We meet for lunch at Pine Creek Sporting Club, the exclusive hunting-and-shooting destination located in central Florida, equidistant to Orlando and south to Palm Beach. Professional-golf icon Nick Price offers a sincere welcome that instantly puts me at ease.

As I admire the immaculately appointed members’ lodge, I’m impressed by this residential community built exclusively around hunters and shooting sports. Conceived by cable television magnate Stephen Myers with the support of founding members, including golfers Nick Price and Jack Nicklaus, former NFL running back Tucker Frederickson, and famed gunmaker Tullio Fabbri, Pine Creek provides a charming oasis for shooting sportsmen.

A dog you love should live as long as you do. How often now have I said this to myself since I began hunting over dogs? That was 59 years ago, when I toted by single-shot .410 on some of my father’s shorter forays into the field. At nine, I didn’t shoot much game, but when at long last his gun dog died, I recall–more vividly that I do most things from that time–how I protested the plain injustice of it all. Like a father, a dog was surely meant to endure forever.

Up on top, in the saddle between the buttes, a 500-foot climb from the rocky two-track below, sits a rock. Plunked there by a volcano, created first in a cauldron of fire, it’s a chunk of stone pockmarked by eons of fire and ice.

A boulder about the size of a subcompact car, it has a cleft in its center, like a Yugo on which a tree has fallen. The dust of centuries has piled around it and it makes for a pretty good seat on a nice day. But nice days are hard to come by late in chukar season.