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his setter is moving in to back his bracemate's point. Tom Prawdzik prefers that his dogs run with a low, quiet tail to reduce the chance of injury. How a dog holds its tail while on point is of no concern to the veteran grouse hunter. T S ince he began keeping records in 1958, Michigan hunter Tom Prawdzik and his dogs, all but one of them English setters, have moved upwards of 37,000 ruffed grouse. One of those dogs, a setter named Kate, accounted for almost 9,500 of those birds by herself. You might want to pause here and give those numbers a few moments to sink in. You've likely heard the expression "One man's floor is another man's ceiling." Well, in the gilded palace of ruffed grouse hunting, Tom Prawdzik's hunt, testify to how rigorously and even obsessively Prawdzik has dedicated himself to this quest. A measure of the lengths to which he goes is that he intentionally steers clear of areas where he suspects his dogs will be distracted by woodcock. In Prawdzik's view, dogs pointing woodcock (which he doesn't shoot) are burning up precious minutes that could be put to better use looking for grouse. Training grouse dogs is easy when you know how—the numbers don't lie. S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 9 3 aerie towers so far above the squalid quarters the rest of us inhabit that he's in a different climate zone. While he basks in sunshine, our huddled masses shiver in the dark. We don't breathe the same air. And yet this retired biologist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources is the most humble and unassuming of men. He didn't set out to become the most successful grouse hunter of the modern era, the acknowledged master of this exquisitely challenging, excruciatingly difficult sport. He simply decided long ago that if he was going to hunt grouse, he might as well hunt them as efficiently as he could. The astonishing numbers he's put up, meticulously entered into his journal at the end of each day's Tom Davis u n d o g s G