For the Love of the Pointer
I fell in love with an English Pointer long before I realized that she was too much of a dog, and I still too much of a kid, to make the relationship stick. She was a lemon and white bitch out of the South somewhere, a dog who’d been discarded when mange made her ugly and, ostensibly, unworthy of the milo fields. She’d been scooped up by trainer Alec Sparks, nursed back to elegance, and given retirement privileges at Snowbound Kennels until a better offer came along. The odd training bird that Alec laid out for her was just gravy, just the kindness of a man who realized that without birds, bird dogs are simply dogs, artists without a muse. That lemon and white bitch was guileless to a fault. Her name was Bonnie.
What I knew then, though I wouldn’t admit it, was that Bonnie’s sights were set on a horizon I couldn’t quite see. She was a big-running horseback dog, plantation-bred and wired for quail, and I was just a kid. Mine was hip-pocket hunting hemmed in by cow pastures, spruce stands and birds that blew out at the sound of a bell. My New England was a patchwork place, and Bonnie needed the whole quilt, and Alec warned me of this obliquely. He referred to her as ‘Bonnie von Long Gone’, a dog who’d been similarly courted by another North Country wingshooter the year before.
“The owner put her down in a popple thicket, tapped her head, and didn’t see her again for three days. The logger who found her said she was torn up pretty good, but locked up stiff as a statue, nose jammed into a thorn-apple clump. He had to kick a partridge outta there before he could drag her off and call the owner. Sixty miles by road from where he’d last seen her. ‘Long Gone’ was back here at the kennel the next day, waiting for someone who could keep up with her…”
Bonnie was all business, like English Pointers are. They embody all that a pointing dog should be: something sinuous as a breeze-bent grain field that becomes in an instant a study in suspended animation. They are box-muzzled and split-nosed, the good ones anyway, and explicit in every cord of muscle. They may love you, as I like to think Bonnie did me, but they love hunting more. To see an English Pointer on a bird is to have upland hunting defined for you, to have the heart of it trapped in a frozen instant. It is poetry no doubt, brought to bear as much by good breeding as magic.
On my final visit with Bonnie, Alec opened the kennel and turned her loose. She wriggled a circle and I touched her, felt her stream through my hands like something liquid, though she was hard-muscled and alive. That was all I felt of her. Alec hupped her and pointed, and she cast off around the edge of the kennel and out of sight. Beyond a copse of birch was the big training field, and as we came out of the trees we saw her cutting back and forth across the end of it. She was beautiful, and working with as much joy as a dog can, until she hit scent. She slammed on the brakes and froze, locked in silhouette several hundred yards away. All we could do was walk over to her, staunch as she was.
It was a long enough walk to allow me time to think, and I watched Bonnie the whole time. It occurred to me then, and it does to this day, that against a horizon is where an English Pointer is best. I know now that there are tight-working grouse dogs among them, and close quartering woodcockers that barely range past the muzzles of the gun. But to appreciate the English Pointer, you have to see one run, and run big, over a canvas of wide-open land. You have to see one Hoover up a space that would take you a year to cover alone, then to become a suspended piece of earth and sky. Maybe you even have to love one and want one, and know that you just can’t give her all she needs. But walking up beside her, stepping past that quivering trace of lemon and white, you can’t help but see what bird hunting and pointing dogs become in communion: after all, it’s right there beside you with its tail in the air.
First published in Pointing Dog Journal
