"You notice how she never gets out more than about 150 yards without checking back in?" Mike Vance and I are working our way into the teeth of a 20-knot wind, the kind that, on the Montana prairie, passes for a breeze. It has snowed, and now the dips and furrows in the plowed wheatfield we're traversing have been filled in and leveled smooth with an overlay of dirty white snow -- a painful problem, as I will soon discover.

But at the moment, my eyes are on Bijo and Aya, Vance's two griffons. Aya is just a pup, and is spending most of her time puttering around Mike's feet. But Bijo is quartering at a smart clip 100 yards or so out front, clearly in tune with her job as Vance's primary bird finder. What's more, she does check back in. Checking in is good. Ergo, dogs that check back in are good dogs. But so much for philosophy.

Quartering "smartly" is perhaps the most accurate way to describe Bijo's pace as well as the pace of several other griffons I've hunted over in the last couple of years. They're not ground eaters--for sheer legs, no griffon I've seen can match the pace of a really hot setter or pointer for long--but they don't dawdle, either. Instead, they run…smartly, at a measured pace that my friends, Vance included, claim they can maintain for hours at a stretch.

That's a big advantage if you're a one-dog man; not so much if you're a multi-dog man who dotes on style and speed and is accustomed to hunting a single dog no more than two or three hours at a time. I make no bones about being a style and speed freak, but the truth is, 90 percent of the bird hunters in this country are anything but. They want a dog they can hunt all day, day in and day out. Style and speed don't even make it into the job description.

Style or no style, the birds aren't cooperating. Non-cooperation is a salient characteristic of Hungarian partridge, so when a covey blows out from several hundred yards behind us, flies past, and punches into the wind, I get the distinct feeling they're giving us the raspberry. They settle into the sagebrush a few hundred yards ahead.

My guess is that the day's slow action has nothing to do with Bijo. Despite the lack of birds, she's never stopped hunting--quartering into the wind, lowering her head to puzzle out old scent, then breaking off and casting out again. That measured but determined drive to find game seems characteristic of the breed. I'm hoping that, with the birds I know are ahead, we'll finally see some action, but it is not to be.

When we get into the general vicinity of where the covey put down, Bijo shifts into overdrive, her stub of a tail whirring. She's obviously foot-tracking running birds, but try as she might, she can't seem to pin them. Finally, Vance calls her off and we move on.