Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i Gun Dog

MOST wild-game-burger aficionados already know adding pork fat or pork meat is a proven method for binding ground game while also retaining moisture during cooking. In my experience, pork butt is the happy medium between the two techniques and both adds extra flavor and keeps the burger juicy. Note: pork butt is a cut from the upper shoulder—not the actual butt. Anything called pork shoulder is taken from lower on the foreleg. Most stores or butcher shops will sell sliced pork butt, or what some might call, “pork steaks.” Banh mi, from my understanding, literally translates to “bread” in Vietnamese. In the case of the sandwich by the same name, the bread component is just as crucial as every other ingredient. In this recipe, that means substituting a French baguette…

PROBLEM: Your dog doesn’t retrieve all the way to hand. He brings it so close and drops it and takes off hunting; or he brings the bird but turns away and parades around just out of reach so you have to chase him down; or he brings the bird halfway, stops and chews it up into small pieces or swallows it whole. Dropping it near enough to bend over and pick it up yourself isn’t too bad unless the bird still has legs and runs down the first corn row. But, if the retrieve has deteriorated to a buried or eaten bird, it’s serious. Usually this problem arises from undertraining for one of the most important aspects of retrieving: the delivery to hand. So, how do you fix this problem?…

If you’ve ever returned to your childhood bedroom, then you know the unsettling familiarity of the experience. The room is smaller than you remember it, and you’re disappointed to realize that this place that once heaved with possibility and magic is really just an ordinary room in an ordinary house. If my bedroom was a pasture, then I had that same disappointment last December, as I hunted the edges of an overgrown field in north Missouri, not far from where I spent my boyhood. Back when I was a kid, a pasture like this might have come alive with cottontail rabbits scrambling from one brush pile to the next, fox squirrels chattering in the pin oaks, and bobwhite quail flushing like bumblebees from beneath wild raspberry vines. That’s the way…

One of the main problems we have as a society right now is that our communication style has changed so rapidly. We’ve spent a couple hundred thousand years looking at one-another, making sounds with our face, and gesticulating our bodies to convey our messages. Today, we key in simple, poorly worded sentences and read them on a screen. Emotion, inflection, sarcasm, and all of the nuances of in-person communication are stripped away. This leaves us wholly unprepared to glean all of the unwritten information that might be included in the message. This is particularly difficult to deal with when it comes to communicating with strangers. To top it off, the very same devices that we choose to communicate with are chock-full of distraction, which further hinders communication. What does this…

Eastern Nevada’s Ruby Mountains draw a small group of adventurers every year after a single, obscure prize: The Himalayan snowcock. This grayish bird stands roughly two-feet tall and can weigh six pounds. A sizeable, deftly camouflaged bird that possesses uncanny wariness and paranoia. To find them is one thing. To actually bag one is a whole other ball game. The sharp granite peaks of the Ruby Mountains rise abruptly from the valley floor to elevations reaching 11,000 feet. If you are the sort of person who yearns for solitude to commune with nature, you couldn’t pick a more idyllic place. As a longtime Nevada resident, I had talked about hunting snowcock for years. It never evolved to much more than that, until I met Alaskans Terry and Matt Hardinge. We…

I remember a morning a decade ago when I laid in bed beside my wife and watched the seasons slipping past, and I thought about moving West. It had been a wet and windless October, and through the bedside window I could see birch whips on the field edge standing stark against the dark and deeper woods. Their leaves, what remained of them, were soaked and luminous in the early light. On that morning, fall had been inching its way out of the north for a week or more, arriving in our dooryard with sprays of sunburst maple, and stars at night that sparkled like cut crystal, clearer than they had been in summer. It was only the beginning of the turn, and the season would unfurl for a month…

WHY do we dread so many things that we know are good for us? If I’ve got a toothache, it takes nearly unbearable pain before I schedule an appointment. Once I am done getting whatever needs to be taken care of, I feel instant relief and always wish I’d just gotten it done sooner. For me, the most difficult part of doing something unenjoyable is getting past the resistance and simply dealing with it. The process of hold conditioning can be like going to the dentist—most dread it. It’s not fun. Bella is 15 months old and has been with us for a little over a year. We are just now wrapping up the process of hold conditioning with her. The toothache that created the need to schedule an appointment…

THE desire and willingness to travel in search of upland adventure has never been stronger than it is these days. The availability of information on potential hunting spots combined with the opportunity to experience new species in new places is enough to get many of us to plan at least one hunting trip every season. This is a good thing for us and our dogs, but it doesn’t come without some considerations for our retrievers’ needs. This is especially true when you acknowledge that a lot of the planning will revolve around simply daydreaming about how productive the hunting will be; and hopefully, your trip pans out exactly that way. However, it’s also a good idea to plan for what can go wrong with your dog on a road trip,…

LIKE many other upland hunters, I grew up on the Browning brand. My grandfather and father owned Brownings, and when I was young and in search of my first real bird gun, I was only interested in firearms that bore the Buckmark logo. The first gun I ever remember really longing for was a Browning Citori. Despite a name change and factory relocation in the late twentieth century, the modern Citori looks and operates much like the original John Browning-designed Superposed that first drew American hunters to stack barrel shotguns. To many upland hunters, the Superposed/Citori was a blueprint of how an over/under should look, and few suspected Browning would stray very far from the shotgun’s original recipe. Then came 2004 when Browning launched the Cynergy: an all-new over/ under…

➜ I’ll skip the hackneyed social-distancing jokes, and say that I actually do like to hunt with a buddy and his dog in certain situations. There are times when we work together, fairly close. But there are also plenty of times when we will choose hunting spots specifically because they allow us to get enough space while hunting together, but not really too close. This is not unlike the parallel play you might see among toddlers, who desire the company of a schoolmate but don’t interact all that closely. For bird hunters, that might mean hunting in opposite directions and then meeting up at the truck at the end of the night, or it might mean that one hunter and his dog take one side of the slough and you…

HE was distancing himself from us, not on purpose, and not only because he had lost his sight and hearing, but because he had started on a journey where none of us were going—not yet anyway. Sometimes when I woke him, especially those last few days, it was as if he had been someplace and was almost disappointed to be back where he was, being helped to his feet and guided to the door. He dreamed deeply, often running and stopping, sniffing audibly. I thought that in his mind he was hunting, moving in glorious strides as he did in his younger days. He was never a noisy dog, only barking when a stranger came to the house. Only one time did he bark in his sleep, and it was…