Robert DeMott

“No matter how fast or slow the action, no matter how staunch or bedraggled the point, no matter how unerring or wayward the shots, our chief pleasure has always been in the shared experience of watching dogs work, anticipating the choreography of point, flush, and shot, but also looking sideways, too, carrying on animated conversations about everything under the sun, and perhaps more than anything else, storing up sustaining impressions and vivid memories to call up at times like this when the only hunt worth its name is the hunt for words.”
― Robert DeMott, Afield: American Writers on Bird Dogs

“Few things taste better or deliver a more unalloyed experience than wild game we have killed, cleaned, and cooked ourselves (especially grouse, woodcock, teal, wood ducks - birds that simply cannot be domesticated, pen reared, or artificially farmed in any way, shape, or form.) Yet we also realize that, depending on one's degree of personal sensitivity, capacity for ironic reflection, or susceptibility to guilt, there is always that signal moment, when the dog delivers a dead bird to hand, that can occasion a haunting, unresolvable mix of "self-satisfaction and self-reproach," as Texas-born novelist William Humphrey says in Open Season: Sporting Adventures (1986), because "you hold in your hand the creature you both love and love to kill.”
― Robert DeMott, Afield: American Writers on Bird Dogs