 In Part 1, Sam and I brought half-sisters, Ila & Sage to Montana with their trusty sidekick, (GWP) Rye. We had a good time despite having to battle with high winds and storm surges on the daily. For Part 2, we returned to Eastern Montana to meet up with Josh, and his lovely boy Dio. Dio is from the Tule x Fen Litter of ’21. Tule being a Dutch Import, and Fen a boy produced from Powder’s first litter with Munson back in 2017. So, with that, we had Grandmother, Mother, Son, and Ila as an Aunt/Cousin depending on how you looked at the family tree. We also had Fizzy and Rye along for good measure.
 Man, it was amazing to see the change 3-weeks had brought to the region. Once green and lush, everything was crunchy, dry and brown. On the way into town Jenna and I stopped in an area to air the dogs out and get a quick hunt in before checking into the hotel. The area held plenty of ditch parrots mid-September, so what would we find? Well, it isn’t so much of what we found, but what did Fizzy find? She found the only pit filled with gloppy black mud, that’s what she found. Her bright and vibrate orange and white coat was rendered black with stringy ropes of muck dripping black, scummy water rife with the stench of rotting organic material. A simple bath wasn’t going to fix that, we needed a priest. Now this is how you end a twelve hour drive a short way out from the hotel! Yeah, in case you wondered, no birds, hell the girls didn’t even get birdy. We covered every square inch of the property. Frickin’ sweet man.  We met Josh and Dio in the morning, as he had succumbed the afternoon before to the siren’s call of good-looking habitat and had to pull several Sharpies from the sky – poor guy…but the detour made an evening arrival out of the question. We decided to hunt a pheasant rich area that wasn’t much of a secret. Just a few days into Montana’s pheasant season and Holy Moly were the birds thinned out and wise to human activity. We spent some time on the struggle bus hunting other areas with very limited success. This trip was going to be hard. Later that afternoon we hunted an area we like, because it takes some walking to get into, and because of this, it usually is pretty good. We were not entirely disappointed! All of the dogs did some really nice work on the ditch chickens and our game pouches began to collect birds. Fizzy, normally very “sticky”, showed marked improvement with her tracking and relocating and became an effective pheasant dog on this trip. Dio, managed a few points. Ila and Tule, a great team on phez, did what they do – one tracking and pointing, the other getting the bird boxed in, which translates to some fairly easy shots.  After such a frustrating day, we decided we needed to change the script, and so we began afresh in an area I had only briefly hunted a few years ago. This did in fact change the game for pheasant for our hunting. We saw generous numbers of birds, and many were still very huntable using pointing dogs. In short, we had a blast! We spent the last days of the trip trying our new to us parcels of land, rotating dogs, and hunting to our limits, which were filled with fat birds and colorful feathers despite their being an alarming amount of hunting pressure. On the last day, Josh managed to bang out his limit in short order, and I had one last bird to get. A decision was made to get that bird elsewhere. To be honest, I wasn’t really on board with this, as I wanted my last phez and to head back out and work on mix bag hunting! We toured around the area, and each property we looked over really didn’t hold much if any magic for my sensibilities. Wasting time, and feeling pressured, we selected a parcel we wanted to hunt the day before, but trucks were already there. I said, “that’s it, I’ll hunt it or pass – and after that we’ll switch gears”.  Arriving at the property and getting a good view for the first time, I wasn’t exactly excited. A small square of cut wheat stubble surrounding a dished out, dried swamp pit the shape of a pear. It was filled with tule grass, cattail, and dense tall grasses that grow in these areas. Just great, this was gonna be tough with one gun. I made the decision to throw it all at the wall, with one critical handicap – no GPS collars! So, we ran Powder, Tule, Ila, and Fizzy, hoping the chaos would encourage at least a bird or two to make a mistake. Josh and Jenna off my left flank, we walked counterclockwise starting from the 6 o’clock position. We reached 12 o’clock, and nothing had stirred, also I was having some regrets on running the dogs without collars. They spent most of the time burrowing sight unseen in the deep thick vegetation. At 1 o’clock, hens were starting to pop, hey that’s a gooder sign. By 2 o’clock, Josh motioned me to punch out to the tree, I nodded in agreement and stepped up and out of the deep channel I had been in to see Fizzy on point to my right 15 yards away. Then I saw the white fur of Tule, and Powder on the right and left flank of Fizz. I made my approach, and walked to Fizzy’s left, there was Ila, deeper in and to Powder’s left. I began stomping and smashing the dried crispy vegetation aggressively. Whoop! The rooster lost his nerve and down he went. What a way to finish it out, all the dogs on point together, doing it all without any influence. Just fantastic!
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Two GunI'm just a guy suffering with an infatuation with gundogs since childhood. Forty some years later this is what you get. 
The Old Man
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