As owners saw how the small, energetic dogs worked, they clamored for them on their hunts. When Miller first arrived at Brays, the kennels housed a couple of flushing cockers that were used sparingly. “The key is making them stand there and look good.” “Anybody can make them stand there and look miserable,” he says. What’s more, Miller’s dogs do it with style. Dogs “broke” to wing and shot provide a safer hunting atmosphere void of dogs chasing birds through the fields. And fewer still are steady to the shot, or to the retrieve, which means they hold their exact, unwavering, not-one-step-more position when the gun barks, and when a separate retrieving dog launches in to hunt the downed bird. Fewer are steady to wing, meaning they stay on point and unmoved when birds flush from cover.
GARDEN STORY TRAINER FULL
What Miller might best be known for-and why he has a room full of trophies-is training bird dogs to perform at a level not always associated with a pointer’s comportment in the field. Each player knows its role-hunter and dog and handler, and certainly the birds. There are fortune and chance and luck, ill winds and character flaws writ large and small, each mitigated by training and skill and understanding. Quail hunting is a live performance, a visually artful pageant that comprises equal measures of of choreography, serendipity, and set design. He now owns more than ninety NBHA championships and more than a thousand placements in field trials. Miller won his first NBHA National Open Shooting Dog Championship, the association’s most prestigious competition, in 1995, and followed it with wins in 1996, 2001, 2003, and 2005.
GARDEN STORY TRAINER SERIES
He competed in the National Bird Hunters Association network, a leading field-trial series in which dogs are worked by walking handlers rather than by horseback. But then I started kicking people’s butts, and they quit calling.”Īs his reputation grew, Miller hit the road, training and running trials for clients’ dogs across the country.
GARDEN STORY TRAINER TRIAL
“People would call me whenever a trial was coming up and say, Why don’t you enter your dog? They wanted me there so they could beat me. “When I first started, I’d let a dog loose and he’d stay close for five minutes, then take off, and I’d never see him again,” Miller remembers with a chuckle. Bit by bit, he honed his field-trial skills. He didn’t toil in the little leagues for long. He started his own kennel two years later, taking on a couple of dogs for $200 a month and supplementing his income by working from 3:30 in the afternoon to midnight throwing fifty-pound bags of Pennington seed into semitrailer trucks for four dollars an hour. “Zero.” Each man took a chance on the other, and Miller got a crash course in the balancing act of managing both dogs and dog owners’ expectations in the hypercompetitive world of field trials. In 1987, when Miller was thirty-three, a private kennel owner offered him a job at his bird-dog training operation in Missouri. You could kill a limit in thirty minutes like it was nothing.” “There were so many pheasant on our farm,” he recalls, “that my mom would drive me around when I was little and let me out of the car when we saw one running up the ditch.
Quail hunting back then was a rarity for him. As a youth in Iowa, he ran beagles and coon dogs, and in 1981 won the UKC World Hunt Championship of coon hunting. The sixty-four-year-old Miller brought to a land of salt breezes and oyster roasts a legendary résumé he forged over decades of field trials. A “shared plantation” among its owners, it devotes more than 5,000 of its acres to hunting, shooting, fishing, golf, and equestrian sports, and keeps a kennel with thirty-six bird dogs that are available to members and their guests, along with seven guides. Trainer Scott Miller watches his pupil at work.īrays Island is a private sporting community on the Pocotaligo River, 5,500 acres of tidal creek and riverfront, wild woods, and manicured bird-hunting fields about sixty miles southwest of Charleston. “There’s our lesson for today,” Miller said, a grin pushing up the corners of a thick mustache. We were beaten by the bird, fair and square. My hunting partner, Fred Childs, Tieka’s owner, was caught flat-footed, as well. My back was half turned, my shotgun dangling loose in my hand. He tapped Tieka to release the dog, and the Brittany took a halting, you-sure-about-this half step when a single bobwhite quail launched from the brush, clawing for blue. “That must have been it,” Miller figured, nearly talking to himself. “Nothing,” he muttered, then walked two more steps in front of the dog before a tiny winter-brown sparrow leaped from its deep burrow in the bunchgrass. We could have seen a june bug hiding in there. Scott Miller swept the brush twice with battered and dusty snake boots.
We’d given up on the point, despite Tieka’s staunch figure in the broomsedge, at a field corner near the cut sorghum, unwavering in her commitment.
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