Woody was doing his job behind me, shaking the tall horseweeds with his excited tail. I heard a cackle, and turned to see a rooster flying off the end of Woody's nose.

The bird careened in a windblown arc across the open stubble, gaining altitude and speed. The old 1100 was hard to get moving, but just as hard to stop once it started to swing. It kept on swinging through the blast, and the bird fell dead among the broken stalks. Woody brought it to hand, and it was just as beautiful as the first. I was glad that I had been carrying the old 1100.

On the way back to the trucks, a rooster flushed wild and flew high above the brome. We watched it land on the far side of a brushy draw, 300 yards away. While the other men continued toward the trucks, Dad and I decided to go for it.

Minutes later we reached the general vicinity and let the dogs go to work. Woody was crashing the brush down in the draw to my right when he suddenly lifted his nose high and turned toward me. He came up out of the draw, passed behind me, and began quartering into the open grass to my left.

Soon he paused with his ears perked, and then he lunged forward. The rooster came out cackling, flying straight away. From that angle, a pheasant is easy to hit but hard to kill. I hit it, but didn't kill it. The bird fell to earth with a broken wing and perhaps other less visible injuries, but with two uninjured legs.

Obviously, Woody has a good nose. He had detected the bird on the breeze from perhaps 30 yards away, and followed the scent plume to its source. Moreover, he marked the fall almost perfectly. This story should end with a live bird in a Labrador's mouth, but it doesn't end that way. It ends with two puzzled men stamping all over a hillside with two good dogs that don't understand why they can't smell the bird they just saw.

I thought about the bird racing panicked through the brome, dragging a wing and dying slower than it deserved, and I wished that I had kept my hands in my pockets.

A friend of mine trains gun dogs for a living. Recently, after we had shot limits of pheasants in South Dakota, he told me that he wasn't sure if he could stand to keep on training dogs. I was expecting him to go on about picky owners and their unreasonable demands, so his reason struck me hard.

"I'm tired of the killing," he whispered. "Every day, all day long, I shoot pigeons or twist their necks. God help me, some days I don't think I can kill another one."

There were other hunters present, and he spoke quietly, as though afraid others might overhear us. I wondered then, and still wonder now, whether the state of hunting today is healthy if a hunter feels afraid to speak out loud of his reticence about killing.

For the record, I am not done killing pheasants. But I don't need to kill them anymore, and their deaths bother me more than they once did, especially when they don't go according to script. Maybe that's because pheasants are getting­ scarcer--and thus more precious­--where I live, or maybe it's because I'm getting older. Either way, I look forward to more opportunities to handle the dogs and let others do the shooting. I hate cold fingers.