In Iowa: In praise of Gunther

Sexy women selling credit cards - click, change the channel. Movie stars selling luxury cars - click. Even the world's most interesting man selling a beer I've never tasted - click.

I seldom watch television commercials, but when I do they feature dogs.

Give me a white bull terrier with a red-ringed eye and I will watch to the end, even though I have no plans to shop at Target. Give me a Clydesdale-and-lost-dog melodrama, and I will forgo my next beer until the Super Bowl resumes.

Unlike marketers, most folks don't need focus groups to tell them people like dogs.

All dogs go to heaven, according to Pope Francis, and if I were the gatekeeper, I'd let them all in, with the possible exception of the boxer that left cow manure forepaw prints on my shirt and the terrier that left his dental impression on my lower leg.

I especially like dogs that work for a living - the sled pullers, the cattle herders, the drug sniffers, the junkyard protectors, the leaders of the sightless and, yes, the hunters.

Hunting pheasants, one of my favorite pastimes, would be barely possible, let alone enjoyable, without the skill, energy and joie de vivre the dogs bring to the party.

After a two-hour drive early Monday, my friend Arthur Clark of Quasqueton and I arrived at public hunting area in north-central Iowa.

Without a dog, finding a pheasant in that a 2,200-acre tangle of grass and swamp, with which neither of us was familiar, would have been pure luck.

But with Gunther, Arthur's talented and precocious two-year-old German shorthair pointer, we were at least optimistic if not confident.

Like most breeds of pointing bird dogs, Gunther has about 220 million scent receptors in his nose - not as many as the famed human tracker, the bloodhound, which has about 300 million, but well more than Arthur and I, who, with about 5 million apiece, could barely smell a pheasant with our noses in its breast feathers.

Besides having a powerful nose, Gunther, as with other members of his profession, has been bred and trained to take full advantage of it.

His long, coiled steel legs carry him effortlessly over and through dense cover while his capacious heart and lungs keep his motor fully revved from dusk to dark.

He seems to know instinctively how to take advantage of the wind and how much ground he can effectively cover without outrunning his human companions.

When he smells a pheasant, his movements intensify, and when he gets close he goes into a careful stalk mode, seemingly calculated to close in on the bird without flushing it prematurely.

When he gets really close, he freezes into the classic pointer pose - tail erect, right forepaw raised, eyes glazed, nose pointing directly at the source of the scent.

That's when you know full-blown excitement is about to happen.

As the gaudy rooster bursts from its last refuge, its beating wings muffling its outraged cackle, its blurry image coalescing into a bronze missile with streaming tail feathers and a distinct white neck, then shotguns sound, and this bird falls dead on the ice of a marsh, where Arthur and I cannot easily fetch it.

Not a problem. Unlike Arthur and me, whose considerable weight is distributed over just two feet, Gunther, with much less weight distributed over four feet, jumps onto the ice, dashes across it and skids to a stop like Kremer on the 'Seinfeld” show.

Back with the rooster he comes, and before his efforts can be justly praised, he's off in search of the next bird, leaving Arthur and me to admire the performance of an artist in love with his art.