The author’s hosts, Bill and Katie Kluchko of Bozeman, Montana, and their flat-coats, Fanny and Doc.

Although I've hunted over retrievers before and at one time owned a crackerjack springer spaniel, for most of the last 15 years I've been hunting over wide-ranging setters and moderately-ranging Brittanys, and I found myself wanting to shoo Fanny and Doc further into the woods where I thought the grouse were. To be fair, though, these were retrievers, not pointers, and their range was close but within acceptable retrieving-dog standards. I was also beginning to get an inkling of something that Bill would explain to me a few days later: Flat-coats are easily bored.

In my research on the breed, I'd run across similar statements written by other flat-coat owners. "I usually throw dummies for them," Bill told me, outlining the light training he gives his dogs. "But not a lot of them. That's one thing about the breed--they do not take repetition. It's almost like they're saying, 'I did it once; why do I have to do it again?'"

Funny how bird scent changes everything.

Getting Birdy
A half hour after we'd started, the three of us began climbing a nearly vertical, pine-studded mountainside. I pulled myself up tree limb by tree limb and finally gained the respite of a long-abandoned and blessedly flat logging road. Bill and Katie shifted their guns to the crooks of their arms and took a breather while I wheezed in the murderously thin air. Suddenly, Katie spun around and pointed at Fanny.

"Look," she said. "She's got something!"

Fanny had come alive. She charged up the mountain, her nose to the ground, plowing through the underbrush and squirming under deadfalls. A moment later, Doc joined her, and the two of them dashed around the hillside above us, Bill and Katie waiting below with their shotguns halfway to their shoulders.

But as so often happens in the grouse woods, nothing came of it. Had a brood been through there? Since Fanny and Doc are six and eight, respectively, and Bill and Katie hunt them three days a week for doves, Huns and pheasants throughout most of the generous Montana bird season, I'm fairly certain one had. Experienced dogs, no matter the breed, rarely get worked up over chipmunks and tweety birds. A few minutes later the dogs were back at our sides, and we resumed our climb.

Twenty-plus years ago, while recovering from back surgery, Bill started shopping around for a bird dog. At the time, he was a music teacher in Aspen, Colorado. Katie worked for Obermeyer, a huge ski-clothing manufacturer of the day. Bill was just getting his feet wet as a bird hunter but already knew enough to realize he needed canine help.

"I chose them [flat-coats] because they were so easy to work with," he told me. "I went to the library and got this booklet on dog breeds, and it had this little check list. It said that flat-coats were intelligent, easy to work with, very birdy, family oriented and not aggressive (but would give warning barks). And I said, 'Gosh, this is the exact recipe for what I want.' And it's all been true."

That was four flat-coats ago. His first dog lived to be 12, the second died at age seven, and the last two were here before us, clambering up the hill in search of scent.

Presently we found an open meadow that straddled a ridgeline, nearly perfect cover. We stopped for a moment while Katie watered the dogs, admiring the view that fell away on all sides of us.

I gazed across the meadow. "There have got to be birds here," I said. All around were scattered clumps of fir and spruce, among them large, old-growth trees ringed with ground-hugging junipers. Snowberries and grass grew thickly in the sunny openings, and a type of silvery forb--a plant I hadn't yet identified but had seen in virtually every crop of every bird I'd taken that year--grew in patches underfoot. It was grouse heaven.