big adventures...

Momo and I had a big adventure to celebrate his second birthday. We drove up to a game farm in western MA to hunt chukar for the morning. Phew! Hard work for man and dog.

We were working a relatively narrow strip of land, maybe 300 yards wide, but maybe a 1000 yards up a hillside, with a defunct cornfield at the bottom, and then both deciduous and coniferous trees extending up the hill. Most of the understory was ferns and brambles, not too savage, but hard work on a fairly still, warm day. They had put out 15 chukar -- which were in great shape for farm-raised birds. And they were twitchy. If they had any line of sight on you, these birds either ran like crazy or just got up and flew. Tough work for a young dog on a not especially great scenting day.

We had 13 flushes, 6 of whom immediately flew out-of-bounds. Out of respect for the birds, and to keep His Majesty honest, I also didn't shoot any of the birds he wasn't on point for -- and so I took only 6 shots claiming three birds. I can't do one of those cool Venn diagrams that would tell you how many how many of the out-of-bounds birds he got a fair point on, or if I failed to take any shot at a bird he'd located on point. In any case, we went up and down the hill several times.

We're home now and we're tired.

Momo is very pleased that Team Astana went first and second in yesterday's Dauphiné time-trial, and that Andrej Kashechkin now stands in first-place after today's hilly silliness.