154 THE COMPLETE SHOT 



distance you may observe a thin line of smoke as of a steamer 

 hull down ; you guess it at 10 miles, expecting to be told you 

 have doubled the distance. Instead, you are informed it is 

 the Trans-Continental railway train, which you know to be 

 40 miles away by the map. You may shoot to it, driving your 

 waggon all the way, as the dogs work to the sky-lines on 

 either side of you, never stopping until they get a point or 

 come to the waggon for water. When they do point, you 

 drive to them, it may be a mile, before taking the gun from 

 its case and descending from the waggon. You judge of your 

 dogs, not by their " treading up " the game, but by their sense 

 in only hunting the habitat of game, and by the instinctive 

 straightness of their course, first to the whereabouts of birds, 

 and second to the game itself. With that 40 miles of unbeaten 

 prairie in front, you are not reluctant to leave behind unbeaten 

 ground that your dogs repudiate, especially as you see they 

 do believe in what lies ahead, and you have reason to know 

 that they are as reliable in their sense of " bird ground " as in 

 their powers of smelling the game itself. The Americans 

 value them for the former most uncommon quality, which 

 they call "bird sense." In practice it means both the greatest 

 expenditure and economy of canine energy. 



Change the locality to the South, in those winter months 

 when all the Frozen North is mantled in white, and when the 

 Ohio and the big lakes are solid ice. The autumn has passed, 

 and Christmas has come and gone, before a shot is fired at 

 the quail on many plantations. The brush has been too thick, 

 to say nothing of the standing corn and the cotton, into which 

 it is not " good form " to ride. You have exchanged your 

 waggon for a saddle-horse. The flat prairie has given place 

 to much broken and rolling ground, much natural covert, but 

 distances are still wide ; quail are plentiful for these parts. 

 That is to say, there may be a brood to every 500 acres, 

 perhaps to every 100 acres. As your dogs are sent off, you 

 take care that they are not deceived as to the way you are 

 riding. They will have no other indication as to your where- 

 abouts in half an hour's time, by when they will assuredly have 



