By Clyde Edgerton | Aug/Sept 09 | 

Chicken Dog

Some dogs just never figure out the right bird to hunt

Illustration by Jason Holley

Listen to a lost recording of Bird Dog Ben

In 1971 I began writing songs. The first one was about a dog I’d once owned (lazy 4/4 tempo):

Bird dog Bell had some
puppies, I think she had ten.
The one I chose was a hotshot—I named him Ben.

The one main dog in my life was Ben, a liver and white English pointer, mine over his whole life span, from the time I was sixteen (1960) until I was twenty-six (1970).

My first pet had been a black cat named Inky who one afternoon got run over but not quite killed. I was six, standing in the front yard when it happened. My mama took it upon herself to finish Inky off with a baseball bat (as a good deed). This event marks a milestone in my life. It’s the day I learned that when things die, they stay dead. And that sometimes people kill animals on purpose.

Nick and Sam, the two bird dogs my father owned when I was growing up, were family. They somehow seemed more important than the pets I owned as a child—Inky, a dog named Sergeant, and a few other dogs. For one thing, they had a job. Hunting. And they had clear human personalities. Nick was cool, distant, proud. Not easy to know. Sam was warm, friendly, the type to walk up, throw an arm around your shoulder and say, “Hey, man, what’s up?”

Early on, I got an idea of how bird dogs should be treated. I still hold onto the rules, prejudices, and guidelines I learned from my father and mother (she was less sentimental) about dogs, especially bird dogs:
1. Mix table scraps and cheap dry dog food with water. Feed your dogs in the evening—after they’ve been let out of their pen (roomy) to run around awhile.
2. Dogs should have good manners. They must come when called—no hesitations. They should never jump up on a person. (A short section of garden hose to the nose should solve that bothersome problem.)
3. If you don’t have time or knowledge to train your dogs yourself, then perhaps your priorities are jumbled.
4. Dogs, especially hunting dogs, should stay out of the house.
5. Dogs should be trained not to chase chickens, for chasing chickens is a serious offense.

We had a few bird dogs after Nick and Sam, and by the time I was sixteen, it was Queen. Her person-like qualities were patience, steadiness, and a kind of mother-hen-ness. She was sired to a dog belonging to a friend of my father’s, and on a snowy day, February 29, 1960, ten pups were born to Queen there in the doghouse in the backyard pen. (I changed Queen’s name to Bell in the song because I thought it sounded better.) I had first choice and I chose the biggest one, a liver and white big-footed prize.

For five long years we hunted many a field and hill, what a thrill.

No, the song didn’t win any awards.

During my last two years of high school (’60–’62), my father and I trained Ben. Our methods had been passed down from father to son, uncle to nephew, for generations—among people who hunted in order to put food on the table and money in the bank. (A great-uncle, around the turn of the century, sold undressed quail bound at the neck in Raleigh for a quarter a bunch.)

For puppy Ben—while teaching him to point as Uncle Bob and Daddy showed me—I’d tie a small ball of newspaper onto the end of a string that hung from a fishing pole. Then I’d sling it out in front of him. He would charge it. I’d jerk it into the air before he reached it, and I’d drop it elsewhere. He’d charge it again but perhaps hesitate just a second before getting to it. I’d lift it and fling it out again, and he’d drop into a beautiful point for maybe three seconds; then he’d charge the paper. Within a few days, little Ben, only weeks old, would hold a picture-perfect point for a long time. The instinct to stalk prey and freeze is so strong in some bird dogs that this training is easy, but in others it’s not. Ben was easy. In fact, he was already coming into what would be his eventual person-like qualities: He was smart, enthusiastic, obedient, and brotherly.

In the field, Uncle Bob’s technique was to keep a long rope around a young dog’s neck. When the pup charged a covey pointed by another dog as he invariably would, Uncle Bob gave him rope, the dog picked up speed, and then the rope gave out just as Uncle Bob jerked on it—a shocking discouragement for running into a covey of quail. Several of these episodes would normally teach a smart dog proper pointing technique. Ben learned everything naturally and easily—honoring (or “backing”) another dog’s point, retrieving, circling a field with nose to ground, winding, hunting close in thick woods and farther out in thin woods.

Here’s the hunt as I knew it in the 1960s: I’d let Ben out of his pen in the backyard, and after he ran around a few minutes, I’d order him into the car trunk and then lower the trunk lid and tie it so it would neither close nor pop open. I’d drive to the woods, a hunting place I knew—or knew about—let Ben out, load my gun, place the safety switch on, and start walking on a general route I knew if I’d hunted that place before. Ben would gallop ahead with his nose lowered.