Diary of a bird dog; Kellie, 1987

In late summer of 1986, a couple of years before Stephanie was born and very early into my career in the USAF, I moved with my then spouse to the boonies outside Murray, Nebraska. Literally aabout a stones throw from what is now Rake’s Creek WMA. We bought our first house and found good neighbors, a bad septic system, peace and quiet and when I started stomping about the farm fields, ditches and wood lots nearby, I also found tons of quail. It’s hard to believe the numbers of quail that are not in that area of Nebraska here barely 20 years later. I had never hunted quail before, but I had read enough to know that to hunt quail properly, one needed a bird dog. So, I opened up the phone book the first week of December that year after the quail were almost doing schooling me one day and whipping my butt the next. So, under Kennels… “A” is for Armbrust, hunting dogs it said, bred and trained. Armbrust Kennels, then at 180th and Harrison St. Called the number, no answer. This was almost before answering machines! OK, then, B is for Brewer… more bird dogs, it says. I’m loving this state more and more all the timel . Betty Brewer out in Wahoo. Any of you ever know her? Man, you should have. Betty is long gone now and she was about 140 even then, but she still had some good dogs around. Legend has it, I learned, that Betty bred and whelped the first litter of German Shorthaired Pointers in the state of Nebraska not long after WW2 ended. Betty had a litter coming, she said, but nothing available until April. If I only even knew what GSP’s where at that point. I had to run to the base library and find out!! So, I called Art back. He wouldn’t have anything until January, but would I like to come out and hunt some pheasant with him right after Christmas? I packed up my buddy Tim and I and we headed out there the day after Christmas, hunted right there where all the houses are now and over where that Millard high school now sits, clear down to 156th St. on the north side of Harrison. Tons of birds in there. We hunted with the sire of the litter Art was peddling for a January whelping date, FC Rawhide’s Smokin’ Joe. Joe was a heck of a dog, sired by FC Jigs White Smoke, owned by a gentlemen who lived in Plattsmouth at the time named Marty Wyant. Jigs would later be voted into the the GSPC of America Hall of Fame and Smokin’ Joe himself would become the first pointing dog of any breed in the state of Nebraska (and about the 2nd or 3rd in the whole USA) to pin an AKC Master Hunter title at the end of his name to go with the AKC Field Championship at the beginning of his name. Big, solid liver with a head like cinder block and eyes that said he was born to do one thing: Hunt and find birds. I didn’t have any idea what I was watching at the time and I don’t think we killed any birds that day. But I remember Joe slammed on point in a plum corner and as we approached over the snow, about 7 roosters got up one at a time, with each step we took, but out of range….and old Joe, he just stood there like a statue and watched them fly off and never twitched. Art went over and heeled him off and sent him on his way. Dangest thing I’d ever seen. I was sold. I went out and saw the litter a few times after it was born. I wanted a girl. I brought her home in Feburary and immediately set about putting to work all the knowledge that had made me into a first rate bird dog trainer from the books I’d read from the base library since Christmas. Some of those book were retriever training books and I still didn’t even know the difference!! No wonder that poor Kellie came out about half screwed up. But, she was her father’s daughter, through and through. I didn’t know it then, but she was and is about the greatest hunting dog I’ve ever seen, in her prime. But even that first summer, Kellie knew it. I got some pigeons and chukars and kept them in the barn and did everything wrong I possibly could with her. And I did it a lot. That was the only thing I did right. My wife, Sue, tried to ruin her, though. She professed to think Kellie and all bird dogs ugly and stupid. But I came off the road late one night that summer and found Kellie’s kennel empty. She and Sue were curled up in the bed together, sound asleep and barely any room for me to crawl in. Been there all week, Sue said. What about the ugly and stupid part?, I asked. She’s used to that, she says! So when old Art called me up that about the next week and asked how that dog was doing and did I want to send her back out to him for a month of so’s training at the end of the summer?, I thought it might be good to stop all the pampering that was going on when I wasn’t around get this dog down to serious business. She was over 6 months old, after all!! Neither Art, nor I, had any idea what I was dropping off at his house that August day. I was in the USAF band in those days and we were gone a lot in the summertime. We had a couple of long tours coming up. I’d come back and get her at the end of the September. Perfect. I turned the pigeons all loose, slaughtered the chukars for the freezer and packed Kellie off to Art’s in the first week of August and hit the road again. Two weeks later, I was on the road and Sue, calls me and says, “You’d better call that bird dog guy, he keeps leaving messages for you.” I call Art and he explains that the dog is doing well and that I should think about entering her in something called a field trial down in Lincoln the first part of September. Oh really? How much? Art says he’ll run her for free since he’s training her anyway if I’ll pay the entry fee. OK… and he says he can tell I’ve been working her some. She’s doing great for him. She’s a real go’er, says Art. About two weeks later I’m home between tours on a Sunday night and the phone rings. It’s Art. Kellie won the Open Puppy down in Lincoln. What’s an Open Puppy? She’s a screamer, he says!! I need to put her in another trial the next week, it’s down in Kansas. The next Sunday night, Art’s not back home to Omaha until late, but I call him anyway. Kellie didn’t win, but she placed again!! The next weekend I’m out at Art’s picking up a pile of hardware. The one trophy is a huge plaque, from the Nebraska German Shorthaired Pointer Club. It’s a traveling trophy. It says “Betty Brewer Trophy” at the top and all the dogs who’ve ever won the thing have their names on it. The dog that won it the year before? Heidi Ho Pinehurst. Heidi is another dog that if I’m not mistaken, is also now in the GSPC of America Hall of Fame. By about that time, I was home for a spell starting that fall and into the winter and that’s where our story really starts. I kept a hunting diary of every day Kellie and I hit the field for the next two months. By that time, Kellie knew more about bird hunting than I did. By the end of that season, she would know more about bird hunting than I ever would. And so, that is how we began on Opening Day, November 5, 1987.