In all the countries in Europe pointers and setters are used, but there are districts in Hungary and Bohemia where partridges are so plentiful that this canine assistance is neither required nor employed. The style of shooting in these districts would make the use of any dogs except retrievers absurd, and the writer never has been able to detect the sportsmanship in employing dogs when they are in the way and hinder sport. The truest pleasure is to be derived from getting shots by means of dogs that one could have got in no other way. This feeling for and fellowship with pointers and setters is to be found in the wild Highlands and Islands of the west and extreme north of Scotland, and also in the greater part of the mountains of Ireland. To a great extent it is also felt in pursuit of the rype of Scandinavia, and of the partridge, wherever that bird is scarce enough to require much finding before it is shot. But throughout Europe there is more or less preservation, more or less boundary to be protected, with the growing demands for artificial methods first, and then, a little later, the substitution of men for dogs. There is also a kind of bastard shooting over dogs, in which a line of guns is formed as if for walking up the game, and then one or a brace of dogs is allowed to run down wind, or up, according to the requirements of the line of guns, and with no thought as to possibility of the wind serving the dogs. But under such circumstances canine assistance is in a false position, and it is distressing to see what happens. A pair of dogs could not adequately serve a line of guns, even if they had all the advantage of the wind, and it may be safely affirmed that when any attempt is made to walk up game, dogs are out of place, except as retrievers at heel. On a Scotch Highland hillside it may be a question whether a party of four guns can kill most game by all walking in line or by working in two parties and shooting over dogs, but in the former case there is a better way—that of driving the game to the guns, which saves the walking, and the shooting becomes more exciting because more frequent.

But dog work is conducted in such various methods, some of which are so little removed from treading up the birds, that an idealist must hesitate to affirm that it is always preferable to forming line and walking up the game. There is an idea that the place to loose off the dogs is where game has congregated, or been driven into good cover, so that points may recur at every 10 yards. This is when the heavy shooting occurs, but it is not when the dog is most indispensable. The latter happens when there is no more than one covey to every 500 acres, and you have to find it before you have any sport. Some people say that under those circumstances they would prefer no sport. This, however, is a decadent view. We all of us appreciate sport as its difficulty increases, and a bag that was good enough for the great Duke of Wellington and for Colonel Peter Hawker ought to be good enough for any of us if we desire to feel ourselves sportsmen. The author has no word to urge against big bags except this: they cannot form a feature of everyday life for many, if for any of us, and sport can—provided the anxiety to make big bags because they are the fashion does not destroy our love of sport for its own sake. The writer confesses to being one of those selfish creatures who is supremely happy if he has satisfied his own critical spirit, even in such trifles as a day’s unwitnessed sport over dogs, the stalking of a blackcock or of a stag, the capture of a reluctant trout, or the killing of half a score of driven grouse out of a pack without a miss. He is well aware that either of these may be the harder to accomplish according to circumstances, and his pleasure is based on the absence of anything that might have been done better. Once in his life he sent a stag’s head to a taxidermist, and then changed his mind and would not have it home; and once or twice he has counted his kills during a day, but never made a written note of them. It has always appeared to the author that sport is its own reward, and that records are rather sad reading, and trophies create memories of the noble dead, and not always pleasant ones. It seems easier to take an interest in other people’s records than in one’s own, and to admire trophies that one did not victimise.

Surely a true spirit of sport may be the possession of one whose whole household idols are his gun and rifle, and whose total impedimenta are a portmanteau and gun-case. The greater one’s belongings, and the more one grows to care for them, the less ready one becomes to go far afield for sport, and the more one is inclined to cling to old memories, even without the assistance of trophies and private written records.

Feats of sport that can be forgotten are not worth remembering, for if enjoyment depended upon the size of the bag or the grandeur of a trophy, every day in which the old record was not beaten would be a day lost, whereas, in sport for its own sake alone, every triviality is supreme for the time being, and one is as keen for small things or great at sixty as at sixteen, although—and more is the pity—a great deal more self-critical.

The author has not ventured to trouble the possible reader with these personal reflections without a purpose—a purpose of making small things interesting, if that may be in an atmosphere of fashion and big bags.

An American prairie chicken and a quail are very small birds, and nowhere are they to be had in the abundance of Norfolk partridges or Yorkshire grouse. But they are as keenly pursued as any game in this country, and the writer was at least as gratified with small-bag successes as he has ever been with bigger bags in this country.

There are many reasons for the appreciation of even small bags of prairie chicken or quail. One is that the birds are for the most part for those who can find them. The actual shooting is so much the smaller matter. You find yourself on a prairie apparently as big and as flat as the Pacific Ocean. In the far distance you may observe a thin line of smoke as of a steamer hull down; you guess it at 10 miles, expecting to be told you have doubled the distance. Instead, you are informed it is the Trans-Continental railway train, which you know to be 40 miles away by the map. You may shoot to it, driving your waggon all the way, as the dogs work to the sky-lines on either side of you, never stopping until they get a point or come to the waggon for water. When they do point, you drive to them, it may be a mile, before taking the gun from its case and descending from the waggon. You judge of your dogs, not by their “treading up” the game, but by their sense in only hunting the habitat of game, and by the instinctive straightness of their course, first to the whereabouts of birds, and second to the game itself. With that 40 miles of unbeaten prairie in front, you are not reluctant to leave behind unbeaten ground that your dogs repudiate, especially as you see they do believe in what lies ahead, and you have reason to know that they are as reliable in their sense of “bird ground” as in their powers of smelling the game itself. The Americans value them for the former most uncommon quality, which they call “bird sense.” In practice it means both the greatest expenditure and economy of canine energy.

Change the locality to the South, in those winter months when all the Frozen North is mantled in white, and when the Ohio and the big lakes are solid ice. The autumn has passed, and Christmas has come and gone, before a shot is fired at the quail on many plantations. The brush has been too thick, to say nothing of the standing corn and the cotton, into which it is not “good form” to ride. You have exchanged your waggon for a saddle-horse. The flat prairie has given place to much broken and rolling ground, much natural covert, but distances are still wide; quail are plentiful for these parts. That is to say, there may be a brood to every 500 acres, perhaps to every 100 acres. As your dogs are sent off, you take care that they are not deceived as to the way you are riding. They will have no other indication as to your whereabouts in half an hour’s time, by when they will assuredly have been seen once or twice. Their sense of locality now becomes of as great importance as their bird sense. If they had not the former, they could either not go out of sight, or, doing so, would be lost. They may be the other side a hill and through a wood and half a mile away, but they can come straight back to you from any point, provided you ride straight. If you turn when they are out of sight, you defeat them, and they lose you. In such country as this it is not surprising that one school of shooters prefer what they call close ranging dogs, which, however, are not quarterers, but merely dogs of lesser courage, or those that fear to be lost. But, every other quality being equal, the field trials are won by the fastest stayers of the wide ranging variety, but such as do not lose themselves and do find game. In the Champion Stake for previous field trial winners that I assisted to judge in 1904, the rules insist on three-hour heats, and in practice competition demands these heats to be run at top speed throughout; but this speed in no sense means racing, but the most strenuous hunting for game.

Although the close ranging school condemn high ranging on various grounds, it is interesting to note that when they breed a litter of puppies the sires they use are those which have won these Champion Stakes. They are wise enough to know that, given the natural canine energy in their young dogs, they can turn it to advantage either in close or wide ranging, or merely in staying longer at a slower pace.

The broods of quail are not easy to find, because of the strenuous canine work required to cover so much ground, and the bird sense necessary to enable the dogs to select the right ground on which to hunt. When the brood is found and flushed, it scatters. Then any slow dog can find the scattered birds, and this is when the bag is filled; but it is not the valued canine quality, for the very reason that it is common property, whereas bird sense, sense of locality, and covey finding in the highest degree, are rare traits by comparison.

One day when the writer was shooting in Tennessee, his host had out three handlers of dogs, each mounted, and each working a brace of field trial winning setters at a time, with frequent changes. The sound of the horn was indicative of a point, and a long gallop had frequently to be taken to get to it. When the beat is in progress, the horses usually travel at a fox trot, or about six miles an hour. But even six crack dogs proved none too many for sport, so scarce are quail in some parts, and in this particular part they fairly swarmed in comparison with much of the Frozen North.

These high-couraged dogs that seem to take no hint from their handlers, but to think entirely for themselves, nevertheless have but to see their handler off his horse to take it for a signal to quarter the ground closely for scattered quail, or to hunt like a retriever for dead birds. Then upon the handler mounting again, their natures seem to change upon the instant, and they shoot off in a mighty hurry to make some cast that they have had “in mind” probably all the time they have been doing what is called “bird work,” as tamely as and obediently as any English field trialer.

Some people look upon this riding to pointers and setters as new, and think these dogs were never intended for any such purpose. On the other hand, it appears probable that they could not have invented their bird sense and sense of locality, which are doubtless instinctive and hereditary. It is the fashion to think our ancestors were slow in their movements. So they were, no doubt, when they could not be quick, but others besides Colonel Hawker knew the advantage of bustling along after partridges by means of a shooting pony and quick pointers; and others besides Joe Manton have found that “going slow” was not the royal road to success, nor buttermilk as good for pointers as for points. It was not fair of the Colonel to prepare certain failure by means of buttermilk. Used in this way, the shooting pony in conjunction with pointers and setters is not often seen now in England, but it certainly was very common when the ridable portions of the country were mostly shot by the assistance of those dogs. It is probable, therefore, that this American form of shooting, brought to perfection there by means of field trials, is really more like English shooting at the dawn of the nineteenth century than our own shooting over dogs is like it.

But whether that is so or not, the writer is certain that this strenuous work is the right method to maintain the generations of the dog, and that there would be no sense in the theory of evolution if these Champions were not the best dogs to breed from. At any rate, although the Americans owe to us all their breeds of pointers and setters, no recent importations have been able to win there, and, on the other hand, the first American cross-breds to be brought over have annexed some of our field trials. The reference is to Mr. A. Hall’s Guiniard Shot and Dash, victors in a brace stake in 1905, and good enough with a little luck, and in the hands of any but a novice, to have beaten the best running in our trials that year, although they were only four days over the age of puppies when they competed against old dogs.

Another charming method of shooting is found still farther South, in Georgia, where there are vast areas of pine forests and quail in them.

Here it is common to drive through the pathless woods. The waggons are often driven over a fallen tree that to English eyes seems to bar the way. It is an article of faith that if the horse can get over, the buggy will follow.

There is naturally a limit to one’s range of vision amongst straight stems, although there is no brushwood to interfere, and the way free rangers when upon the point are found in these woods, as also in the brushwood outside, is by means of other dogs; there may be half a dozen hunting together, and several spare animals in the buggy. If careful watching does not discover the last direction taken by the dog on point, it will do so of one or other of the backing dogs, and, failing that, another is turned out to look for the out-of-sight brigade. January sport is like driving in the English pine districts on an early September day, and shooting partridges in the woods (for the “quail” or “bob-whites” are partridges, and not quail) and the bracing freshness of the pine-laden air has, with good reason, caused New York fashion to winter in the pine districts of Georgia, of which Thomasville is a good specimen, for sport and health.

Since writing the above, a puppy the author selected in America in 1904, then eight months old and unentered, has beaten all the pointers and setters at the grouse trials on Lord Home’s beautiful Lanarkshire moors, in August 1906. This is Captain H. Heywood Lonsdale’s Ightfield Rob Roy, and very fully confirms a view expressed above, that the severest tests are the best for keeping up a breed. This dog comes of the remarkably in-bred race referred to in the chapter on English setters, and it need not be mentioned further, except to say that the pure breed as first-rate performers came to an end in this country owing to in-breeding, without at the same time selecting as severely for vitality as the field trial system does in America. Selection has negatived the well-known influence of in-breeding in everything except in size. This pure bred in-bred race was originated over there by the author’s selection for Americans of dogs all descended from those six setters named in the chapter on English setters, and picked and recommended from the kennels of the late Mr. Tom Statter, the late Mr. Laverack, the late Mr. Barclay Field, Mr. Purcell Llewellin, and others. In the exported originals they were Laverack and Rhoebe crosses, like Mr. Barclay Field’s Rock on the one hand; Laveracks, like Mr. Laverack’s Victress (Dash and Moll); Laverack and Rhoebe crosses like the late Mr. Statter’s Rob Roy; Duke and Rhoebe crosses bred by Mr. Statter, of which strain two big bitches were sent out; and others of the three crosses, Duke, Rhoebe, and Laveracks, like Mr. Llewellin’s Druid and his Count Noble. The demand for them arose in consequence of some letters the author had written in the American sporting press referring to the superiority of these three strains over any others of that period. The author even ventured to give them a title, namely “the Field Trial breed,” and that was the sole reason why they were kept uncrossed with other blood in America. It is this uncrossed blood that is represented in Captain Heywood Lonsdale’s Rob Roy, but that this race of in-breds is still valuable (and in America by far the most valuable) is owing to those three-hour stamina trials by which the sires are selected. It was because of the severity of those tests that the writer felt sure that he could select in America superior material to any our breakers have to work upon. That idea was not very popular when it was first stated some five years ago; but those who had taken the opposite view were generous when they saw Rob Roy’s performance, and, as one of them remarked, they “took it all back.” The crosses of this energetic strain cannot fail to improve our setters, and if we could only import the severity of selection of the best winners by further more severe stamina trials, we should not be long behind America. There the breed has a Stud Book registration to itself, for which any cross whatever disqualifies. They are registered as “Llewellin setters,” which was for some reason substituted for the “Field Trial breed” which the author had given. In conversation they are spoken of in America as “straight-bred,” and in England the best designation is “the American straight-bred setters,” since it is necessary to know that we are not speaking of the same breed as Mr. Llewellin’s recent field trial representatives, which are crossed, and could not be registered in the American Stud Book as Llewellin setters or straight-bred ones. About thirty-five field trials for pointers and setters are held every year in America, and honours rarely, if ever, fall on any other race except setters, either straight-bred or having 90 per cent. of the blood, and on the pointers.