Kodiak, an energetic 3-year-old springer spaniel, was the perfect pick to accompany Mark Haglin and his three sons on a pheasant hunt in South Dakota. The owner of Pine Shadows, an award-winning hunting dog breeder, set off in late December after a large snowstorm. The wind had coated the cattail sloughs and corn rows with a thick layer of white.

“After struggling toward what we thought was the edge of the cattails,” says Haglin, “Grant set Kodiak on top of the snow and she quickly went to work.” Kodiak dropped down under the snow. After a minute a rooster exploded out of the snow with Kodiak busting out right behind the bird. Haglin shot the bird, Kodiak made the retrieve, and dropped back down under the snow coursing through the maze of trails under the snow. In quick order, another bird made its way out of the snow with Kodiak right behind. The pup repeated this show at least six times in just a 10-minute time period. Determination, a powerful gait, a friendly disposition: these are just a few typical spaniel traits…

“Lady, whoa.” The German shorthair keened and quivered. She looked at each of us in turn to make sure we were ready. During the end of November, our group had prepared for the hunt of a lifetime in Arizona. Bill Valentine thumbed three rounds of No. 8s into his Browning. My dad broke his borrowed over/under and dropped two loads into the chambers. Clunk-clunk. Drops of dew clung to the tops of the yellowed chest-high grass and glistened on the cholla and the prickly pear. “This early in the season, the birds are out in the tall grass in the flats. Later in the day, we’ll find them up in the brush.” Lady cut back and forth and bounced on her back legs to catch a glimpse of her master. Then, at the mouth of a canyon, her head lifted and she sorted out scents borne on tendrils of wind…

Havilah Babcock, a beloved English professor at the University of South Carolina, has often been described as the unofficial poet laureate of the bobwhite quail. “Call him Bob White, quail, bird or whatever you will in the rest of the country,” he wrote, “but to elder sportsmen of the South, this saucy little patrician is still partridge. It is lese majeste to call him anything else.” Matters of terminology aside, anyone who samples and savors Babcock’s writings will be enchanted. Strangely enough, the origin of his grand tales came from chronic insomnia, and he turned pen to paper during morning’s wee hours in a fruitless search for an antidote. He may have suffered mightily, but posterity can feel blessed that sleeplessness left us a bounty of immensely enjoyable and insightful tales devoted to the bird he fondly described as “five ounces of feathered dynamite.” As might be expected of someone who served as the head of a university English department for decades, Babcock was a master of words…