Story by Nicole Cordier
Photo by Devin Ream
Steve Arms takes a deep breath and looks through the sight on his 12-gauge Remington shotgun. In the distance, his three German Shorthair Pointers stand in a pointing position, alerting Arms of nearby Chukars, an upland bird in the pheasant family. The dogs lift one front paw and stretch their noses in the direction of the birds, tails extended away from their bodies in sharp points. Without warning, a flock of birds takes off into the air in a flurry of webbed red feet, muted brown feathers, and white faces. Arms steadies his gun, tracking a particular bird within the masses. The dogs–Hank, Jack, and Leah–swivel their heads to follow the barrel. Once his aim is true, Arms takes a smooth, controlled breath out, and slowly squeezes the trigger. The forest rings with the crack of a shotgun blast, and a bird plummets sharply toward the ground. Although the dogs are supposed to wait for Arms’ retrieval command, Leah can’t contain her excitement and bounds off into the bushes to find the fallen bird.
Arms has been training and hunting with dogs since his father first took him hunting as a five-year-old. When he was seven, Arms discovered a Bluetick Coonhound abandoned in the woods and decided to take the dog home. He named him Hobo. Through diligent training and help from his father and uncle, Arms bonded with the former stray and taught him how to hunt raccoons and cougars. Training Hobo was Arms’ first experience with canine behavior. “Getting him to trust me and come when called, creating that bond, it’s just like getting to know a new person,” Arms says.
Since Hobo, Arms has owned ten hunting dogs, eventually switching from scent hounds to retrievers and pointers, which are used for fowl hunts. Over the years, as Arms worked with different breeds, his passion for hunting with dogs grew—a passion he shares with Paleolithic hunters from more than 14,000 years ago.
Hunting dogs have been bred for desirable traits for thousands of years and their senses have refined, allowing them to become specialized at certain types of prey. Arms now works with pointers, a type of hunting dog renowned for keen senses, the ability to move about in rough terrain without detection, and characteristic “pointing” behavior that alerts a hunter to the presence of game.
It’s important that the hunter chooses a breed of dog that is familiar with hunting, as the woods can be dangerous—hunters must know they can rely on their dogs for protection. When he was younger, Arms and his uncle had been hired to clear a predatory cougar off a farmer’s land. After trapping the cougar up in a tree, Arms and his uncle waited at the tree’s base until the cougar climbed down, hackles raised and fight in its eyes. “We had the cougar come down out of a tree, and the dogs ran off to distract it and get it away from us,” Arms says. The hunting dogs were able to distract the cougar by luring it away from the two men. In the end, Arms and his uncle escaped without injury, though one of the dogs had a severe laceration that tore open his belly and required immediate veterinary attention. Arms believes that without the dogs there, he and his uncle could have been seriously injured.
However, it’s not only the hunters who rely on their dogs for protection. Often, the dogs must also depend on their owner for safety and guidance. Arms’ dogs always wear GPS tracking collars, which helps him pinpoint their location, ensuring they won’t get separated or wander into dangerous terrain. Once, during a training session, Hank, the oldest dog, got separated from the pack. After wandering around searching for the dog, Arms’ anxiety began to grow. “I was worried about him,” he says, “I went back to the car to see if he had found his way back to where we began.” When he returned to the car, Arms narrowly caught another man attempting to load Hank up into his truck and take him home. The man tried to claim that Hank was his dog, but when Hank saw Arms, he refused to play along and ran straight over to Arms.
Aside from getting lost or stolen, Arms must ensure his dogs aren’t injured in the rough terrain. When Arms goes on a hunt, he always brings a first aid kit for his dogs with him. He watches for lacerations or scrapes, as well as for poisonous plants. He also vaccinates all three of his dogs against snakebites and the game they are tracking. This mutual protection keeps both man and dog safe while on the hunt.
Properly training a dog is tantamount to ensuring well-being on the hunt for all parties involved. It requires an enormous amount of training and diligent exercise to refine a dog’s skills. Arms trains his dogs at least ten hours a week, on top of the reinforcement training that happens naturally around the house. He takes them out for at least an hour each day and plans training sessions or hunts for both weekend days in order to keep their skills sharp. At home, he practices their basic obedience training and reinforces primary commands like “come,” “stay,” and “heel.”
 
Arms is an experienced trainer, in part due to the time he volunteers to help fellow hunters with their dogs. To get a new dog prepped for its first hunt, it takes about five to six months of intensive training, according to Arms. He also says training methods that work for some dogs may not work for others. “Every dog is like a human – they have different personalities and different experiences, and you have to train them according to what motivates them and what they need,” Arms says. For example, in the past he has helped train a friend’s new Brittney Spaniel. “All he wanted was affection,” Arms says, “The more you petted him up the more he wanted to do to please you.”
The bond between hunter and dog is more important than training. Without a strong bond, the dog wants to hunt for itself instead of working as a part of a team. “It’s like buying a new car and never reading the owners manual, so you don’t know how to operate it,” says Arms. “You’ve got to go out and bond with the dog to be able to hunt well together.” While some hunters use professional trainers who facilitate the training process and help get their dog ready for the woods, Arms stresses how important it is to train not only the dog, but the hunter as well. “If the client doesn’t go out and spend time bonding with that dog during training, it’s not gonna work for them as well,” he says.
This bond, in addition to being an important training tool, makes dogs desirable companions for hunts that would otherwise be long and lonely. Often enough, for Arms it’s simply about the presence of other beings enjoying the beauty of nature with him. “The biggest advantage of having them along on the hunt is their companionship,” Arms says. On his longer hunts, sometimes lasting up to 16 days, Arms especially enjoys the company he receives from his dogs. He says they’ll run ahead of him and do their own thing for a while, but having their tracks to follow and their smiling faces running toward him to check in keeps him from feeling alone in the woods.
Part of the companionship Arms gains from his dogs is the entertainment value in watching them enjoy the hunt. “It’s not about getting the animal for me,” he says, “I’ll take the dogs out hunting and use a blank gun, not actually killing the birds, just so they can have their experience.”
His dedication to his dogs’ happiness extends beyond hunting together. In his spare time, Arms likes to take his dogs fishing or out to the field to play ball. Jack, the youngest dog, especially enjoys playing “laser,” a game in which he enthusiastically chases a bright red laser point around the room. He also likes to use treat toys with the dogs because the toys require them to use their mind and solve puzzles, which trains their logic. He has a special command, “Alright, go and get it!” which means the dogs are allowed to race each other to a decoy, and vicious  tug of war games are encouraged.
For Arms, hunting and interacting with his dogs has become a way of life. They have helped him create a social life that revolves around other families that are passionate about animals. Arms is a former president of the Green Valley Hunting and Retriever Club, which organizes events centered around hunting dogs, including club fun hunts and field trials. Arms’ girlfriend hunts with her five dogs, and both of them enjoy getting out into nature accompanied by their pack of pups.
“The dogs come first,” Arms says. His love for his dogs is evident when he explains the meaning behind their names. Although he mostly calls them by their first names, each of his three pointers has a full name, used for registration with the American Kennel Club. Hank, the oldest dog, is formally known by the name White Smoke’s Bad Boy Hank. This name pays homage to Hank’s father, an accomplished hunting dog known as White Smoke. Jack, the youngest dog of the bunch, who also happens to be Hank’s pup, is registered under the name Jack’s To The Point, paying homage to Arm’s father and Jack’s picture perfect pointing position. Finally, Leah is registered as Little Bits Leah. As the only girl of the group and her habit of boisterously begging for attention have led to her reputation as the alpha-female of Arms’ pack. “Her name is the nice way of calling her a little bitch,” Arms says with a sheepish grin.
Although Hank, Jack, and Leah are well trained in the field, at home they like to cuddle just like any other family pet. “You can lay on the couch, and Jack will come along thinking he’s a 75-pound lap dog trying to get attention,” Arms says. Although the dogs begin each night sleeping in their kennel, he chooses to leave the crate doors open and says most mornings he finds them sleeping in a pile on the couch, waiting for him to come wake them up.
For him, it’s the connection with his dogs that make it all worthwhile. Transcending simple pets, Arms’ dogs have truly become a part of his family. When he speaks of them, it is easy to forget he is not referring to people. “For me, living alone with them, the biggest advantage is having someone around, someone to talk to,” Arms says.
Arms’ bond with his dogs is bittersweet. Their short lifespans guarantee heartbreak when they become old and frail. “Losing a dog is always hard, like losing a kid,” Arms says. To honor past hunting dogs, Arms has had them cremated and scatters their ashes in places where they spent a lot of time. He recalls the loss of one dog in particular, “I took his ashes up onto this ridge that overlooked a great hunting area, a place where we’d always see game and have good luck, and scattered them in wind,” he says. “I wanted to leave him in a place that he knew and loved.”
Back on the hunt, Leah returns with the downed duck and drops it into Arms’ outstretched hands, her mouth open and tongue hanging out in the canine version of a smile. Once her mouth is free, she pants heavily, with soft down feathers stuck to her tongue and lips. Once they’re all packed up, Arms and the dogs head back to his burnt orange truck. Upon arrival, Arms puts them up on the tailgate one by one and checks them over for scratches, as well as ensuring they have no seeds in their eyes or cuts on their paws.
Back at camp, Arms relaxes in his chair, his feet resting on the stone fire pit. The dogs, despite a long day of hunting, still have energy, and they chase the sparks flying off the crackling campfire. Occasionally, they glance away from this game to run over to Arms and get his attention, a scratch behind the ears or a pat on the head. As the night closes, and the fire dims to only flickering embers, Arms tucks the dogs into their kennels, each with their own individual bed and insulation system. In the morning this pack of four will rise early to head out hunting again, the dogs’ eyes sparkling, ready to help their owner in any way they can.

Gallery • 4 Photos

Hank and Leah digging in the ground searching for anything they can get their paws around when they aren’t in training at Lakeside Park in Cottage Grove, OR.