Whoever hunted the waterway before me apparently believed, as some do, that pheasants must be field dressed immediately to retain their flavor. I knew this because I kept coming across guts and feathers given a hasty burial under a few dirt clods. Brushing a little more dirt over a pile of remains with the toe of my boot, I reflected on my poor chances of finding any more birds down here.

Late in the season, you usually find pheasants where others don't look. Whistling for Sam to follow, I turned and headed for the back side of the farm, where 240 acres of government set-aside brome grass fields had been clipped down almost to ankle height. No one else, I reasoned, would bother to hunt a field without much more cover than the average lawn after a summer rain when so much better looking ground lay close to the road.

Fifteen minutes after we started hunting the short grass, Sam stiffened onto a solid point. Even in cover so sparse you'd think I could easily see a three-foot-long bird with a bright green-and-red head crouching a few feet away, I saw only grass in front of Sam's nose. There was no mistaking the dog's intensity, though--the pheasant was right there.

I flushed the bird with a stamp of my foot. "Let him get out far enough," I told myself, then missed twice. Watching the rooster fly to safety I realized that he hadn't gone more than 10 yards before I shot. Thirty seconds later Sam pointed again, and this time I let the bird travel 20 yards before a load of 6s brought him crashing to the ground. He had sharp spurs, white eyebrows, and the longest tailfeathers of any rooster I'd seen in quite a while. A trophy pheasant.

The truth is, any bird that survives the first days of the season qualifies in my mind as a trophy. Pheasant season, it is frequently observed consists of two parts: Opening Day and the rest of the season. The survivors of Opening Day are not the naive pheasants that perch on fence posts and panic at the approach of man or dog, flushing straight up, cackling in dismay. They are instead the birds who pay close attention when they hear a car door closing, who know enough to slink, run, flush wild, or sit very, very still at the sound of footfalls.

The best way to deal with these birds is to lower your expectations for success and raise your opinion of pheasants. Each year I'll shoot almost half my birds for the year in the first 10 days or so of the season. After that, I come to think of pheasants as big game and celebrate my successes accordingly.

These educated birds know where safety lies: it's no coincidence that roosters I flush on public areas late in the year invariably fly straight to posted private property nearby. Or, like the cocks I found in the clipped hayfield, they find a place where no one chases them and stay there.

We call these birds smart, but that is to give them human characteristics. They are wary, and those that survive have learned by trial and error how to escape.

To extend the big game analogy, let me tell you that it's possible to pattern individual birds like some hunters pattern deer, by learning their escape routes and planning appropriate tactics to counter them.

Two or three seasons back, on Opening Day, I missed a rooster that flushed from a fencerow at the edge of the hayfield by my house. For the rest of the season, he often flushed well out of range from exactly the same spot along the fence and flew the same route over a hill to safety whenever I stepped into the field.

Because he had figured out a foolproof method of escaping his main threat (me) he was secure in this small patch of weeds. I had a plan for this rooster. What I was going to do was to call my neighbor Joe, who lives on the other side of the hill, and tell him to load his shotgun, walk about 50 yards up the road from his house, and wait there, looking west. Then I'd have walked into the field the same way I always did, and the rooster would have flown obligingly over the hill and into trap. My scheme was so foolproof I never tried it. I enjoyed chasing that rooster more than I would have liked ganging up with someone to kill him.

The hunter does have one advantage as the season progresses: when the weather turns bad enough to be life-threatening, pheasants re-order their priorities, choosing the insulation of good winter cover over the need to avoid predators. The first limit of pheasants I ever shot I killed not on the first half hour of Opening Day, but late one December, in a small marsh where the dense cattails provided the only winter cover amid the cornfields around it. That day, after a fierce blizzard the night before, the roosters sat tight buried under the snow, still a little dazed, I think, from the force of the storm.

Snow knocks down cover and concentrates birds in flocks, which can be a mixed blessing. The pheasants will be easier to find, but you can't always count on their sitting still. Once they're up and running on top of the snow, a flock of pheasants can be too much of a good thing; 20 birds have 20 times the eyesight and hearing of one.

Last fall, after the snows flattened the short grass fields and corn stubble, I knew the pheasants had moved to a wooded slough along the creek behind my house. Inside the slough, which I thought of as The Pheasant Yard, there were so many tracks it looked as if 30 or 40 birds had linked wings and marched back and forth just to make footprints. Knowing where the pheasants were and getting into range, I learned quickly, were two different things.

I tried sneaking in with the dog at heel, running full speed, approaching from different directions. Invariably the pheasants scattered out of range. Through shear persistence, I did finally get a rooster in the Pheasant Yard, a bird that scooted out from a under a brush pile and fell on top of a deep snow drift too soft to support Sam's weight. So my reward for these repeated assaults was the sight of my dog picking up the rooster then disappearing under the snow as if a trapdoor had opened beneath his feet. He dug himself out a moment later, tail wagging, with the bird still in his mouth.

When winter weather concentrates birds, the dogless hunter will be back in the game--but, let me say quickly that the best thing about hunting without a dog after Opening Day is that it's tranquil--rarely do cackling roosters or booming shotguns interrupt your wandering thoughts.

If you have to hunt without a dog, your best bet is to poke through thick cover, pausing meaningfully from time to time, hoping to unnerve a skulking rooster. In my dogless days I'd have most of my few successes late in the afternoon, in small patches of roosting cover, or along fence lines and road ditches, anywhere that didn't give birds too much room to run around me. Where there are abandoned railroad tracks running through farm country, some hunters do well plodding along, mile after linear mile.

Regardless of weather, cover, or phase of the moon, you'll have the best luck day in, day out, following the simple advice an old bird hunter gave me. "Put the best dog you can get in the best cover you can find." For pheasants, let me add: Be in range when the dog finds birds. This addendum is almost equally true for pointing dogs as it is for the flushing breeds.

Last year I shot at 40 roosters--never mind how many I hit--38 of which the dog found before I did, 20 of which he pointed. Of those 20 points, only 10 were the rock solid points you can walk up to slowly, adjusting the bill of your cap and repacking your pipe. The rest weren't more than a quick flash point before the bird flushed. The remaining 18 birds chose not to stop at all when Sam tried to work them carefully in the short, sparse grass in which we did so much hunting last fall.

Learn to read your dog. The attitude of Sam's tail tells me when a point is the real thing and when he's false pointing. If his tail is moving ever so slightly, a command of "fetch" will make him break. If he still won't move a hard stomp on the ground will make him break the false point or flush the bird if I've misread the dog. When Sam lowers his head and takes off in a straight line, I know he's chasing a bird who's running ahead, and I run too. Usually the bird and the dog leave me wheezing in their dust, but occasionally, just often enough to make all the running worthwhile, Sam will point, I'll skid to a halt behind him, raising the gun even as the rooster is flushing.

Sometimes it's even possible to work with the dog to pin birds between the two of you, or to jump ahead of him to cut off runners. Here's how it worked one day late last season: I had parked my pickup on the side of the gravel road bordering a fallow eighty overgrown with tall foxtail; a wooded draw ran down the middle. Snow had flattened the short grass in the fields all around it, leaving no cover nearby. Birds would have to be in there.

The ruts on the shoulder told me other hunters had been there, too. So did the 10 pheasants that flushed out of the field and flew to the safety of the posted cornfields across the road the minute I opened the door of the truck.

I put Sam and the gun over the fence, then climbed it myself. The sound of the bolt closing over a load of high brass sixes was too much for one more rooster who'd stayed behind. He flushed and followed the others.

"Sam," I said, "I think these birds have been hunted before." Sam wasn't listening. He was hot on the trail, I suspected, of the birds we had just seen. "Always believe your dog," the wise old bird hunter or another like him had told me, so I followed close after Sam even though I was fairly certain there was no bird in front of him. Then I heard rustling in the grass to my left. It was the pheasant Sam was trailing, doubling back to the fence and safety.

Holding the Double Automatic at port arms, I sprinted a few steps towards the truck, trying to gain an angle and close the gap, when the two roosters went up. I made a longish shot on the nearer bird, then put Sam back over the fence to make the retrieve. I smoothed the bird's feathers and loaded him in the game bag carefully, permitting myself a small vanity: I made sure the tailfeathers stuck clearly out of the pouch on one side, in case anyone drove by.

With the rooster making a pleasant, heavy weight in the game bag I set off after Sam. After two hours of following the dog up and down the rolling hills, the rooster in my vest was becoming a burden. I saw tracks everywhere in the fresh snow, but Sam had pointed only three hens.

Just as I was deciding to quit for the day, the dog struck a fresh trail, pointing and breaking for several minutes. I puffed to the top of a hill behind him in time to glimpse a dark shadow gliding between the branches of the trees down in the waterway, then over the fence to safety. That bird, I knew, was one we'd never catch, but he'd keep us coming back to try until the day the season closed.