This time of year, the Hero Shot ( a generous bag of birds in front of a tired dog, a favorite shotgun, sometimes a proud dog handler) is everywhere on social media.  This photo of Brent, his Blizzard's Huntmore setter Annie, a suggestion of some good dog work, steady shooting by two hunters, and the promise of several grouse dinners is noteworthy as much for what can't be in the portrait as for what is.

What we cannot see is a long day of working good cover: 12 birds up, seven productive points, five wild flushes.  The photo doesn't show the planning that went into Eric Jacobs acquiring his Blizzard bloodstock and the decision to put Parker to Dixie.  The photo doesn't record Eric starting Annie on her ground work - standing steady on pigeons, and casting forward.  It does not allow for Brent devoting time and energy into keeping Annie's training up where Eric left off, or the savvy and commitment and travel Annie's man has made to afford her chances on wild birds.  

Years from now, this photo will jostle Brent's memory that at just over 18 months old, Annie had four of the day's seven productive points.  A bracemate, also started by Eric, notched the other three.  Annie made one retrieve from water.

But it won't show the Jacobs family's decades-long devotion to breeding a better Appalachian grouse dog.  The photo can't include the many seasons afield, every one carefully logged into Eric's hunting journals, of scrambling through mountain coverts daunting to even the best-conditioned man and dog, proving generations of Llewellin setters on ruffed grouse scattered over up-and-down-uplands: abandoned farmsteads, auger benches and high wall cuts left from strip mining, stretches of grape vine tangles and rhododendron, pockets of cedar and young oaks, menacing blackberry thickets bristling with cane briar.

The photo can't show "Huntmores Before": Eric carrying Bull out of the mountains, both of them exhausted from more than a week of all day, every day, after grouse; can't produce the sound of Bull's beeper high on a hillside, holding a bird that only the best pair of hardy treaded boots, sturdy legs and iron will can hope to reach.  We don't see Toby wending his way up an almost vertical cut to make a soft-mouthed retrieve, or sweet, beautiful Bleu holding birds in stands more pose than point, six Llewellin generations of joy and disappointment, missed opportunities, miraculous successes.

Every picture tells a story.  The continuing saga of Eric Jacobs and his Blizzard's Huntmore Llewellin requires a gallery.