EAR NEW TOWN, N.D. — The first sharptail flushed just four minutes after we had begun hunting. One minute later, a covey of Hungarian partridges burst into flight, filling the air with their wingbeats and peeping.

No shots were fired by Duluth’s Tom S. Bell, 38, and his longtime [...]]]> From the Duluth News Tribune
published Sept. 28, 2008

EAR NEW TOWN, N.D. — The first sharptail flushed just four minutes after we had begun hunting. One minute later, a covey of Hungarian partridges burst into flight, filling the air with their wingbeats and peeping.

No shots were fired by Duluth’s Tom S. Bell, 38, and his longtime friend Tom Schramm, 37, of Esko. The birds were just out of range.

But those early flushes were a sign of good things to come on this five-day sharp-tailed grouse and Hungarian partridge hunt in western North Dakota. Bell soon picked up his first sharptail of the morning in low cover near a dry wetland.

The real action on this mid-September hunt began in a nearby tree row along two stubble fields of harvested grain. One sharptail after another flushed, interspersed by the rise of two more coveys of partridges. Bell’s black Lab, Koya, kept busy retrieving downed birds. Bell and Schramm shot well.

Meanwhile, Bell’s dad, Tom Bell of Duluth, and his friend Dick Adams of Superior were working other treelines and stubble fields on the same farm. By the time we had finished that walk, our group had 14 sharptails — just one shy of a limit — and four Huns. We had been in the field exactly an hour. By noon, when the heat forced us to quit hunting, the tally was 15 sharptails and eight Huns.

“I’d say this is close to one of the best morning’s we’ve had,” the senior Bell said.

ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY

Bell, 62, has been going north and west for sharptails for more than 30 years. He and others began hunting the prairie grouse in Manitoba and Saskatchewan in 1972. On one return trip from Saskatchewan, they stopped at a small-town cafe in this part of North Dakota and met a farmer who invited them to hunt sharptails here.

Now, Bell and friends make the 550-mile trip west annually, camping on the prairie, eating what they shoot and living close to the land. His son Tom has been making the trip for about 20 years now.

“Once you get it in your blood, you gotta keep coming out here,” the younger Bell said. “You can’t say it’s one thing because it’s so many things.”

“The land,” Schramm said. “The diverse hunting. The dogs.”

“And you’re out here, and you don’t see any ‘No Hunting’ signs,” Bell added.

FRIENDLY FARMERS

It’s easy to find land to hunt. Bell’s right. We saw little land posted “No Hunting” during our trip. If we had questions about whether land was open to hunting, we stopped and asked farmers.

“I’ve seldom been refused,” the elder Bell said.

One day, we stopped to visit with a farmer who gladly let us hunt and suggested two other parcels of land we might want to try. We found birds at both places.

Another thing you see little of out here is other hunters. Except for a group of Bell’s friends from Duluth and one farmer he already knew, we saw no other hunters in five days. The main source of blaze orange we saw were actual orange blazes at oil-drilling sites, where waste natural gas burned day and night. There’s an oil boom happening here that’s making some farmers millionaires and others — who don’t own mineral rights on their land — bitter about all the semitrailer traffic on once-quiet roads.

EXPANSIVE COUNTRY

Away from the roads, though, this is still the western North Dakota you remember — wheat and barley fields rolling to forever, broad grasslands where the eye can roam for miles, distant buttes and promontories. You can’t help thinking about a pioneer family, creaking across this country in a covered wagon, trying to decide how best to proceed west.

We would often split up and go our own ways, following our dogs wherever they would lead us. You’d look across the folds of land and see a tiny speck of orange on a distant hillside. Your hunting partner. And the sharptails we were hunting are native to this land, eking out a living on seeds of native grasses like little bluestem and side-oats gramma as well as crop residue.

“I like sharptail hunting,” the senior Bell said. “I feel close to the earth. It’s a native bird, natural to this environment. And I like walking.”

Our hunting was good. If one part of the day or one piece of land didn’t produce, another would. We hunted treelines and vast grasslands and Missouri River breaks and abandoned farmsteads that almost always held a covey or two of Huns.

LIVING ON THE LAND

We would walk all morning, then return to our little camp during the afternoon heat. Dick Adams had brought his pop-up camper, and some of us slept in tents. We ate sharptails at least once a day, sometimes twice — grilled and pan-fried and in stew.

Hunting sharptails was good. Living with them, camped under the prairie stars, listening to a great-horned owl oboeing in the night, was even better. Living on the land, and living off the land eating what we had shot, seemed to complete a circle. We felt completely immersed in the landscape, as much a part of the grand scheme as human beings could be.

At night, we lay in our sleeping bags listening to crickets singing, coyotes yipping and Canada geese honking. At dawn, rooster pheasants cackled from the knee-high grasses just beyond camp, stirring anticipation of the season to come.

In the mornings, we’d roust out, feed the dogs and pick a new piece of land to hunt.

Sharptail camp.

It’s a good place to live in September.

For Steve Ingram, a hunting trip that was supposed to last a few hours Monday morning turned into a more than 30-hour excursion.

The 56-year-old Silver Bay man got lost in the woods, walked many unexpected miles, slept under a tree with his dog, portaged across a few lakes [...]]]> From the Duluth News Tribune
published Sept. 24, 2008

For Steve Ingram, a hunting trip that was supposed to last a few hours Monday morning turned into a more than 30-hour excursion.

The 56-year-old Silver Bay man got lost in the woods, walked many unexpected miles, slept under a tree with his dog, portaged across a few lakes with a church group and hitched a ride back to civilization early Tuesday evening. In the meantime, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office had launched a search for Ingram with assistance from the Two Harbors, Silver Bay and Finland rescue squads.

Officials began searching for Ingram in the area east of Ely and north of Isabella at about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Ingram went hunting on the Pow Wow Trail near Isabella Lake at 9 a.m. Monday, said Brandon McGaw, a conservation officer who spoke with Ingram afterward.

Ingram planned to stay on the trail and connect with another trail that led back to his vehicle in two or three hours, but he said he “got turned around,” said McGaw and Ingram’s wife, Kay.

With a map, Ingram walked until nightfall Monday and then slept under a fir tree with Henry, a springer spaniel, for warmth.

On Tuesday morning, he continued to walk until he met some canoeists from a church group, who fed them and invited them to portage across a few lakes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. After that, Ingram caught a ride to Ely and telephoned relatives in Babbitt about 6 p.m. Tuesday.

“He did everything right. He kept his head,” McGaw said. “He stayed on the trail for the most part. … He said he wished he would have thrown a candy bar in his coat beforehand.”

Kay Ingram rushed back from a Tuesday business trip in Wisconsin.

“The plan was to go into the woods for a couple of hours and come home,” she said Tuesday night. “I’m just grateful to everybody. Everybody came forward to help find him. You see it on the news all the time, and you don’t think it will happen to you, especially to someone that has so much experience in woods.

“He has been running trap lines since he was 11,” Kay Ingram said. “He usually is just phenomenal in the woods. I got worried.”

They ask so little. They give us so much, these dogs who let us take them hunting.

For a lot of hunters, it wouldn’t be a hunt without their devoted canine companions.

With the fall hunt upon us, we asked a few hunters to share their favorite dog stories. We [...]]]> From the Duluth News Tribune
published Sept. 21, 2008

They ask so little. They give us so much, these dogs who let us take them hunting.

For a lot of hunters, it wouldn’t be a hunt without their devoted canine companions.

With the fall hunt upon us, we asked a few hunters to share their favorite dog stories. We think you’ll enjoy them.

Mark Fouts, Superior

Director of Regional Operations, Ruffed Grouse Society

“I remember my first pointing dog,” Fouts said. “An English setter. I got her from [Duluth dog trainer] Joe DeLoia. She was about 3. We were hunting pheasants — you know, ditch parrots — down in Nebraska.”

The dog’s name was Bandit, Fouts said.

“She made a cast out in front of me,” Fouts said. “I didn’t hear her yelp or anything. She came back toward me pawing at her face. I noticed she had a stick sticking out of her eye. My first reaction was to grab the stick and pull it out, which I found out later was the wrong thing to do.

“I took her back to the truck, about a half-mile. She hunted all the way. What a trooper. I got her in to the vet. They told me it was serious. I got some medication, and they told me I’d have to keep her down for a few days. We did lose the eye.

“We had a wooden trailer for the dogs. The rest of that day and the next morning, she’d put up a fit every time we’d stop to let out the dogs. She tried to chew a hole through the wooden door. For 24 hours, she was going hunting. It amazes me, the drive of a dog, what they’ll put themselves through to do what they love to do.”

Bandit recovered and hunted for six more years, Fouts said.

“After that, we called her the One-Eyed Bandit,” he said.

Left, or right?

Al and Margo Penke, Ely

Owners of BWCA Labs dog kennel

“This was probably seven years ago,” Al said. “It happened at Wilderness Wings [game farm] near Effie. We were hunting with Birdie, a female black Lab. She was probably a year old. It may have been her first hunt.

“You know how you’re sure where the bird is and you’re sure where the bird isn’t? She got real birdy and started working this cover. We were all sure the bird was off to the left somewhere, but she wanted to go to the right. I thought she was on an old deadfall [a previously killed bird]. She was, in my estimation, being disobedient. I was getting angry.

“Lo and behold, she dives into the brush and comes up with this hen pheasant and delivers it to me.”

It wasn’t the first time a dog has humbled its owner. Birdie is 8 now and is owned by a hunter in Tower, the Penkes said.

Al Markham, Duluth

Long-time upland and waterfowl hunter

“I don’t know what year this was. Probably the late ’70s,” Markham said one morning at the Harry Allenfall clothing store where he works.

He was talking about Tracy, a black Labrador retriever he once owned.

“Best dog I ever had,” Markham said.

She had run some derby events for young dogs in field trials when she was young, he said. But one day after training, when she was about 2, she had run off with another dog, Markham said. The two were found about 2 a.m. along a highway. The other dog was dead. Tracy was “barely alive,” Markham said. She had been hit badly in one eye and had broken a leg. She was treated by a veterinarian, and her leg healed but she lost the eye. She was through with field trials but went on to hunt several more years.

One year when she was about 10, Markham was out for the fall season after knee surgery. His neighbor, Jim, asked if he and a friend could take Tracy on a sharp-tailed grouse hunt near Sandstone. Markham readily agreed.

“They had taken two or three birds,” Markham said, “and they got into another covey at the edge of some standing corn. They put up the covey and hit three birds.

“Tracy picked up two birds and retrieved them. Then Jim sent her for the third bird.”

The bird had fallen in the corn, and Tracy disappeared into the corn to search for it. She had been gone for some time, or at least that’s what the hunter thought, Markham said. Jim didn’t know what happened to the dog. He was getting concerned.

“After 10 minutes, he looked down, and there she was,” Markham said. “She had nudged him on the leg. She had the bird. She had marked all three of those birds and got ’em with her one eye and three legs. She was a hell of a dog.”

More than one hunter has wondered where his dog was, only to discover that the dog was at heel with a downed bird.

“We think we’re the alpha,” Markham said. “But we’re not.”

Eric Larson, Duluth

Avid pheasant hunter

Larson hunts with two large Munsterlanders, a pointing breed. Like many owners of pointing breeds, Larson marks Oct. 10 on his calendar each year. That usually marks the peak of the woodcock migration.

“I remember a couple of October 10ths in a row,” Larson said. “I think Macy was about 8 months old the first year. We were hunting up by Fish Lake. Woodcock were flittering about, and it was as if a light bulb went off. Macy would bump one and point another one.”

When a pointer “bumps” a bird, it means she moves in too close and flushes it before the hunter is ready. But that day, Macy learned to point.

“It was just a fantastic bit of dog work from a young dog,” Larson said. “It set the tone for her seasons to come. She’s been a staunch dog since then.

“Now that my dogs are 9 [Macy] and 12 [Riley], I’m reminiscing about those times. I found myself thinking about them yesterday.”

Woodcock are diminutive game birds with chunky bodies, oversize heads and elongated bills used for probing moist soil for earthworms. When they migrate through northern Minnesota in mid-October, they often settle into stands of young aspen, where a hunter and a dog might have 50 or 60 flushes in a day.

“The whole hillside looks like it’s on fire with yellow,” Larson said. “You have vistas of the lake, and the woodcock are flittering around. There’s nothing much cooler to a pointing-dog guy.”

Debbie Waters, Duluth

Grouse and pheasant hunter

Waters, 35, owns a 6-year-old Gordon setter named Remmi. Last fall, she shot her first pheasant after several years of pheasant hunting. She had assisted other hunters in shooting pheasants, but she never had shot one on her own.

“It sounds kind of benign, but this is my favorite story,” Waters said. “I was out in this native prairie that had been restored. Remmi was quartering like crazy. It was really windy. I was trudging up this field, and when we got up to the top, he locked up on point.

“I was thinking ‘hen,’ because hens hold better than roosters. I walked up there. I flushed this bird, and gol-darnit, it was a rooster. I shot it. It was perfect. I dropped to my knees and marveled at that bird.”

She shot several more pheasants last fall.

Waters began deer hunting at age 15, and she shot her first grouse at age 20. She attributes much of her success with pheasants last fall to her new shotgun.

“I had a 20-gauge, but it didn’t fit me right,” she said. “I sold the 20 and got a new gun, a Benelli 12-gauge. It’s a sweet gun, a beautiful gun. It shoots like it’s part of me.”

A young boy whose family owned a black Labrador retriever once asked Duluth dog trainer Joe DeLoia if he knew why so many catalogs and magazines featured photos of yellow Labradors. DeLoia was stumped.

“Because the black ones are all out hunting,” the boy said.

John Lindgren, Duluth

Brittany spaniel owner and pheasant hunter

“My first dog, Cassie — a Brittany spaniel, of course — had a couple of nicknames. One was ‘the blazing snowball.’ She was mostly white, and she was possessed. She had this insane drive to get from Point A to Point B.

“Her other nickname was ‘the ferret.’ She weighed about 40 pounds. If there were cattails, she would swim over them or blast under them. Occasionally, she’d disappear for several seconds.

“I didn’t have a release command for her. If she was on point, I’d just kick around in front of her. If the birdwasn’t where I was, she would break and go farther.

“There was a time in North Dakota with a friend of mine. There was snow on the ground. She went on point. I was kicking around and kicking around, but the birddidn’t get up. She would not break from that point. Finally, I looked down and there was the pheasant, sitting about 6 inches from her nose in a spot that was all blown over with snow.

“I grabbed the rooster and picked it up. I have this rooster in my hand, alive. I said to my friend, ‘Kent, what should we do?’ He didn’t know. I said, ‘I’m going to throw this pheasant up in the air. If you hit it, we’ll get it.’

“I threw it up. He shot twice and missed both times.”

Lindgren supplied his own moral for the story.

“A bird in the hand is not necessarily a bird in the bag.”

When Cassie was 13, in her final season, Lindgren went out to hunt ruffed grouse near Bagley, Minn., one day. The hunt would have been too much for Cassie, he figured, so he asked his dad to keep Cassie in the cabin until well after Lindgren had left to hunt with his younger dog, Annie.

Lindgren was in the woods, hunting, sometime later when Cassie came running up to him.

“Dad had opened the door, and she ran a mile and a half to find us,” Lindgren said. “I almost cried when it happened. I just hugged her.”

Cassie died later that fall, he said.

She was one in thousand, one in a million,” Lindgren said.

If you’ve never hunted ducks in a snowfall, let me tell you that it is a remarkable thing. The ducks appear as if out of nowhere. How they even know that there is water down below when the air is as thick as one of those shaken snow [...]]]> From the Duluth News Tribune
published Sept. 21, 2008

If you’ve never hunted ducks in a snowfall, let me tell you that it is a remarkable thing. The ducks appear as if out of nowhere. How they even know that there is water down below when the air is as thick as one of those shaken snow globes I’ll never know. But down they drop, brazen-chested, feet dangling and wings cupped, suddenly appearing before startled hunters who rise cold and stiff, shotgun barks muffled by the wet air. And so it was this day, both blinds seeing great action, six men relishing the experience, and one very happy retriever.

That happy retriever was my female black Labrador, Gypsy. Gypsy’s most remarkable gift was that of her sense of smell, a sense no other dog I’ve owned or hunted over has ever equaled. And during this snowfall in North Dakota, she had ample chance to demonstrate her gift, for Gypsy was covering for two blinds a hundred yards or more apart on a long, deep prairie pothole. The mallards and pintails poured in through the snow, some meeting death, others escaping to the south. Gypsy and I were kept busy retrieving everyone’s ducks, and she fetched more birds that day than many a dog does in a full season.

Once, after cleaning up some downed birds for my friends in the south blind, the dog and I returned to our station in the other, only to learn that guys there had been busy, too, and several ducks dotted the water. Gypsy made short work of them, and the pile in the snowy blind grew ever larger.

Jeff Nelson, my wise, elder duck hunting friend, took one look at the most recently retrieved birds and told me that one was still missing. I asked how he knew.

“Because I know I knocked down a fine drake pintail, and there are none in the pile,” he replied. “If it was a cripple, I’d guess it swam off into that stand of cattails on the other shore.”

Jeff had been hunting ducks longer than I’d been alive, so I never doubted his word. Wondering if I’d ever again get the chance to pull the trigger myself, I climbed from the blind. From the water’s edge, I gave Gypsy a line, and sent her across the water and into the cattails. Once she hit the far shore, she sped into the dense cover but almost immediately popped back out. That was quick, I thought, and was waiting for her to begin her return. Instead, she stood on the water’s edge, staring at me. Her mouth was empty.

I motioned her back into the cattails, and again she entered, but she did not hunt dead. Almost immediately, she emerged birdless, and stared back in my direction.

One of the things I’ve regretted in my life is growing angry with a dog when it really didn’t deserve my wrath. But I was young and hot with the thought she was disobeying me in front of all my friends. I fired some choice curse words across the water as I grew angry at her refusal to scour those cattails. She just stared back over the water. Finally, I decided that it was time to walk around the edge of the pothole and give her “what for.” We had had several of those kinds of discussions over the years …

Just as I was about to hitch up my waders and march over to the dog, a remarkable thing happened. I noted that not only was she ignoring me, she was staring out into the pothole, her head slightly up, her big nose working the breeze. Without a command from me, she eased into the slushy pothole, and swam out to the middle, where she paused, treading water.

She swam in place, snorting, the sound of it coming to us even through the snow-muffled air. Then she paused, ears perked up, staring down at the water’s surface.

Now, if you recall, we’d shot a bunch of ducks in this slough, and there were feathers floating everywhere out there. I guessed that she was merely smelling the traces of some previous retrieve, and was about to call her back and scold her into scouring those cattails, when she disappeared beneath the water.

I have since owned a lab (Rascal) that swam underwater as well as an otter, but this was not something Gypsy had ever done. Yet here she was (or wasn’t, for she was nowhere to be seen) diving into a pothole growing ever thick with fallen snow. Everyone in both blinds looked at me, as if to ask the same question I was asking myself — what the hell does she think she’s doing?

Some anxious seconds went by, and just as I began to grow worried that she had somehow gotten mired in the thickening water, she surfaced, her back to us. Seventy yards away. And then she got her bearings, turned toward my whistle, and when she did, we saw she had a limp pintail drake in her mouth.

There have been several times in my life when I’ve been very proud (and some times when I’ve been red faced, too, but that’s for another time), but I don’t know if there was a much prouder moment than that. I admired her for her skill, and her heart, and even for the fact that she was smart enough to ignore me and risk a possible whooping in order to get that duck.

There was seemingly no way, with all the duck feathers and duck oil floating in that slushy pothole, that she should have been able to distinguish the scent of a bird deep underwater from the scent floating on top. Yet she had, had found the exact spot where that pintail drake had made his last dive, had the nose and the smarts to go under and yank him from his weedy, watery grave.

As she climbed the bank and delivered the duck to me, the men in both blinds stood up and applauded. In their lives, they had all seen many a fine retrieve. But to a man, all said they had never seen anything quite like this one.

That night, Gypsy was the queen of the duck camp.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Duluth outdoor author and photographer Michael Furtman wrote this essay about Gypsy, his first black Labrador retriever. Gypsy is long since gone, but her legend lives on.

Six retrieving dogs from Northeastern Minnesota will be among 287 entered in this week’s Master National Hunt Test, which starts today near Mountain Iron. The event, which tests the top retrievers in the country under simulated hunting situations, is being conducted by the Minnesota Iron Range Retriever Club.

Members [...]]]> From the Duluth News Tribune
published Sept. 21, 2008

Six retrieving dogs from Northeastern Minnesota will be among 287 entered in this week’s Master National Hunt Test, which starts today near Mountain Iron. The event, which tests the top retrievers in the country under simulated hunting situations, is being conducted by the Minnesota Iron Range Retriever Club.

Members of the MIRRC who have dogs qualified to compete in the national event include:

* Jace Tramontin, Cherry, with his black Lab, JT’s Tip Trouble.

* Pete Coldagelli, Eveleth, with his yellow Lab, Ramblin Man’s Bella Donna.

* Mark Vossbein, Biwabik, with a chocolate Lab, The Captn L’il Ace of Peakview and a yellow Lab, The Captain’s Mark-V Renegade.

* Roger Wallner, Cohasset, with a black Lab, Zoe’s Chloe One in a Million MH; and a chocolate Lab, Mysterious Magical Maggie MH.

The event will not select a single winner, as field trial competitions do, said Tramontin, who is president of the MIRRC. Dogs simply compete against American Kennel Club standards for the Master Hunter ranking.

“If 100 of them complete the test and do all the standards expected by the AKC, then they all get a ribbon,” Tramontin said. “It’s tough to say it’s noncompetitive, but it’s not running for first, second and third place.”

This is the first time the MIRRC has hosted the National Masters event, but it has held the AKC National Amateur Retriever Trial in 1997, 2001 and 2005. The club has about 200 members from across the Iron Range.

Tests in the National Masters event will simulate experiences that hunters might encounter in the field.

“When you’re out hunting and three birds come down, the dog has the opportunity to retrieve all three of them on his own,” Tramontin said. “Occasionally, you’ll shoot a bird, and the dog has no idea where it went. Then the handler has the ability to direct the dog with whistles and hand signals to the location of that bird.

“We test them on land, on water and a combination of the two.”

The tests will be conducted on four pieces of property in the Hibbing-Buhl-Mountain Iron area.

To qualify for the Master National event, a dog must have qualified by passing Master Hunter tests five times in seven attempts at AKC member-club events in the current year. In addition, every dog running in the event must also have a Master Hunter title from the AKC.

Tramontin estimates the Master National event will bring at least $3 million into the local economy, based on a Hibbing Chamber of Commerce study following a past National Amateur Retriever Championship.