This, I suppose, could be considered a fault, but I've seen this happen literally hundreds of times before with virtually every pointing dog I've ever hunted over, none more so than my own. Huns march to a different drummer, and after two decades and then some of chasing them all over Montana, I still don't have a clue where they go. Do they run off? Fly off? I'm open for suggestions.

Besides strong hunting instincts, griffons also get high marks for their companionable nature.

"You notice how she always returns on a single whistle blast?" That's Vance again, and again I've noticed. But we're halfway through the hunt I've scheduled for the day, and with the best cover already behind us, I'm thinking about asking him for another hunt so I can take photos. Scant minutes later I step into a snow-filled badger hole and plunge forward onto my face, badly hyperextending my right knee. In the space of a curse, my season comes to an abrupt end. I'm able to hobble through the remainder of the hunt, but the following morning my knee is so sore I can barely get out of bed.

Luckily, I've seen enough, and what I've seen I've liked. If there really is an all-around pointing dog, a well-trained griffon (drahthaars are also serious contenders) may well be it.

That's not a designation I toss around casually; in fact I've written stories claiming just the opposite. But I'm beginning to come around.

There's good reason for the dog's versatility, and it's called the Wirehaired Pointing Griffon Club of America, or WPGCA. Their griffons are expected to quarter within reasonable range of the gun, point game, retrieve upland birds and waterfowl equally well, track and retrieve the wounded, and--a distinctly European requirement--blood-track big game animals. But several decades ago, according to some, those very qualities had gone into decline.

Jim Seibel, a retired food chemist, bird hunter and board member of the WPGCA from Michigan, remembers the bad old days.

"You have to go all the way back to the sixties," he told me. "That's when people like Ed and Joan Bailey--with a lot of help from Bodo Winterheldt--attempted to import griffons [to the U.S.] from all over the world. What was happening was, over the years…the dogs that they brought in seemed to all have their own set of problems, everything from temperament problems--not having a lot of desire--to being bootlickers, to having poor coats.

"So that was part of the problem. They couldn't find a dog that had a good coat, they couldn't find a dog without problems, even by importing. So after going through 20 years of doing this, they scratched their heads, and it was Bodo Winterheldt (the founder of NAVHDA) that suggested they outcross to another breed."

The upshot was that the dogs were infused with new blood from a closely related breed called the Cesky fousek (pronounced sezkee foughsek).

"A man named Joe Nadeker came here after WWII from the Czech Republic," Seibel recalls. "He was actually a shorthair guy, but he was aware of the Cesky fousek, which of course we eventually outcrossed to. The dogs (the fouseks) were almost completely wiped out during the war, and they had to rebuild the breed. Today, if you read the fousek standards, it's about as close to identical to the griffon standards as you can get, with only about an inch in difference in height."