Winterhelle's Spark clambered over a partially submerged root wad, half in and half out of the Madison River. Ice clung to his coat and face, giving the youngster the wizened look of Old Man Winter. Eric Trapp, his owner, was up to his knees in river water, watching his dog.

The Madison, of course, is Montana's world-class trout stream, but in November it's duck country. We were hunting on a private ranch owned by a consortium of doctors and managed by an on-site wildlife biologist, Mike Atcinson, who just so happens to be Trapp's personal friend. Sometimes it helps to know people in high places.

We'd had mallards buzzing our small decoy spread all morning, but most had flared at the last minute, giving us iffy shots at best. Trapp finally managed to scratch down a drake, but it hit the river swimming. It paddled to the root wad, crawled up the bank, and disappeared. Trapp's dog charged across the river, spray flying. But with more birds coming in, Trapp decided to call him back and pick up the duck later.

I had that figured for a mistake. It pains me to admit it, but I've wounded scores of ducks that have disappeared under ice-rimmed banks or swum to the far shore, never to be seen again. Some drift around a bend, others vanish into the reeds. Either way, they're gone. But now, two hours later, we were back, and Trapp was encouraging Scooby Doo (that's what you get when you let your pre-school aged kids give your dog his informal name) to move into the tangle of roots where we'd last seen his wounded quacker.

Suddenly, Scooby tensed and began burrowing deep into the branches, half his muscular body buried in the root wad. He backed out a minute later with a very dead duck in his mouth. I raised a cheer. The duck, as it turned out, was minus its head. Back in the blind, Atcinson mentioned he'd seen something dark and feline dart away from the bank. A mink, apparently, had got to the duck before Scooby had. Regardless, it was an impressive display of canine determination.

"Good boy, Scooby!" Trapp said. The leggy pudelpointer skittered around his owner's feet, mighty pleased with himself and more than happy to have another go at it.

With fewer than 2,000 pudelpointers in the entire U.S., this isn't a dog you're likely to see in the field, and if you did you might not recognize it as such. To the uninitiated--count me among them--they look very similar to several other German imports: Drahthaars, German wirehaired pointers and griffons. Scooby Doo is tall (the breed standard is between 22 and 26 inches at the shoulder), leggy, and strikingly handsome, with the mustachioed good looks of a WW1 German artillery officer.

His coat is wiry and stiff and a soft mocha brown, but Trapp tells me that the movers and shakers in the pudelpointer world are still breeding for coat consistency, and that some of the dogs have much flatter coats than others. For what it's worth, on our duck-hunting trip Scooby was so covered with ice he almost tinkled when he walked, but I never saw him shiver, despite sitting outside our blind for two hours with temperatures in the high twenties and low thirties.