The dog's name is Ratface MacDougall, and for those of you who consider that a mite unusual I must add that it is the name of a trout fly too.
Mac really is a little rat-faced, being a very dark liver Brittany with shifty eyes. A classic pointing dog he is not. Mac is what is scornfully known as a "meat dog" by lovers of statuesque pointers and setters. This means that Mac's chief purpose in life is not to be photographed for the covers of outdoor magazines, but to put birds where his owner can blap them with a 20-gauge over-and-under.
This is really a kind of eulogy on meat dogs, dogs that may point with their tails down, that may boost quail out of tight palmetto patches with their noses instead of pointing them where they cannot be found and dogs that circle around and head off sundry birds that are bent on running into the next county.
Mac, like others of his ilk, is likely to attempt a classy point if conditions are right. Sometimes it doesn't come off very well since he has rather long hair that is often clumped with burrs and mud. And Mac is pretty small, better at crawling under fences than springing over them.
In fact, people sometimes ask what kind of dog Mac is and his owner is likely to go along by saying Mac is just a stray he picked up and he doesn't know who his parents were. This, of course, is a lie because Mac has a pedigree as long as a duck gun. Mac just turned out the way he is in spite of his noble parentage.
But I'll explain how Mac is a meat dog.
The other day I was hunting ruffed grouse with Mac's owner and Mac was prowling around in the brush with his bell jangling. We were way to heck up in the mountains and there were three inches of snow where the sun hadn't hit. Where the sun had hit there were three inches of mud. And no matter where we turned we seemed to be going uphill.
Now a ruffed grouse, you know, lives in places a garter snake would circle around and Mac was out of sight most of the time where the brush was as thick as a bargain basement toupee. Then Mac said, "Yip!".
When Mac says, "Yip!" it means that he has smelled or sighted a grouse and that pointing is a waste of time because by the time you got in there with a shotgun the season would be closed.
We got into position to shoot if the grouse happened to come out for a breath of air, and we could follow Mac's progress by what he said. He yipped again, which meant to stand by, that the main operation was about to begin and then he said, "G-r-r-r-rwoof!" which meant that he was moving in on the grouse. Then we heard the grouse flutter to another branch and cluck the way a grouse clucks when things are getting out of hand.
Then I got a glimpse of Mac back in there. He was two feet off the ground and climbing a shaggy little tree in a net of vines, muttering to himself because everything had stickers on it. Then there was some louder crackling and flapping and the grouse came barreling out of there, obviously preferring to face shotguns than a Ratface MacDougall that climbs trees.
Mac came out of the brush and shook himself and went off through the mud and snow and retrieved the grouse to his boss as if he were carrying out the garbage. Then he sighed loudly and went off looking for another one.
That's what I mean by meat dog.
This story originally appeared in Ridge Runners and Swamp Rats by Charles F. Waterman. Copyright (c) 1983 by Charley Waterman. All rights reserved.
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