My favorite Thanksgiving or Christmas meal is a ham and cheese sandwich. If I am eating a ham and cheese sandwich on either of those holidays it means I am bird hunting and for me there is no better way to give thanks or no better gift than time in the field with my dogs.
My most memorable Christmas hunt was with my Dad. We had a spot of public land close to his house that even though only a little over 300 acres had lots of honeysuckle, berry vines and plum thickets and several big covies of quail. We had two dogs then, Dixie my Dad's Lewellin and my Sally, a grand daughter of the great Bozeann's Mosely. It was cloudy, overcast and windy, in other words, perfect weather for the dogs. We started at the north end of the property and hunted across the east side kind of angling against the northwest wind. We hit a couple of spots where we had found birds in the past but not this time. We pushed through some honeysuckle into the power-line right of way to find both dogs pointing near a pile of brush. Dad and I walked in and almost all of the birds came my way and I got one. I looked over at my Dad in time to see him shooting at a single bird flying almost straight away up over a gradual rise. The bird disappeared from our view flying strong. Uncharacteristically, Dixie was following the bird at full speed. My Dad was calling her to come in and pick up the first bird he shot but she wasn't hearing him. We brought my dog over to hunt dead and she found the bird for us. We were just collecting ourselves trying to figure where the singles went and should we go after them when Dixie comes back carrying a dead quail. She instantly transformed from hopeless sinner to blessed saint in our book. I don't know what she saw or heard or smelled for that matter, because I was above and behind my Dad and could see him, the gun and the bird all in a line. The bird never flinched, didn't drop a foot or break flight , nothing to indicate it had been hit but that dog knew something. I have replayed that incident over and over in my mind and I reach the same conclusion each time, "Trust the Dog".
