Staunchness--holding a point until the gunner arrives to flush the bird--is a requisite among pointing dogs.

Blue grouse typically remain in broods until early October, but the big males are true bachelors, living a life of lonely isolation deep in the forest primeval. So when my Brittany pointed a male not far from the open parks the family groups usually inhabit, I was doubly surprised: first, that we'd found a cock so far from the woods; and second, that Powder broke at my buddy's shot and ran the bird down. I'd spent all the previous summer steadying her to wing and shot, and enough was enough. I picked her up, hauled her back to the scene of the crime and set her where she belonged. "Whoa," I growled, hoping the tone of my voice was fraught with implications.

It must have worked. In the next two hours, we put up four more singles as well as a brood of five or six--a hell of a good day for blues--and she never broke again, never budged.

Call it steady, call it staunch--technically there's a difference but I'm not a technical guy--so let's just call it fully trained, a finished gun dog. By my reckoning, a finished dog whoas, heels, backs, comes when called, retrieves, serves up a reasonably dry martini, and last, is steady to wing and shot. So, you may well ask, have my dogs always lived up to this ideal? And to that I would answer: Ha.

In fact, the dogs I now own are the first ever. None of my previous pointers was steady, although for what it's worth, I've come close.

My last pair of bird puppies--like the current pair, also a setter and a Brittany--were steady as a rock on pigeons, but somehow, by the time the season rolled around, hunting got in the way of training, one thing led to another, and before long both of the little connivers were up to their old tricks, which meant that, as near as I could tell, they figured they could chase a flushed bird until it fell exhausted from the sky or one or the other of them ran into a tree. They would return on the whistle, but that's not the same as steady.

Of course, all the foregoing begs the question: If it's so much trouble, why make them steady to begin with? Is it really necessary? There's a long and a short answer to that question, and the short answer is "no." But we're going to explore the long answer today, because that's what I get paid to do.

Maybe I've lived a sheltered existence, but until recently, I don't recall ever hunting with anyone who had an honest-to-God, bedrock-steady pointing dog. I've trained dogs with men and women who owned steady dogs--quite a few of them, in fact--but as for actually hunting with someone whose dog was reliably steady…well, it just doesn't seem to figure in the average bird hunter's idea of the good life. In fact, an awful lot of the dogs I've hunted over were on the edge of control, or completely off the deep end, dogs that paid no more attention to their owner's shrill screams than they paid to the morning commodities report.

"Steady to wing and shot" wasn't an obscure concept to the owners of these dogs, particularly those who had taken the time to mold their charges into reasonably compliant animals. Rather, it simply wasn't deemed necessary. And truth be told, I agree with them. No law says you have to steady up your pointing dog. None of your hunting buddies will notice if you don't. And if your dog hunts hard, finds birds and makes you happy, who am I or anyone else to say that's not good enough?