It's really just a lawn ornament, a white and black English setter figurine.  But maybe, just maybe, it's also a reliable harbinger of good things to come.

Awbonnies Bull was first, as he has been in so many was and means for the Blizzard's Huntmore dogs.  "He was young," Eric remembers, "and there was a setter statue in (another setter breeder's) yard.  I got Bull out of the truck, put him on the ground...and he locked up backing the setter statue in the yard."

Eric laughs when he remembers,  "As he grew in maturity, he did not care for backing," adding wryly, "Not sure he did much of it, if any, until he was old."

Memories of Bull have come flooding back the last couple of years with the addition of a setter sculpture to the Jacobs family landscaping.  Since then,  "The Statue Test" has been a fun marker for the amount of natural point Blizzard's Huntmore prospects seem to have.  Backing is both a practical and elegant aspect of working two or more dogs together.  It's practical from the standpoint of control;  we'd don't have another dog on the move after one has established a stand on game.  More than once, we've found the dog on point, buried in the brush, only after we've found the dog honoring his or her bracemate.

And elegant?  If you can walk in on a point with two or more high-headed Llewellin setters stacked up, quivering with intensity, and not feel your pulse start to pound, you need to see your doctor or maybe find another outdoor activity.

Nearly all of the Blizzard's Huntmore puppies we've started have backed naturally on the first opportunity.  That's a tribute to their innate pointing instinct, obviously a huge leg up in developing a young gun dog.  Ohio's legendary grouse gunner and setter devotee Nelson Groves used to drawl, "They gotta want to stand there from the beginning."  

For many years, Nelson ran big-going dogs bred from Ch Sam L's Rebel, the Grand National Grouse Champion in back to back years, 1960 and 1961.  Until I met Eric Jacobs, Nelson Groves was the most indefatigable hiker in the grouse woods I'd ever known.  We didn't see his dogs in the woods much, but we heard the beeper tone "point" quite often... and we'd set off toward the faint sound of one of the Sam L dogs "standing there," as Nelson would say, until Groves and his little AyA 28-bore made the scene.

Nelson didn't teach "whoa."  In fact, he didn't teach much of anything.  "I just fool with puppies until they like me, then take 'em hunting with the Old Dog," he'd patiently explain.  "If they're born with the right stuff, why, they'll stand there behind the dog on point until, sooner or later, they get their chance."  Here's the caveat:  Nelson had the coverts and the birds and the legs to make a dog this way, and for many years, he had the best English setters in our hills.

So when one of this generation of Blizzard's Huntmore Llewellins locks down on that old setter lawn ornament, brimming with willingness to "stand there," it's hard not to think of those Sam L's Rebel dogs of Nelson Groves's, and about Awbonnies Bull, whose "firstest with the mostest" talents, taught all the others how to honor greatness.