The other farms allowed me to shoot anything but their pheasants and partridges. I shot pigeons ,ducks and geese by the hundreds and had quite a bit of rabbit and hare shooting too. What I didn't have was a gundog.My ignorance was so complete on the subject of gundogs that I went out and bought a show bred springer puppy. Training him was quite an experience since I didn't know what to do and had nobody to tell me. I began to buy the Shooting Times and scanned it's pages feverishly for any hints on gundog training. Peter Moxon was the gundog bloke for the Times back in the sixties and he became my "hero" quickly followed by Keith Erlandson . That pair didn't get on too well in print and I loved reading as they battled it out on the letters page.
An awful lot of their writings flew right over the top of my head ..... I didn't have a clue what they were arguing about ! By now I was beginning to realise my springer pup was somewhat lacking in natural ability. The things blokes like Moxon and Erlandson expected to be bred into a pup were having to be trained into my pup. I taught him to retrieve first and then to hunt ....in that dog's case the word "hunt" applies only very loosely ! He just didn't have it in him to hunt well. His retrieving was limited to what I knew so all he did was a basic run-in and pick it up and bring it back retrieve. He was actually quite good at doing that and he did it very well on game. He was a large, very strong dog and since I took him shooting a lot his size and strength was not due to him being fat and yet he weighed 55 lbs. at just 9-10 months old.
I tied him to my leg one evening while out shooting ducks on a very wet and muddy foreshore. I fired at a duck and off he went taking me with him. He towed me for a couple of yards through a few inches of water and an even greater depth of mud. That was when I first began to think maybe some degree of steadiness might be a good idea. I sold him to another rough shooter who thought he was O.K. for a tenner and "moved on."
A work bred lab pup was my next attempt at gundog training. He would not retrieve any kind of dummy and showed no interest in retrieving until he found a stinking, rotten , maggot covered seagull carcase one day during a walk and brought me that .......as pups will. I praised the hell out of him for that "retrieve" and took the wings home with me to attach to a dummy. He very quickly became a good retriever of anything , even glass milk bottles !
I began to take him shooting at about 5 months old. He was pretty good at heelwork and he was pretty good when sitting in a duck, goose or pigeon hide too....but back then my definition of "pretty good" was that he did not run - in unless I had actually hit what I had fired at !
He was truly outstanding as a duck shooters dog. He'd sit quietly beside me in the darkness as I looked for ducks passing by backlit by the town lights of Forfar. I'd shoot and often not know if I'd hit a duck or not .....but he knew. If he remained sitting , I'd missed. If he ran-in , I'd hit a duck. That dog used to take off into the darkness with two fields and a long strip of woods to cover in his search for shot ducks that had planed on. It was very rare for him to return without the duck.Such was the depths of my ignorance that back then I did not know just how good a gamefinder that dog was. I thought all gundogs could have done the same. I actually got impatient and annoyed when his search took a bit of time. I wanted to shoot other ducks but knew that without him being there beside me the duck I shot might never be found.
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To be continued later , I've got to go out for a while.
Wullie
