The grouse was no novice, no youngster that luck shoved down the perfect flight path out of harm's way. He--and I was positive it was a male--made the right moves at the right times. Besides, I was sure I knew this bird; I would have bet a truckload of No. 8s it was the same cock grouse (a striking red-phase bird; grays predominate in my part of the Maine woods) that had outfoxed me in the same place and in much the same fashion twice during last year's season.

English setters are the traditional dogs of the northeastern grouse woods, both in mind’s eye and in reality. It’s imposible to deny their elegance in the covers and their effectiveness on Yankee pa’tridge.

The crafty grouse--"pa'tridge" in Maine lingo--had flushed 25 yards in front of me off the backside of a steep hill. My springer, a veteran hunter that knew the cover, had worked the bird's twisting trail into a corner of a weedy farm road from another time and a postage-stamp field. At the field's edge was a splendid red maple whose spread of limbs had once shaded the dooryard of a dwelling.

I was angling toward the maple and the dog's bell, trying to head off the bird and pin him in the corner, when the October breeze freshened and the air went wild with leaves: yellow leaves and crimsons and lighter shades of reds, rusts, and magentas swirled around me. It was a stunning show, and for a moment I was paralyzed by the sight. And that pause was long enough for dog and grouse, both unconcerned with beauty, to converge near the big maple.

Taking time to admire a grouse brought to bag is a requisite part of the experience.

The bird exploded from a tangle of undergrowth amidst wing-fanned dust and debris, then arced sharply down and to the side behind the maple to beat toward the safety of an adjacent pine stand. In the instant before he was screened by the tree, the pa'tridge looked blurred, hazy and stretched out a yard long.

The springer had done his job well; he put the grouse in the air and his butt on the ground, where he stayed, leaning muscle-tense and staring along the wake of the departed bird. I, on the other hand, stood off balance with shotgun half-raised and unfired, watching dust from the flush drift away on the wind. My mind had wandered just when the bird jumped and deftly sideslipped behind the maple and into deep cover mapped in his brain.

His turf was a part of a long-abandoned farmstead, a sprawl of hardscrabble acreage where families had scratched meager livings from the rocky earth of Maine. And they had worked at it, as evidenced by overgrown lanes now traveled only by hunters and hunted; antique apple orchards with scattered, arthritic survivors still hanging on; run-amok berry brambles; small, barely discernable clearings. There were rock-lined cellar holes of dwellings collapsed on themselves; tumbledown stone walls marking boundaries and faint two-tracks to nowhere; granite blocks of millraces that once dammed a silvery ribbon of creek.

In superficial ways, this cover resembles those all over New England, while in others it is uniquely Maine. More southerly uplands are softer, the classic New England of calendar art; scratch the surface of the far northcountry and you find all of its rough inner self. And this old farmstead is unalloyed Maine right down to small, sad cemeteries whose weathered gravestones chronicle the history of a rock-strewn land that broke more than the plowshares of those who farmed it. But land that challenges the hardiest of people offers a bonanza to ruffed grouse and woodcock.