Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/575593
ltimately, pheasants that hold tight are gifts. The truer measure of a pheasant dog's abilities are the roosters that run. U W hen a protracted attempt to flush a pheasant comes up empty, but the dog on point refuses to budge and ignores your increasingly strident exhortations to move on, the smart money bets on the dog. And the smart hunter—or at least the hunter capable of performing basic mental functions such as putting two and two together—makes another try at flushing. This time, though, he kicks a little harder. That was the scenario on a mid- November pheasant hunt in central darker than the surrounding vegetation and laddered with narrow bars . . . It was, I realized to my amazement, the tailfeather of a rooster pheasant—a pheasant hunkered so deeply in the grass he could have been preparing for hibernation. "There's a cockbird right in front of me," I called to my hunting partner, Terry Barker. "Get ready." I toe-nudged the bird—meaning the grass-covered lump where the tailfeather disappeared into the ground—steeling my nerves for the usual clamorous response. But nothing happened. I nudged him again, a bit more emphatically The legs of the ringnecked pheasant have helped shape the American gundog scene. S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 9 9 Iowa some years back. My setter Emmylou went on point in a patch of sloughgrass, but try as I might I couldn't flush a thing. And when I gave her the release command, All right, it was as if I was addressing one of the guards at Buckingham Palace. Wherever or whatever the scent was coming from, it had turned my setter into stone. So I waded back into the papery grass, stomping and scuffling, my expectations for a productive outcome leaking air with every step. But then, at an almost subconscious level, I registered something anomalous sprouting from the thickly bunched undergrowth, something that didn't seem quite right. It resembled a long, slender, gracefully tapering leaf, a shade Tom Davis u n d o g s G