A Truly Golden Day Afield

A Truly Golden Day Afield

For a Truly Golden Setter

  By Capt. Tony Petrella

  The morning dawned sunny, with temperatures in the low 40s and the promise of gold in the air. And, that’s exactly the way it turned out.

  But I was pretty worried for a while.

  It seemed like Ghost, my incomparable English setter, was “confused” in the upland grouse and woodcock covert we hit first. As if she was running in circles, without her normal intensity and focus.

  And “focus” indeed was the imperative.

  A few days later I was to learn that her vision “is about 60 percent of normal,” according to canine ophthalmologist Harriet Davidson, who’s been treating Ghost along with Dr. Dan Lorimer ever since he did laser surgery on her left eye in August.

  She still managed to point two woodcock in that first covert. Don Schulz knocked down the first, but he and friends Dick Barron—along with Bill “Magoo” Ross—never loosed a hull at the second.

  “I never saw it,” Magoo said. Which is WHY his nickname is Magoo.

  After just 30 minutes, I thought it best to give my 11 ½-year-old girl a rest. She, of course, protested loudly and long when I leashed Heart and more or less “walked” him through the uplands.

  We flushed another woodcock, but putting up with the puppy pulling me through the oaks and popples and blackberry tangles simply became too much to deal with.

  Ultimately, we pulled up at a cover I hadn’t worked in five or six years. “Those darn grouse have to be SOMEWHERE,” I lamented. “If they’re not in the lower stuff, we’ll take the high road.”

  Ghost almost immediately pointed a grouse, which Don missed. But my judgment and intuition was vindicated. Ghost seemed as relieved as I was. Don, of course, was beating himself up mercilessly for missing such an easy shot.

  “I make those all day long on the trap range,” he lamented.

  “Yeah, well those clay birds don’t juke and jive like these live ones do,” I pointed out.

  Ghost worked a while longer without getting a whiff of scent, and we were nearly back to the trucks when it happened. She locked up, looked back at me and more or less said, “Oh, YEAH, Dad! They’re here all right!”

  About that time grouse started popping out of the little Hawthorne thicket like rockets from a Patriot Missile site. WHOOSH, WHOOSH, WHOOSH. Seven of them, heading front back and sideways.

  When it was finished, Don pocketed a healthy gray-phase rooster. But only after Magoo hid it underneath Don’s orange hunting cap, forcing us to look around like a couple of puzzled schoolboys.

  “I don’t know how it got there,” Magoo said innocently. “YOU’RE the one who threw down the hat. Maybe you should have looked down at the ground first.”

  Meanwhile, Dick lovingly fondled a magnificent red-phase rooster that carried a 13-inch spread on its tail.

  My, my. The way they carried on would have done a couple of dissenting senators proud.

  “Hell, you should have heard them the rest of the night,” Magoo told me later. “You would have thought nobody else in the world had ever done anything so magnificent.”

  All I know is, Ghost surely had one helluva fine day! Half-blind or not.