It's a huge cut located on the side of a steep ridge and although the Game Commission had taken down the deer fence that had enclosed it when I had first found it, the cover was still extremely thick. We hunted the perimeter of the cut, as I often do to get a "feel" for the cover, hoping to find a grouse along the edge but we found nothing although in a covert of that immense size there had to be some birds somewhere in it's depths. So we called it a day knowing that we would be back in years to come to give it another try.
On Fri. Emma and I headed north to the Graham covert, one that we have been hunting for a number of years and usually shared a bird or two with us. It's an immense reclaimed strip mine with spruce plantings and a mostly black birch forest running along the edge of it.
Emma gave me a lovely point at the edge of the strip mine cover and I just knew that the grouse was hiding in a small group of spruce directly in front of her. As I walked in focused on the spruce the grouse erupted 40 or 50 feet below the spruce and escaped down the ridge without me getting off a shot. Later she gave me two points that held no birds although she was sure that the birds were there and I had to spend time kicking the cover in front of her to convince her that the birds had gone out before we arrived.
Part way through the hunt I saw Emma running toward me with something white in her mouth. She's retrieved several "interesting" things to me in the past but this was the first time that she brought me a buck scrotum obviously from a recent "gutpile".
She was very pleased with herself and I thanked her and told her what a good girl she was before she would resume hunting. It's the little things that our dogs do for us that makes them special :).
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