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| Tony and Lloyd Carney getting Trash ready for the first brace this morning. |
Last December towards the end of the grouse season, Tommy and I went to a spot he had seen deer hunting and running his bear dogs. With a couple of inches of snow and Jack on the ground we moved 25 to 30 grouse in a relatively short period of time. Tony and I got back in there once more before the end of the season with Deuce and had a bunch more grouse. We needed a name for the cover but we wanted one that wouldn’t give any hint to its whereabouts. So we called it the No Name Cover and hadn’t been back to check on it until this morning. Most of our covers are right off the many logging roads that traverse the North Country this one is a little harder to get to and we healed LJ and Trash in quite a ways before we cut them loose. As it turned out we could have healed them in a little further as we had no birds in the first 10 minutes. Then I heard a grouse go out and then Trash stopped and we flushed another one in front of her. A third one came out over our heads. I think we ended the brace with 13 grouse with LJ and Trash having three finds each. When we got to breakfast and looked at the cover on Google Earth on Lloyd’s I-Phone it looked like we had just barely scratched the edge of this enormous cut. You can expect us to be back in there again soon and from the maps we maybe able to find a quicker way into it from another direction.
For the second brace we ran Bertha and Trip. It’s amazing how much progress Bertha has made in her conditioning. She’s running much stronger with greater fluidity as she is gaining muscle tone and mass. She had one woodcock Trip had three. It was then time for some tune-up work with some of the young dogs in the birdfield. After that we got some breakfast and Lloyd and Tony headed off to run the Little Thudster and the big Rig.