Southern bird hunters, dogs and wild bobwhite quail were once as integral and complete in their surroundings as anything in nature can be.

For us regulars, Golly's ancestry was a mystery. His owner (we'll call him Gary) didn't place much stock in pedigrees and never discussed Golly's. It was an era in which pointing dog pedigrees were not as prized by Southern bird hunters as they later became and since none of us planned to breed bird dogs for profit we didn't care much about registered extraction, either.

Golly (short for Goliath) did, however, look just like Moesgaard's Dandy, a locally well-thought-of German shorthair then owned by Dr. Lewis Kline, and we supposed Golly sprang from somewhere in the Dandy line. We weakly suspected that some long-tailed pointer blood found the way into Golly's lineage, too, but we couldn't prove it so the subject was broached only in a whisper.

Dandy's genes certainly would have explained Golly's prodigious quail-hunting prowess but all we knew of Dandy at that time was that he was doing pretty well in national field competition. We couldn't have known then that he would become the preeminent producer of world-class shorthairs he turned out to be. Wherever it came from, Golly's dark side was more than offset by his keen bird-hunting ability. But make no mistake, Golly's dark side did shine through.

For one thing, he was a sneak. Golly could glide past a knee-high wool sock draped over a boot top, lift and swallow it faster than you can say "Abracadabra." He was a cunning thief, too. To prove to us that he knew the difference between forbidden and permitted looting, Golly would conspicuously grab a worn out, permissible sock, shake it, toss it to himself a few times and then slowly savor it as if at a wine and cheese tasting.

Gary figured he could keep Golly in his kennel run by making it eight feet high, one of the few prison-height kennels we had ever seen. Golly would scale a corner, push up the corrugated metal top with his nose and beat Gary to the back door, with stub-tail wagging happily.

Cracker bird hunters have for generations launched guns and dogs on some exotic conveyances.

Gary finally resorted to a bolt snap and then a padlock on Golly's gate latch after the pup quickly learned to pick every other device Gary tried. It wasn't that Golly had any place more important to be. He simply had fun proving himself as an escape artist and, when the mood was right, we would often joke that Golly's learning curve had a slightly sharper upturn than Gary's. It would still be quite some time off in the future, but someone with a cheap shock-collar could have made a small fortune by renting it to Gary, if he could have found a way to keep Golly from removing the thing.

We all lost some of our lunches to Golly. It got pretty hungry during our dawn-to-dark forays and since we three regulars, Doc, Gary and me, along with an occasional irregular or two, hit the fields every weekend of the season, we knew to come prepared with ample, if not ambrosial, provisions. Some of these became dog food for Golly--if you didn't watch him like a hawk, Golly could grab and devour a sandwich in an eyeblink, leaving the victim to wonder if he had obliviously eaten it himself. Leave a window rolled part way down, and Golly would raid the lunch sacks like a wolverine in a logging camp. He could put away more food than a team of sled dogs and, though not what you'd call lean, he never appeared overweight.