It helps to think like a dog

WALKER - One of the nice things about dogs is they don't see the big picture.

They live in the here and now, as illustrated by my all-time favorite cartoon, which depicted a sinking ship in the background and in the foreground a lifeboat full of boxes filled with provisions surrounded by dogs, all with upraised paws, over a caption that asks: Who wants to eat everything now?

That fine canine trait no doubt explains why Gus and Buck were sadder than their human companions to see the 2010-11 pheasant hunting season close on Monday.

For them, with the fresh scent of pheasant in their nostrils and the feel of feathers in their mouths, it had been good enough but not long enough.

For Arthur Clark, Terry Franck and me, cursed with our big-picture vision of global wetting and habitat losses forcing pheasants from the landscape, the season could have been a lot better and it had been plenty long.

On our two best days, four of us shot six roosters - exactly half what the law allows. On our two worst days, two of us got skunked. On average days, like Sunday, three of us shot three birds - a rooster apiece for about five hours' effort.

By the time we finished Sunday afternoon, we had exhausted not only ourselves but also every last spot in our home range that could spare a surplus rooster.

From our standpoint, one of the great shames of the collapse of Iowa's pheasant population is that it deprives Buck and Gus - skillful, well-motivated and complementary dogs in the prime of their lives - of the opportunity to have Hall of Fame years.

Arthur's Gus pointed three of the five roosters we saw Sunday - a feat on the next-to-last day of the season when pheasants are at their wildest and wariest, and Buck, Terry's yellow Lab, retrieved with his usual unerring skill.

Of the three roosters Gus pointed Sunday, we got only two. The first one escaped unscathed when Gus, in pursuit of the low-flying bird, leapt into Arthur's line of sight, disrupting his concentration and forcing him to delay his shot.

But that turned out all right, since it was the only rooster we saw on that farm, and we would not knowingly have wanted to shoot the last rooster in a given area.

Our final rooster of the season brought our season total to 33.

In terms of birds harvested per hour of effort, it was easily the worst pheasant season any of us had experienced. Still, in an era of greatly reduced expectations, it had its moments, which would be enough if we could learn to think more like a dog.