Kirby, a four-year-old English springer spaniel owned by Jen Tuttle of Mitchell, South Dakota, has retrieved every species of waterfowl in the Central Flyway.

I was teaching English classes at South Dakota State University and started a conversation one day with Bubba's owner, who was a student from Minnesota in one of my Junior Composition classes.

"Yes," I confessed when the young man asked if I liked to hunt pheasants. And "yes," I said again when he offered to meet me that afternoon in a 280-acre tract of public owned cattails and prairie grass 20 miles west of town.

"Stand back," my new hunting partner warned as he got ready to release Bubba, his two-year-old male springer, from the back seat of his car where the dog had been bouncing every second of the ride from town to this hunting spot.

It was good advice because Bubba came barreling out of the back seat like he had been shot from a cannon. He ripped across the road ditch, leaped over a barbed wire fence, and disappeared into the sea of big bluestem and Indian grass.

"We had better get going if we want to shoot some roosters," his owner suggested as we climbed through the fence and took off after Bubba at a fast walk, then a quick trot, and soon a full run as pheasants suddenly started to spring into the air ahead of us 100 or more yards away.

A couple of long and hard hours later we headed back to the vehicle with Bubba still eager to run, but now tethered to a rope so we could load him up and head for home. The hunt, which had been fast and furious, was productive when we could keep up with Bubba. He found and flushed more than two dozen pheasants, only two of which were roosters that flew up close enough for on-the-edge-of-range shots.

On later hunting trips, in addition to finding live pheasants, Bubba also tracked wounded ringnecks and found shot-dead roosters that he usually retrieved in our direction before dropping them to head off after more fresh pheasants.

One early November afternoon Bubba ran toward a small slough at the far end of a big hay field and flushed a pair of mallards from a patch of open water. When the drake fell at the report of a 12-gauge, Bubba raced into the water, swam across the pond, and disappeared into a thick clump of tall cattails. He soon emerged and swam back with the duck clamped in his jaws.

"Once so far and just now," was Bubba's owner's answer to my question: "How often has your springer retrieved waterfowl out of deep water and heavy cover?" During the rest of the hunting season, Bubba fetched more ducks and even a couple of Canada geese that we jump shot off ponds and small lakes. In several instances, he even broke thin ice to get to the birds.