woman bearing a silver tray with a pot of tea on it and she placed the tea and the cups in front of us, she departed quietly then returned with another silver tray this time with freshly made scones , a silver tub of homemade jam and another silver tub of fresh cream. Mr. Eden told me to help myself as the maid stood by for further "orders." It was then I noticed that the maid was the lady who had ticked me off in the morning ! Mr. Eden must have noticed the surprise on my face as this registered with me so he gave the "maid" a nod and she left the room. It was his way of saying he was sorry for that incident and of showing me he'd done more about it than just talk to her !
That's what I call gentlemanly conduct.

Not long before this happened I had talked to Mr.Eden about what the going rate was for the work I was doing. He at once agreed I should get a bigger wage, I got £90 per day. That was a fortune to me back then and I still think it is a lot of money now.
His gamekeepers and I got on very well and Mr. Eden's shooting guests and his shooting clients were a bit different to what I was used to too. I still went out with Italian guns on a regular basis but these men were very different to the majority of the clients the Sicilian enticed into Scotland. It was as if I had gone from hell straight up to heaven !

For a start the number of guns I took out was a maximum of four and it was easy to "manage" them into two parties of two each. At each point I had one of the two little parties move forward to take the shot while the other guns waited behind us. I also had no problems in getting the guns to only load their guns as they approached the point . At any other time the guns were carried unloaded and opened , none of those men used semi-auto shotguns. The work I did became a real pleasure again.

Very often my "shooting party" consisted of just one presumably very wealthy man . It was a very gentlemanly way of dogging for grouse.

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To be continued

Wullie

[trekmoor]

One of the guns who came to Cromlix was an Italian doctor and he usually turned up with his younger and drop dead, gorgeous sister . This man always went out with me on his own. It needs a bit of money to be able to afford to buy a one to one day out with a guide and his dogs on a grouse moor and this man had it but never flaunted it. Sometimes, if I was on holiday , he'd hire me for 2 or three days in a week . He was a real sportsman in every sense but one. He did shoot grouse but what he really wanted was blackgame or to be more specific the magnificent male of the species.

My G.S.P. bitch , "Eva" proved to be just a bit too good at finding them and eventually I had to have a word with Mr. Eden on the subject. Eva was good on all kinds of game but grouse and blackgame seemed to be her specialist subjects. She very nearly led to that Italian gun wiping out every blackcock on the estate. Very often the bird would run from the point and that was when Eva really came into her own , she'd follow it on and on and on and like many HPR's she seemed to know just how fast and far she could follow on while still keeping the man with the gun within shooting range of a flush.
She was deadly on blackgame. Quite often a very long follow or track by her eventually produced grey hens instead of the male of the species . I hesitate to say how far she'd track blackgame for fear of being called a damned liar but it was a very long way over rough ground. The doctor never lifted his gun to greyhens and I once apologised when after a long "follow" up got greyhens but no cock bird.

I said something like...." Sorry about that, I haven't taught her to tell the cocks from the hens yet." He roared with laughter and when we returned to the big house he wasted no time telling Mr.Eden my "joke." He was fanatically devoted to Eva as was his sister who often accompanied us over the moors. My talk with Mr.Eden about the possibility of wiping out the blackcock on his land took effect however and after that the doctor had to satisfy himself with plain, ordinary grouse.
I got on very well with this man but others did not when he went to other shoots , he could be a bit sort of pernickety but I had no problems with him or with his sister to whom I eventually gave an oil painting of Eva on point to a couple of grouse with her brother in the background.

I am not a brilliant painter and that was not my best ever painting but she and the doctor were delighted with it . I was told it now hangs in their house back in Italy.

Eva and "Vicky" my Brittany attracted quite a few offers to buy them. The biggest offer for Vicky was from an American gun who got a bit annoyed when I refused to sell for what was a very good price. If I think a dog is doing it's very best for me and that it's best is easily sufficient to do the job then I never sell the dog on .....I'd rather give the dog away to a friend whom I know will look after it.

Eva received her biggest offer from an Italian International field trial judge. He too came out with me on Cromlix as a single gun but he didn't tell me he was a field trial judge or let me know how well he spoke English (better than I do !) until we stopped for our lunch break. It seems word of Eva had spread in Italy ....from the doctor ?...... Anyway this man had travelled here to take a squint at her in action.

He told me she was the best grouse dog he had ever seen and wanted to know if she would hunt for and point other gamebirds. She certainly did ! He wanted to buy her there and then but I said she wasn't for sale. He asked me what I wanted for her and I still would not sell her . He offered me a very high price but still I would not sell. During the mornings hunt I had noticed he'd failed to even raise his gun to some of the grouse she had pointed and flushed for him, I asked why he hadn't fired and he blushed slightly and said he'd been so fascinated by her work he'd forgotten to shoot ! I have seen other guns fail to shoot for the same reason but those guns had never seen a dog on point before. This man was vastly experienced but seeing a really good piece of work still managed to put him into a trance.

At the day's end he tried to buy her once more but I still refused. We parted good friends.

I may have posted this photograph before but I will post it here again. Sorry about the quality, it is a photograph of an old photograph of Eva with her awards . She had also won a dog show and had qualified for Crufts to which I didn't take her because I was out shooting rabbits that day ! Eva was a large, solidly built bitch as GSP's go and she was of an old "type." More racy looking dogs seem to be in favour now but in her day she did very well in competition with racy dogs. As I said in an earlier episode, this bitch spoiled me for future G.S.P. 's, only one of them came near to her quality of work and extreme ease of training.

EVA



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to be continued

Wullie

[Naj]

What a cracking looking dog, Wullie.

Talking about the distances covered when 'walking you in' to a moving bird, I was pleased to hear of Eva's exploits on the moving Black Game. I've had plenty of instances up to around 100 yards but last season my young dog picked up a line on a wet & boggy bit of hill moor & worked it at a sensible pace, stopping every so often until I caught up, casting herself when she lost it & then following it on again when she picked it up until she finally had the bird held under her point. As expected it turned out to be a cock pheasant and I was fortunate in killing it as her reward but was taken aback by the distance she had taken me. I paced it back & it was well over 350 yards. Like you, I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

Naj

[trekmoor]

Hi Naj, I think GSP's take a bit of beating when it comes to following "lines" whether the bird has been shot and is leaving behind a blood scent or not. I often noticed how often my GSP's wiped the eyes of both spaniels and labs while out picking up if a runner was proving difficult to collect, having talked to Tom Brechney about this I can tell you he has noticed the same thing (Tom also has labs.)

I think this breeds ability on runners is partly due to their ability to follow the lines of unshot game ....IF they are allowed to do that ! Following the lines of unshot game provides them with very valuable practice when following bloodscent . It's only my theory mind you ! My brittanies become bored of following unshot game lines more quickly than the GSP's I have owned . They tend towards breaking off from the scent of unshot birds when the birds run any great distance, then the Brittany will quarter the ground to try to find the birds again using air scent.

I can say from having trialed both of these breeds that the brittanies preferred way of doing things finds greater favour with trial judges . Judges get a bit miffed if a dog tracks on and on and on while missing any game that might be sitting off to one side of the "line." I usually just let the dogs play to their own strengths.

Wullie

[Naj]

Sorry, I was referring to 'un-shot' game & the bird in question was 'un-shot' & must have heard/seen us coming & scarpered - the dog picked up on the fresh scent as soon as she quartered over the line, which is what I would expect of her. That was likely the only pheasant on the hill so I am always pleased for a dog to work the line of moving/un-shot game when they believe it to be a 'hot' scent because game is a scarce commodity where I hunt & my dog's job is to find game for me, & once it has a viable 'find', to stick to it until it produces. If it's not 'hot' then they soon lose interest in it. Without this capability I wouldn't get much shooting, especially where pheasants are concerned. Coincidentally, American spaniel trainers expect a similar thing of their dogs, stopping them until they catch up whenever they are getting out of shot. I think it is a tactic more likely to occur where game is few & far between rather than where the ground is covered in scent due to higher game densities. As regards the GSPs undoubted expertise at tracking, if you look at the German testing system for trials they are largely centred upon tracking.

Naj

[trekmoor]

Another installment .... I had forgotten this thing again !
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My G.S.P. bitch "Eva" had qualified for the Championships so I took her there but with some misgivings. My previous experience of the championships with my brittany had left a rather sour taste in my mouth. One of the judges at the championships I took Eva to was a man I had won under once before but we found it hard to agree about several things including what is a "stylish" point.

Eva was a stylish pointer but she also did "pretzel" points if that was the way in which the game scent hit her and if she started off with a "proper" point she would very slowly and carefully turn her head and neck around to indicate in which way a bird was trying to run from a point. I already knew that judge did not like that. He felt a really good pointing dog should "pin" a bird so hard with it's point that the bird would not move from the spot.

I completely disagreed and had the cheek to tell him that I worked mainly on "wild" birds and he must have been working on pen reared ones ! Both of us were correct up to a point.
A good dog can "pin" a bird .....but only if it has got close enough to it to do so. The wild reared pheasants I often worked on would have either ran like stink from the point or , more often, would have either ran or even have flown away from too close an approach by a dog.

Eva pointed during the Championships on her first run but the bird was a moving bird and Eva began to do a careful follow , I at once held up my arm which is the usual signal to indicate a dog has game in front of it. The judge wanted to know what was going on so I said that if we followed her she would take us to game. "My" judge wasn't too happy with this but agreed to follow Eva. By her standards it was not a long distance follow , only 40-50 yards but the bird ran through thick ferns towards a little cliff face which caused it to move back towards Eva.

Eva had gone onto a solid point when the bird checked at the cliff face but now she slowly swung her head right round to point behind her ! Again the judge wanted to know what was happening. I said I thought the bird had ran back right past Eva hidden by the ferns and was now behind her. The judge told me to have her flush the bird and Eva did an immediate flush . The pheasant was shot and came down up ahead as a runner among some bushes and yet more ferns.

She remained steady and was allowed the retrieve. She collected the runner pretty quickly but the judge (there might as well have been only one judge !) thought the point and production of the bird had been an untidy performance . I try not to argue with judges during a trial so I bit my tongue and rejoined the other competitors.

She had a nice point on a pheasant in a root field but the gun missed it. As any spaniel or HPR trialer knows, a missed bird can result in a lesser mark for a dog but these things happen and I have no complaints about that.

The trial moved from a small ridge of hills down onto a flat bit of moorland and it was Eva's turn to run again. I almost licked my lips in anticipation of what I knew Eva would do in terms of range and speed out on that moor. Her very first cast took her out and out and out . She would have ran even further but she slammed into a very positive point out there. I raised my arm to claim the point then moved towards her across the moor just as fast as I could walk.

I was about to walk (think half run) past the gun out on that end when he stopped me. The gun was Lord Joicey and he knew his stuff ! He was also the gun who had missed Eva's earlier bird and he more than made amends for that by advising me to walk out there with him at his speed ,not mines ! Doing that would ensure that I did have a gun nearby and as he also pointed out the judges hadn't even started towards the point yet.

Lord Joicey and I took a nice easy walk out and stopped about 20 yards back and to one side of Eva in order not to scare off the bird before the judges arrived. The judges were just sauntering out to the point. So much so that even Lord Joicey remarked on it.One of the trials spectators was a vet. and he told me later that he had timed how long it took for the judges to reach Eva's point .....he said it took them 9 minutes. That is a long time to leave a dog on point for, it is far longer than I ever train for, in fact I never train my dogs to hold points for more than maybe 3-4 minutes.
Even in my present state of health I can cover a couple of hundred yards in about that time on level ground.

Eventually the judges reached us and wanted her to flush. Eva at once produced a pheasant which Lord Joicey shot dead as mutton. As Eva was out retrieving it a shot went off behind me and Eva stopped to shot then completed the retrieve on command. Lord Joicey had fired at a snipe but was not sure that he had hit it. It was thought, the judges weren't very sure either, that the snipe had either fallen or had landed about 60-70 yards away.
Eva was sent for it as a blind . She reached the likely fall area and began to hunt but could not find that bird.

She was seen to check hard in one small marshy area ....she even dipped her head but when she raised it again she was not holding the snipe. She was called up and the judges and Lord Joicey went out to search for the bird but they too failed to find it and Eva was hunted on.

A short while later one of the trials competitors approached the judges. He had gone with his dog on lead to that little marshy area and had seen a single snipe feather jutting out of a little muddy puddle. He had dug down a little into the mud with his hands and came up with the snipe. I have no doubt at all that it was the snipe Lord Joicey had shot or that Eva had failed to dig it out of the mud . The competitor was, to my way of thinking, attempting to have my dog put out of the trial by making a deliberate effort to show the snipe to the judges instead of just giving it to the game carrier.

I thought this was a very unsporting thing to do .... I still think that today. I was not eliminated from the trial but perhaps Eva's score sheet lost a few marks ? To me that sort of competitor behaviour ranks with calling out to the judges that a dog has missed game behind it.

Most of that two day trial was uneventful for me and I cannot remember much more of it except that Eva hunted very well, pointed well, produced game well , was rock steady to every bird and retrieved very well.

She was awarded a Diploma of Merit, the same award that Vicky had got in her Championships. I am not saying that Eva deserved more but I am certain that one of the "placed" dogs deserved to be eliminated ! It had been out of control during the trial and had been shouted at and even physically "handled" during a blind retrieve.

That trial ended me for HPR trials, I had seen enough and decided that I seemed to know what a "controlled" run-in was or what a "controlled" chase was better than some judges did ! As a championship that one was pretty bad and just a few years later some nice person saw fit to make a video of an Hpr Chamionship. That video showed some very poor dog work and some very "iffy" handling work and maybe some dubious judging too.

I think what happened next should have happened years earlier. The K.C. stepped in and there were no more HPR Championships ! The K.C. also appointed judges from retriever and spaniel trials to travel to future HPR trials of any kind and those folk reported what they saw and heard to the K.C.

It was very noticable that for a couple of years following the introduction of K.C. observers to HPR trials that the numbers of awards given took a sharp downwards tumble !

I think things have improved since then.... I hope so.
...................................................................

Bill T.

[trekmoor]

I mated Eva to a dog called "Stewartonian Cane" belonging to Tom Brechney. Cane (Kane ?) was a f.t.ch. fairly closely related to Eva. He was a tall "rangy" looking dog that would not have won in a showring . Showing didn't matter to me at all . He was a damn good working dog ....as most of Tom's dogs are.

I had no proper space or facilities in which to rear puppies so Eva was kept by Peter O'Driscoll and his wife Geraldine while having her pups and while rearing them. Peter and Geraldine wanted the pup they kept from the litter to both work and show but made the wrong choice from the litter. They took a particularly heavy boned pup and he grew up that way too.....when in doubt go for the middle of the choice range !

I intended to keep a bitch from the litter and also to take one dog pup to be trained on for sale at 6 months to a year old. As I had done with the litter I had chosen Eva from, I chose my bitch pup because she showed she had a lot of white in her coat .....white coated or partially white coated dogs are a bit easier to see when on point.

I took my pups home with me at about 8 weeks old and began working on them almost at once. Within about 5 minutes drive from my home back then was a very large acreage of land that the town council had bought for future development. It was covered in a mixture of rough grasses, rashes and the remnants of the crops that had once been grown there. Game loved it and hundreds of grey partridge, numerous pheasants, rabbits , ducks and even water rails lived there.

I'd never had it so good and I never have again since the damned council "grew" a huge shopping centre plus lots of industrial and office units and many houses there !
My two pups grew up seeing and finding game almost every time I took them out the door.
In no time at all they were pointing the game they found before they chased it off the fields.By the time they were 5-6 months old they were quite accomplished hunters and they backed each others points.

I had made a mistake with the bitch pup however. She was beautiful to look at and a crazy keen hunter but she didn't give a toss about retrieving ! I'd made that same mistake before with my brittany and I did not want to go through the troubles I had persuading her to retrieve all over again with the GSP pup. I decided to sell her and keep the male pup who was a good'un in every way including swimming for retrieves.

I placed an advert for the bitch pup in the SHOOTING TIMES and got a reply very quickly. A lady phoned me who wanted to know if the bitch was coloured flashily enough and looked elegant enough to look "tres chic" as she strolled down the main street in Cannes ! I assured the lady that the pup was all of those things and then assured her that I would not sell the pup to her !

The bitch pup went to a gamekeeper on a Scottish island. He wanted her to find and point game but not to retrieve so she fitted in fine there.

Meanwhile the pups were now 6 months old and one of them remained unsold and still in Peter's kennels. Peter wanted him away and I don't blame him. 6 months is a long time to keep someone elses pup for ! The trouble was that I could not in any way blame potential buyers for refusing that particular pup for I would probably have refused him too.
This pup, I called him "Dirk" was a very odd sort of puppy ! When people approached his kennel and run all of the other pups would at once gallop to the gate to be petted . Dirk wouldn't bother , he often just lay with his front paws at the kennel entrance looking completely unconcerned . He didn't hide ,he didn't look at all frightened , he just saw no cause to get excited or even interested. A real "oddball" of a pup.

In order to remove him from Peter's kennels I had to sell off my male pup at 6 months old. Doing that was a real wrench, he was a really good pup and by now he was even steady to flush. I placed an ad for him in the Shooting Times and got a reply from the far south of England. Up came the potential buyer all the way to Edinburgh and I got a bit of a shock and was a bit worried. The man was dressed sort of gypsy fashion and even wore an earing !

I took him in my car to show him the pup working on partridge and pheasants. The pup did everything very well including retrieving to hand and answering to whistle. The man paid over the cash .... £500 ....I think and then told me he'd have paid far more for a pup as good as this one was. He told me he'd been to training days for HPR's down in the south of England to assess the dogs and the pups taken to them. He said my pup was already far in advance of those English pups and he could hardly wait to get him home to show him off.

He assured me he would keep in touch about the pup and he kept his word. He kept in touch with me until the day his dog died. I was very sorry to part with that pup but was delighted he'd found a really good home.

Meanwhile I was left with the litters dud ! Or so I thought then.

..........................................................................
To be continued
Wullie

[trekmoor]

Having sold a really good pup in order to make room for "Dirk" the oddball pup who took very little interest in anything, I decided to keep him for just a couple of months, give him a bit of obedience training and then sell him or even give him away as a pet. I have no interest at all in dogs that do not want to work.

Out of curiousity I took him with me and my two labs to where I knew there was game in numbers enough to be fairly certain of a "find." I could have taken either the brittany or Eva , the pup's dam but I already knew that this lazy sod of a pup would not make any effort to follow the two HPR's as they hunted, they hunted too fast and too far out for him.

I soon discovered that he wouldn't even follow my labs as they hunted at spaniel distances. One of my labs flushed a rabbit not far from me and it ran straight towards the pup as he ambled along just a few feet away from me.My other lab came in from the side and the rabbit swerved and ran right through the pup's forelegs and did a sharp turn to reach the nearest cover. My pup had seen all of this and he almost yawned ! I went home in disgust and more determined than ever to "move him on."

Perhaps the pup picked up on my attitude to him for he never really was "my dog." He knew on which side his bread was buttered and he sucked up to my wife .....big time ! He is the only dog I have ever owned that decided my wife was "his." Every single other dog chose me..... I might have felt quite hurt by this but in his case I didn't give a damn for just as soon as I could I was going to sell him.

A month or so later nothing much had changed. He now retrieved but in a lazy manner and he now did rudimentary obedience work which he learnt very easily since he had no interest in going anywhere on his own anyway ! I was in the process of advertising him for sale to a pet home when a friend phoned.

It was the man who had bred "Eva" and he had heard I had a pup of about the right age to begin training for work. He wanted to use Dirk as "the pup" in a film about elementary H.P.R. training he hoped to make. He had the camera, sound recording gear etc. and he had a bitch pup about 5 months older than Dirk was . She was to be shown doing the more advanced work.

I told my mate, a man called Ian Sayers, that Dirk was a dud , was a washout, was a wet fart of a pup that would not hunt an inch but Ian said no other pup his age was available so would I bring him out to his place and we'd try him out. I agreed and took Dirk onto a spring planting field while Ian got busy with the camera.

I began trying to hunt Dirk into the wind but he didn't really want to know ! About halfway over the field I was doing more hunting than the pup was and with far more range and pace too ! I was zig-zagging my "hunt" and trying to persuade Dirk to do the same. A pair of partridge got up in front of us and I don't think Dirk saw them but he showed a distinct interest in where they had been. I hunted him on and it may sound ridiculous but Dirk now began to "go" .....so much so that by the end of the field I knew I had a hunting dog after all.

Ian had been filming this and wanted to know what I'd been moaning about , he'd quite liked what he had seen during the pup's first ever proper hunt. I drove home having almost completely abandoned my plans to sell Dirk as soon as possible if not sooner.

The pup developed at an astonishing rate from there ....thinking about it I realised I had only ever tried him on rabbits , he'd never scented or seen a bird rise in front of him and it was birds that threw his switch to "On"......he saw plenty after that ! He was still an oddball of a dog for in his entire life he never even once chased a rabbit or a hare although he pointed them readily enough. Birds were a different story , he'd chase after them until they dropped from the sky in sheer exhaustion.

Ian and I continued with the film making about twice a week but I was now the owner of a dog that would hunt, would point and would chase . I went to work on the chase for Dirk showed no signs of any dimunition of interest no matter how many birds he'd chased right off the fields.

I took him down to Cramond beach and mudflats near Edinburgh and while I dug lugworms for my sea fishing , Dirk chased the seashore birds all over about a mile of beach. He chased absolutely any bird. Crows, seagulls, oyster catchers , dunlins . The birds species didn't matter , they were all grist to his mill ! Hundreds of birds were on that shoreline so Dirk never stopped chasing.

I dug worms for well over an hour as Dirk pounded his merry way through tidal pools in the sand and mud in hot pursuit of birds. He seemed to like to turn back towards me once he'd gone about 800 yards from me so I left him alone to get on with it. Many puppy owners would say this was far too much exercise for a pup of 7 months or so but I hoped those birds would teach him the lesson birds teach to any dog that isn't a complete idiot..... chasing flying birds does not result in a capture. No reward for chasing.

Eventually Dirk returned all the way back to me and he was slathered in sand, mud and his own slavers. His tongue seemed to hang down to his knees, he was knackered. He took a drink of sea water from a muddy pool then spewed his guts up.
I took him there again about a week later and this time his chasing was of much shorter duration plus the distances he would chase were considerably decreased. When I began to apply the stop whistle following his flushes on gamebirds I think he was grateful he was not expected to chase them for he now stopped to flush with no trouble at all and without me having to raise a finger to him or even raise my voice.

Dirk still greatly enjoyed hunting for birds however and he now hunted out to ever increasing distances in his efforts to find them by scent. I think Dirk enjoyed the running almost as much as actually finding birds , in time he became the best "running dog" I have ever owned but not neccessarily the best game finding dog. He was always inclined to "bump" a bird or even a covey during his first "hell for leather" cast out from me. He was, at the very start of hunts, a bit too careless.
That dog continued to be a "running dog" until his dying day, he lived to hunt.

.......................................................................

To be continued
Wullie