Give me a creek in my woodcock coverts.  Not a wide, deep rude one that dumps water in my boots when I want to wade across, nor a slatternly one trundling alongside a country road, tempting tires and trash. A creek should be clean and quick, with much to talk about as it rushes over smooth stones.  A clay bottom helps too, so old-gold sunsets can wash into red sediment, matching the smoky orange of a woodcock’s breast feathers.

I want a creek that helps me stay found in new country, that has spunk enough to shoot spray into cold, bright air when a bird dog splashes to cover that’s always “better” on the other side.  I like a creek with mystery, a creek that meanders the way I think woodcock wander when their long migration south is not so harried by weather and guns. 

Of course the best creeks keep game when the birds come down.

Some never fail to hold a woodcock or two.  Like a lover with more than a few beaus, they ask only that you occasionally drop by to stay in their good graces.

Others are teasers, coquette creeks, ,who on one – and only one- casual encounter give up from along their banks birds in numbers never to be encountered again. The dogs weave from point to point. And after a bender like that we sometimes stagger out the other end of the covert, finding it all we can do to whistle in a bloody-tailed setter drunk on bird scent.

When the birds come down, all five dogs get a taste.  But the woodcock is Arran’s specialty.  That’s why it is she who usually dozes in the truck as I endure November school days. Forty minutes from the faculty parking lot is a two-mile stretch of cover, threaded by a favorite creek. When the last bell rings, I dash to the truck and careen down back roads, anxious for that moment when I can finally take a moment to breathe the quiet.

I stand on a plastic feed sack to shuck out of teacher’s garb and shrug into hunting togs as Arran whines hoarsely from within her travel crate.

The battered white Blazer is tucked deep in the pines just off an overgrown fire road, its dog boxes hidden from casual covert cruisers.  In the two years since I first came to this spot, I have stumbled into only one other bird hunter.  Each of us took the other for a skulking trespasser, and I know he checked my game bag, as I did his, for a telltale bulge.

It usually takes two trips back to the tailgate, gathering up forgotten glasses, gloves, or maybe even a whistle.  Arran is grumbling in that curious, throaty muttering she does when impatient. She has taken care of business, is belled, and just cannot understand the delay.  At last I unclip her lead and together we duck out of the pines, slip-slide down the bare grown embankment and listen for water.

We try to set a course that takes best advantage of whatever the breeze offers, but mostly we look for thick, briary places a woodcock might hunker, crisscrossing the creek as it weaves back and forth in front of us.  The dog bell and creek water mingle then, and I listen absently, scanning the leaf pack for off-white splatters of ‘cock chalk.

Arran is a big-framed lady setter, half Scottish Llewellin, half Ryman-type gun dog. She streams through cover with the tireless pacing stride of an Amish cart horse, close and thorough, pointing with a low, bowed tail behind her slight crouch.  He single black eye patch and doleful mien make her work seem more serious than it is.

I carry a little 28-gauge broken over my arm.  When the bell stops, I drift over in that direction, fishing shells out of my pocket as I walk. I hustle all day for a living; when Arran has a bird, I will measure every moment and be damned if I’ll make work of it.

Impatient as always, the big setters eyes shift nervously as I sidle in, never quite trusting that I will get her ordeal over with as soon as possible.  She often leans back at the flush as if surprised that the bird was there after all.  Only the shot hies her on, either to fetch or to take me to places where we might try again.

The second evening after we’d found last season’s flights, Arran pointed into a frost-burned ragweed clump.  Two birds bounced up into a maze of pink swamp birch.  The left chance dropped at the gun’s sharp bark,  just ahead of a splash into a deep bend in the creek.

The bank was washed away there, and Arran skidded almost vertically into the water before breasting downstream to catch up with the dead bird turning slowly in a light current.  Mouthing her woodcock back into those deep flews, she made for a narrow grade deer had carved behind the roots of an undercut sycamore and clambered up to where I crouched to accept the retrieve.

I was doing the contortionist twist, trying to push our woodcock into the back game pocket when Arran took four steps to our right and locked down again.  Another woodcock leapt up before I could even move, twitter-tweeting over my head and twisting directly into the sun.

A friend was with us later in the week as we hunted a covert on the back of my own farm. We jumped the drainage ditch clogged with cattails to get into a swampy stand of pin oaks, scraggly locusts, and a smattering of alders.  Arran’s bell had gone quiet at the edge of the woods, and I spilled a bird sprung from sodden gray leaves.

Arran was trotting back with the retrieve when her head dropped and snapped left. She froze, the dead woodcock limp in her mouth.

I turned wide-eyed to my friend, drew the barrels down over two fresh tries, and promptly whiffed – bang and bang – on the two woodcock I flushed just off Arran’s black nose.

I took the retrieve with a large dollop of humble pie, and we hunted on, this time through an open patch where the previous spring I had spent a drizzly afternoon mudding in several hundred black alder starts.  Perhaps one of Arran’s grandpuppies will give me another go at woodcock pointed over a retrieved one when those alders finally make shaggy cover.

If so, I will take my best shot, then stop for a while and hold a silky setter head between my hands. I hope the dog has one black eye and will hold still long enough for me to tell her of the day I let her grandmother down not far from this place.

Those two or three weeks when the woodcock wander through are the shortest of the eyar. Too soon, we only traipse the creekbank coverts on the way to grouse woods brooding on the higher ground.

In mild years, the dogs have stood loner woodcock who whistle out in front of the crunch of dead leaves well into December.  They look lost, left in Ohio so close to the New Year.  But then even the stragglers leave, and there are few spots on earth more forlorn than a ghost town woodcock covert.

The creeks still talk as I stand midstream at the end of the late-season grouse hunt. Holding there against the chill water, I an see the slim edge of a moonrise, silver, like a lean setter bitch stretched long and low over birds crouched in a copse of birches.

I think of Arran braving briars mean enough to turn away a dog with less heart, ferreting out another gift of woodcock so tenderly that only a slight wetness betrays the carry. I realize then that I am always amazed when birds fold at shot, always a bit overawed  when the dog brings them to me so that I may turn them over and over in my hands.

I hear my dog in the near dusk, drinking deeply of creek water.  Her bell gutters just beneath the surface faint with sunset reflection.  In the riffles of my mind, I see woodcock banking hard past dark patterns of bent trees, their russet breasts fading with autumn’s final glow.

(Parts of this essay appeared in RGS Magazine, January-February-March 1991)