Glasgow Daily Times, Glasgow, KY

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July 14, 2010

Quail hunting with Birdie and Queen

By EUGENE MARTIN Special to the Daily Times

GLASGOW — My quail hunting started in the late 1930s when I was about 17 and a friend of mine from Glasgow brought his bird dog out and wanted to hunt. I hunted with him for a few years until he quit hunting, and then I got a young bird dog pup, which I named Birdie. He was what is called a dropper — a half setter and a half pointer. (There are pointers, setters, and droppers. When a pointer smells birds, he raises one foot and points his tail straight out. The setter gets down low and does about the same thing. A dropper may even lie down when he points birds.) Birdie didn’t lie down, but he had an ugly point when he dropped.

I didn’t break Birdie to hunt with another dog because I didn’t have anybody to hunt with. So Birdie didn’t know how to back another dog. When dogs are hunted together, the pointer will point, and when another dog sees that dog point, he should point too even though he may not have smelled the birds himself. Birdie didn’t know how to do that, so I had to holler at him to stop. When I hollered, he wouldn’t move until I called him or the birds came up.

A few years went by, and a man gave me another young bird dog pup. I raised her and named her Queen. She was a pointer, and she pointed birds and backed dogs exactly like a bird dog was supposed to. I worshipped that dog. I would go to sleep and dream of Queen pointing birds.

One fall in the 1950s my cousin and I went out the first day of bird season. We got into a covey of birds in some open woods with scattered trees and were shooting at them. I had my old dog, Birdie, and I was breaking in Queen. We were shooting and killed a few birds. We went on down through the woods, and Queen made a point. As we started easing in, my cousin said, “It’s a dead bird lying there in front of her.” Queen went in, picked the bird up, and brought it to me, but she didn’t know to let me have it. She was running around playing with it. I laid down my gun, which I had never done before and have never done since. I caught Queen and took the bird out of her mouth. She was jumping up on me and playing. She stepped on the gun, a Remington automatic shotgun, with her back foot and mashed the safety off, and her toe hooked on the trigger and pulled the trigger. Her right foot was right in front of the barrel, and my foot was about a foot away. When the gun went off, it shot her in the bottom of her foot and me in the heel.  

Queen was hollering, and my foot was numb up to my hip. I was wearing a heavy pair of leather shoes which had a double heel. That double heel was full of shot, but when I pulled my shoe off, only one bullet fell out. There wasn’t anything bleeding in my foot, and later on the feeling began to come back. I caught Queen and looked at her foot. All the padding of her foot was shot off, and I could see the bones down to her toes. Her foot got well, but when I hunted her, it would start bleeding again, and she was gun shy.

I knew what the problem was and how the whole thing came about. The scripture says, “Put no other gods before me,” and that’s what I was doing. I continued hunting for several years, but I tried not to put anything before God.

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