.thumbnail.jpg)
By Geoffrey Norman
Photography by Hubert Schriebl
In the entire history of the American field trials for the Brittany breed there has never been a dog like Tom Ettinger's Roy.
When he was growing up around Weston, there were plenty of places where Tom Ettinger could hunt birds. His father, Churchill Ettinger, was a well-known artist and a sportsman whose Golden Retriever named Troubadour, was one of his subjects and a fine, close-working grouse and woodcock dog. Troubadour was what is known among upland hunters as a "flushing dog." Meaning, that the dog does not go motionless when it picks up the scent of a bird. That would be a "pointing dog." One that waits for the hunter to come in and force the bird to fly.
Flushing dogs get excited when they pick up scent and their owners learn to recognize the signs and get ready for a bird to fly in alarm. The distinction may seem minor, even trivial, to non-hunters. But among members of the fraternity, it is exceedingly important, carrying almost theological weight. There are hunters who belong to the church of the flushing dog and those who worship at the altar of pointers. Conversion is possible. But rare.
Ettinger, then, learned by following his flushing dog, Troubadour, through the old played-out apple orchards, the alder swamps and the sidehill birch thickets of southern Vermont. He did not see the need to change even after he had moved away, to Connecticut, and gone to work in Manhattan for Time, Inc. For more than twenty years, he would come back to Vermont on weekends, in the fall, and hunt birds. Labs were his dog of choice. Another flushing breed.
Then, one year, on a bird-hunting trip to Maine, he met a man who bred and trained Brittany spaniels. The breed was still relatively new to the U.S. at that time. They tended to be small dogs and they looked something like a cross between a cocker and a springer. Attractive dogs, then. And they had a history.
In France, where the breed originated, they were known as the "poacher's dog." They were small enough to be concealed under a man's coat when he snuck onto one of the great estates and when they were put on the ground, they would stay close. They had a good nose for game and when they struck a scent, they would point. So when Ettinger bought his first Brittany, in Maine, in 1989, he was embarking on a new patch. "Kate was her name," he says, "and she was my first pointing dog. Maybe it was a mid-life thing." Maybe. Whatever the nature of the impulse, acting on it surely changed Ettinger's life. He brought the dog back home to Connecticut and, then, up to Vermont where he hunted with her in the same places he'd been hunting all his life. "She was green," he says. "And that's putting it kindly. Kate didn't really handle; she just hunted birds." Bird hunters know, all too well, how to deconstruct that statement. If you've ever hunted with a pointing dog of any breed that is not fully trained, you will have known a kind of frustration that is so extreme as to be sublime. Frustration is the product, after all, of the distance between the actual and the possible. Between what could be and what is.....
