I’ve spent more hours than I’d like to admit standing in soggy Nebraska cornfields waiting for a dog to move. If you own a pointer, you know exactly what I mean. You’re walking along, thinking about lunch, and suddenly your high-strung GSP turns into a granite statue. It’s that breathtaking moment every upland hunter lives for. Honestly, I like big points and I cannot lie, even when they happen at the most inconvenient times.
One Saturday last November, my dog Beau locked up on a point so hard I thought he’d suffered a medical emergency. I scrambled through a thicket of wild plum and prickly ash, losing my hat in the process, only to find him staring intensely at a common meadow lark. He didn’t care that it wasn’t a pheasant. To him, that tiny bird was the most important thing in the world. That is the thing about these dogs. They don’t half-beat anything.
A good pointer is a weird mix of a world-class athlete and a total goofball. In the field, they are machines. They cover more ground in twenty minutes than I do in three hours. But the second you get home, they turn into a fifty-pound Velcro-pretzel that won’t let you sit on the couch alone. It is a hilarious contrast that only bird dog people really get.
Sometimes I think they just lose all sense of time. You see the tail go stiff and the front paw tuck up, and you know the dog has vanished into his own mind until a bird flushes. It is a specialized kind of obsession. I once saw a friend’s English Pointer hold a point on a grasshopper for ten minutes while we were trying to eat sandwiches by the truck. We just sat there watching him, wondering if we should tell him or let him enjoy his imaginary trophy.
Owning these dogs means you definately accept a certain amount of chaos in your life. Your truck will always smell like wet dog and your clothes will always have burrs stuck in the hemlines. But when you see that dog catch a scent from fifty yards away and slam into a point, all the vacuuming and muddy paw prints feel worth it. It is a primal, beautiful connection between hunter and hound.