A poodle in the field is worth a ton of mutts in the bush

His dog chased squirrels like nobody’s business, and for a squirrel hunter walking from woodlot to woodlot in pursuit of the big gray or red-colored fox squirrels, any dog that was wild about pointing tree tops, stalking and fervently retrieving to hand the small upland game, was hard to beat.

This dog however came with an image.

And the image didn’t jibe with our own.

My friend Joe’s dog was a mid-size French poodle right out of a cartoon and although he originated as a hunter, he looked like a circus dog prone to jumping through hoops, dancing on a ball or balancing a bowling pin on his nose.

Naturally we were skeptical, me and the rest of my pals. Because ours were real hunting dogs: labs, retrievers, flushing dogs and pointers that liked to hunt by themselves, chase animals over the next rise and maybe swallow a quail or two when nobody was looking.

While the poodle stuck close, didn’t give his owner the mopey eye when he felt slighted and never begged for treats, he just didn’t look like our All-American variants of hunting dogs.

Joe’s poodle had a name that I cannot remember but Antoine comes to mind, and Joe, who owned the dog because his parents insisted on having poodles in their Cadillac as opposed to any of the gassy, slobbering, lop-eared, seldom-obeying other breeds we referred to as bird dogs, insisted his dog was bred for ducks.

His dog’s lineage was developed a long time ago and in a land far away, but nonetheless, Joe said.

“He’s a bird dog.”

After being around Joe’s dark-colored closely coiffed pooch with a ball of curly fur waving like a pompon from the end of his tail, it became apparent that Joe was on to something.

The pompon collected burdocks and a host of other fur-matting infestations, so Joe buzzed it leaving a slim and pointed switch. Now the dog looked a touch more outdoorsy except for the curly mane, but that too eventually fell to the clippers and was left on the bathroom floor. And Voila! Without having to save up cash to buy a half-breed hunting dog from the want ads like the rest of us, Joe had himself a pure-bred incarnation of a hunter hearkening back to a century earlier when the American Kennel Club classified the mid-size poodle as a retriever.

So, there was that.

We didn’t hunt a lot with the poodle. Just a few times that season. We considered it daunting to drive around Hinkeytown in an old pickup truck, shotguns in the gun rack, checkered shirts and duck canvas pants, with a French poodle smiling from the bench seat.

It seemed seedy.

So we quit it.

Instead we yelled at our dogs when they strayed or chased deer, something Joe didn’t have to do because his poodle abided. We told them to fetch and then stomped into the brush ourselves when they didn’t, whereas Joe’s poodle gladly returned game.

And we made our dogs ride in the back with the hydraulic jacks and spare tires, while the poodle returned to the Cadillac.

Years later at a bird dog convention I saw a man with a poodle and thought of Joe. I nudged up and asked nonchalantly about the curly-haired dog.

“Pudelpointer,” He said. “Best bird dog I ever owned.”

I realized then we owed Joe an apology.

He really was on to something, back then.

Tu sais?