Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska. I know, but the state has been very good to me for more than 30 years. I've had great hunts in more than a dozen states but none for as long or consistently as Nebraska. That's enough, the take:

Bo and I had had a tough last few days. We were hunting specifically for prairie chickens and were flushing nothing but sharptails. For three days, nothing but sharptails. I saw chickens in trees, on two tracks and flying overhead but every bird we flushed was a sharptail. I swear thatif I had stopped at the Colonal's for a bucket of extra crispy, they would have served me sharptails.

I was hoping to take a combination limit of prairie chickens and Wilson's snipe. I knew I could get some snipe, but wasn't sure about eight in a day, but I thought three chickens would have been the easy equation. Afterall, Bo and I had taken two limits of just chickens a month earlier and for two years prior I had assembled a series of public access areas that had just about guaranteed me daily limits of chickens. But this trip, "just about" wasn't even close. So I decided to do what any self respecting bird hunter would do. To shoot a combination limit of sharptails and snipe.

At the time, I was thinking selfishly. I was trying to take all original dual limits and I had taken a combination limit of sharptails and snipe many years ago with my last dog, Critter. But I now realized that it wasn't particularly fair to Bo for me to purposely avoid shooting birds just because I did it over another dog.

I certainly knew where to find sharptails and Bo had retrieved her three bird limit by mid-morning, and we still hadn't flushed a single chicken. I drove to the public lake/marsh to search for snipe. As I wrote under Bo's first snipe, it didn't take long to flush a couple. But it seemed the further I walked the fewer snipe I was finding. By mid-afternoon, we had five snipe and I had shot the few snipe that would flush in range and ran the remainder out of the marsh. Snipe aren't stupid birds. Once they've been flushed a couple of times, they head out of the area. There was a private pasture across the road that held more snipe than the public, but they had cattle trampling the cover and mucking up the wet spots, which made it perfect for snipe but out of the question for permission.

As a last resort, I decided to walk to the far side of the marsh where it appeared the high water table flooded into a grazed corner. It was a gamble as it would be dark before I could get out of there if I didn't shoot three more of the little marsh bats.

It turned out to be a good but exceedingly wet and cold end of the hunt. My last snipe fell in a waist deep pool full of sticks. Bo would swim out thinking she saw the snipe only to latch onto a stick, spit it out, swim in a circle and back to shore. Snipe aren't terribly buoyant and difficult for a swimming dog to see. I got that bird, just before dark, more because I needed it for a picture than any sense of purpose. It's hard to rationalize that the ounce of red meat could be considered deserving of cold wet balls, but somehow, my sense of sportsmanship was enhanced by the fact that it was such a tiny morsel of flesh .