Hi Mark, Hi Cheryl, I don’t know if Kath emailed you about our last chukkar hunt with the dogs or not. If not, let me know, and I’ll have her send some pictures. Anyway, last Saturday we went to our favorite hunting place Big cottonwood;. Kath chose to “man the camera”, so I was the solo hunter. They released 8 chukkar, within 45 minutes we had walked up to the area, found all 8 birds, shot 7 (somebody blew an easy shot…….actually, 3 shots…… blamed it on the sun), returned back to the camp with 7 chukkar in our bag and proceeded to tell Benton (the owner), that this isn’t any fun….. With these dogs that we have, it only takes about 15 minutes to find 8 chukkar. So he sent us down to a lower field that had already been hunted earlier in the day to see if they had missed anything. These dogs were just warming up, they wanted to do some more hunting. The dogs proceeded to find 1 more chukar and 2 pheasants. The last trip out, Maxx didn’t find any of the birds, but he honored all of Lacey’s points and retrieved all of the birds. This time he found/pointed over half of the birds. He either found 6 or 7 of the 11 birds (I can’t remember which). Maxx went on point in some super short grass, Kath said that he was probably pointing a mouse, but she called Lacey over anyway. Lacey went on point also, almost immediately a pheasant flew out of the short grass in the middle of them. I shot it, but it hit the ground running. Lacey was in front of Maxx, but she doesn’t quite know what to do with a runner, so Maxx ran around her, swooped up the pheasant by the butt and kept on running back to us. He didn’t hardly even slow down. I wish that I had the whole thing on video. Anyway, Kath was pretty embarrassed, she said that that is the last time that she will ever question the dogs. Roy had taught me that same valuable lesson many times over the years. It was fun to see it happen to someone else. Maxx is unbelievable for a 5 1/2 month old puppy. Roy never really came around until he reached about 2 years old, so this is very exciting for me. I won’t bore you by telling you about each of his points and retrieves, because I’m sure that you’ve seen the same thing thousands of times before. I have a very hard time comprehending how he can be so good and still be so young. Maxx had grown quite a bit since Benton had seen him 3 weeks ago, he said, “Man, you always have such big, good looking dogs, how do you do it?” Kath told him that it was lots of TLC. Right now, I’m fight a cold (and the cold in winning), as soon as I get it whipped, we’re going back out to Big cottonwood. I told my friend (who owns Lacey’s daddy), that my Christmas gift to him was a hunt with his dog and ours. I’ll let you know what happens.
P.S. Sure wish that you could have seen our smiles on the way home. Take Care!