“All of us here are aware of what we are at, that we have flown in the face of tired, old, stuffed-up tradition and custom that don’t have a place with independent thinkers such as us.”
-- Cyrus Boggs, Secretary, Burton Spiller Bird Cat Club
by Ted Williams
“A cat is a natural hunter of birds, whilst a dog is not,” announced Cyrus Boggs as Burton Spiller stalked into the room and leapt up onto the club bar. It was 6:00 p.m. on the last day of fishing at Little Long Pond.
Me, I’m not much into fall fishing because, although the brook trout get colored up nice, they also get slimy and watery tasting and you can’t see your fly amongst all of the leaves.
Probably you know me from the Deadwater Dairyman, in which I have wrote about all the famous dairy farmers that I have hunted and fished with. But these two editors right out of Colby College named Muffy and Bubbles kept saying my writing needed to get “honed” and kept changing my sentences all around and adding new ones until finally I said: “Now look here, this is an article not a bucksaw, and if you got to hone on something, do it to your own claws which you work on most of the day anyhow.” So since then, I have been trying to develop new markets, as they say.
Well, to get back to my original story, it had been real nice out on the water -- all still and misty, with the popples and birches gone gold on the west shore and red mountain ashes reflected in the gin-like surface and sometimes the sweet scent of apples faintly sniffed amidst the paper-mill stink of New England boiled dinner gone bad. If it was not quality angling, it sure beat the bejesus out of cutting pulp.
And now it was happy hour, and we were talking about patridges, which, except for Boggs who had his cows to tend, and Charles, who had got his leg run over by a skidder, the rest of us had the whole season to hunt on account of the Scott Mill got shut down. That was the fancy new one they built down in Deadwater that wasn’t going to stink. Well, guess what.
And, by the way, there is not one single road hunter in our club.
If you have ever taken note of cats, you know that most of them are graceful. But our club cat, Burton Spiller, was the exception of this rule. He walked like a mushrat who had chewed off one paw to escape from a trap, and when he came down the bar he often spilt over our drinks which is how come he got named Burton Spiller. He was a huge yellow-and-tan tomcat with long white whiskers under his nose that looked like a waxed-up moustache and a stub of a tail that he pointed straight up. He had come from Boggs’ barn.
Most of the wives had quit frequenting our club because Burton Spiller would suspend himself from the toilet seat so he could drink, and they would never remember to look before they sat down and therefore got their hind ends carved up some.
Like all cats, Burt killed patridges. But unlike most cats, he ate only the heads. And although he coughed these up under the tables and couches, he was tolerated around the club because he drug in the carcasses pretty much in one piece.
“Take your cat here,” said Boggs. (It was always our cat if Burt knocked over drinks or sprayed or threw up or raked a lady’s butt, but it was his cat when Burt brought in a fresh patridge.) “He descended from the English wildcat whose natural diet is birds. But all these fool bird dogs we got here descended from coyotes who eat deer, hares and calfs. The only reason you can train dogs to point patridges is because they are manageable. But as you gentlemen are aware, that takes considerable sweat. It ain’t natural. With cats, it is natural. But cats ain’t manageable.”
Now Boggs had commenced talking in that grand and fancy style of his that he starts up when he gets oiled. And he had got that look on his face which means he will argue with anyone or even himself if you shut up and just listen.
“You’re always crying about coyotes eating your hens,” said Charles. “Are hens birds or ain’t they?”
Boggs looked at him with as much disgust as he could haul up onto his gray-bristled leathery face and declined to reply at all. “If I was a younger man,” he said, “I’d train that cat.” He squinted his eyes and took a long pull of our SS Pierce Red Label Bourbon.
“Well, I am a younger man,” I said. “And I am going to train that cat.” I tried to grab Burt, but he hissed and backed off and stuck his hind paw, which still had Kitty Litter on it, into the pretzels.
Well, mister, if you think a fully broke bird dog takes an investment of effort, you just try field-training a cat.
Of course, we had nothing and nobody to consult because there was no knowledge or precedent. Boggs and me were partly aware of how difficult it would be, but we also were the ones who had known that it was not impossible and that we would have some slick bird-hunting machine if we ever pulled it off.
So we chased down Burton Spiller and finally got him pinned under the couch by the Victrola. But there was this braided rug underneath into which he dug his claws, so I couldn’t pull him out even though I had both hands around his middle.
Finally, Charles hobbled over and raised up the couch, and out came Burt and the rug all in one unit. Then we pried off the rug claw by claw. When the last claw came out, Burt unloaded on us like a flipped-over outboard motor. Boggs got sliced some and danced around howling and cussing. And because the rest of us were laughing so hard, his face got all red and splotchedy and the veins stuck out on his neck.
“Get a collar on him,” shouted Charles, meaning on Burt, not Boggs.
“We ain’t got a collar small enough to fit,” yelled Boggs at us with considerable anger. He had not calmed down any.
“How about the one on Mildred’s little poodle?” suggested Charles. Suddenly, Boggs did get calmed down, and a scared look came over his face. Mildred is his wife.
“Can we arrive at a decision directly?” I inquired, feeling like the Spartan who had got his innards ate out by a fox because Burt was wrapped up in my undershirt and pressed tight against my belly.
So we hauled up into Boggs’s pickup and drove to the village, and it was a hell of a lot farther than what I remembered and a hell of a lot noisier, too, with Burt making like Al Jolson all the way.
Mildred was putting up three-bean salad in the kitchen. “We got a cat,” is all Boggs said. At least she liked cats. She had two of them.
“Where?” she inquired. Boggs jerked his thumb at me.
It took a lot of strain holding Burt in place. I was getting more and more bent over. And in addition, I knew he had my number if I eased up any.
“Mrs. Boggs,” I said. “Might I trouble you for a pair of your sewing scissors? Mildred and me had always been on friendly terms except for the time my German shorthair, Otto von Pissmark, got in with her hens.
“Now dump out that trash bin,” I told Boggs. When Mildred fetched the scissors, I kept my left hand tight on Burton Spiller, and with my right hand I cut my undershirt all around my belly, being careful not to hit any cat. Then I dumped the whole roll into the bin and clamped on the lid. “We got him,” I said.
That was about as far as we got with our training the first day.
But after a few weeks, we had our bird cat tamed down some. On Tuesdays, Mildred played Bingo at the Grange, so that’s when we transferred the collar from Frolic the poodle to Burton Spiller the cat. Now we could hook him to a lead. And he let himself be towed around, too, except for every so often he flipped out a claw and anchored himself into a rug or grass.
“Nice kitty,” crooned Charles, scratching Burt on the back right up close against his stub tail. Burt raised up higher and higher and purred louder and louder. I dropped a chicken liver in front of him, but he just licked it. Then he licked his chest and under his arms and purred some more.
At this point, I must admit I had not previously been real strong on cats. But Burt was different, top shelf. He took good care of his fur, too. It was all nice and glossy. And, unlike our dogs, he had no more interest in perfuming himself up with rotten trout guts or cow pies than me or you.
“Now,” said Boggs who had kind of taken charge of the project, “the first thing we got to teach him is ‘Whoa.’ Back off fellers. You’re crowding us.”
So Charles and me moved up against the wall, and Boggs took hold of the lead, pulling Burt around in a circle. “Easy Burt,” he whispered. “Easy boy. Eeezeeee. Now WHOA.”
Well, the reaction this word “whoa” raised out of Burton Spiller just flabbergasted us. He hauled Boggs down to his knees. Then Burt broke loose and raced around the whole club, screeching all the time. Next, he clumb a curtain and shredded it on the way up. It was not a pretty sight at all. “Here, now,” Charles hollered, “What ails you cat?”
Boggs just sat on the floor with his stubbly chin in his hands and let Burton Spiller run himself out of gas.
By and by, Boggs recollected that he had observed this exact same behavior once before. “Boys,” he said. “We got to think up some other word besides ‘Whoa’ because when I was mowing hay, ‘Whoa’ is what I sung out to my team because they had got spooked by all this horrible racket and commotion in the grass. I soon perceived that it all came from a cat, the tail of whom had got sliced off in the mower. And that cat, boys, was none other than Burton Spiller.”
By the way, if you get into training bird cats, a good tip to remember is do not rely too much on electric shock collars. They have not yet devised them for cats, and the one we used on Burton Spiller had way more juice than what was required. But more important, we never could punch the control button at exactly the right time. It slowed down our training some. The collar you need to get is a bark collar.
The new word we thought up was ‘Halt.’” That didn’t spook Burt one single bit. But it also didn’t slow him down one single bit. This went on and on until the deer hunters were crashing around in the puckerbrush and we didn’t dare hunt patridges anyhow. “Cats ain’t manageable at all,” moaned Boggs.
But right after that, Charles borrowed the bark collar off Jerome Nadeau who used it on his yellow lab that barked at crickets and wind. It shot off only and exactly when the wearer of it barked, which is something that Burton Spiller never did. Therefore, when Burt kept moving off after we yelled “Halt,’ someone had to bark. And that someone was me.
“Halt Arrff,” I shouted at Burton Spiller. And when the shock hit him, his back arched up like a Halloween cat, and his fur stuck out in all directions. But he stayed in one place. “There b’god,” shouted Boggs.
After that “Halt Arrff” was the command we used, and it worked just fine even without the bark zapper.
The next command we tried out was “Come.” Now and then, Burt would pad over if he felt so inclined, especially if we scratched loud on the carpet or if we were eating trout or patridges. But most times it didn’t work at all.
However, as I have noted, Burt was a top-shelf cat and way smarter than your fluffed-up show breeds. One morning when we were at Boggs’ house to return Frolic the poodle’s collar because we had purchased our own one for Burt, we saw Mildred take down a box of Purr-Fect-Os and rattle it all around and sing out to her own cats real high and quavery: “Puss-puss-puss-puss-puss-puss-puss.” And in one second, Butterscratch and Oreo came dashing into the kitchen.
As soon as we got back to the club we tried this out on Burton Spiller with one of his own boxes of Purr-Fect-Os. Well, Burt just flew off the bar with his stump tail pointed straight up and his coat all fresh lapped and slick and he about grabbed that box out of Boggs’ hands. My, but he was a handsome cat!
Well, of course, it would not be practical for us to lug a box of Burt’s Purr-Fect-Os into the field every time out. So Charles drove down to Deadwater and tested out all the rattles at the kiddy stores until he found one with the right pitch. And when we used it on Burt, he came just like our dogs to the whistle, except every now and then we had to slip him a Purr-Fect-O to keep down his suspicions.
By now, it was September of the next year, and it seemed like we needed to step up our training. On the way to the woods, I held Burt in my lap and scratched behind his good ear, and he purred so loud he about drowned out the truck engine. He sure had got more manageable. He halted great all day.
Burt just loved getting back to the club and was all proud and puffed up and purring and pushing up against the legs of all of the members and of all of the tables.
The next day, we headed out to the hillside which has popples along the edges but grass and milkweed in the middle. Right off, Burt lit out for the puckerbrush. But Boggs shook the rattle and yelled “Puss-puss-puss-puss-puss,” and back ran Burton Spiller, hoping for a Purr-Fect-O, which he got.
“What we have here, gentlemen,” crowed Boggs, all proud and puffed up like Burton Spiller himself, “is a fully broke bird cat.” I near expected him to commence lapping his own chest and armpits.
With lesser cats, Otto von Pissmark would hump them or gum their heads. He was plenty dumb, but he was not so dumb as to try any of that on Burton Spiller. But whenever Burt jumped off the bar, Otto would start walking on eggs and point him all around the room. That didn’t bother Burt one single bit. And when Burt got done cleaning his own fur, he would start in on Otto’s. And if Otto moved any, Burt would swat him upside the head.
When we ran Burton Spiller on clipped-wing pigeons, he kept breaking point and pouncing on them. This went on for weeks and weeks until we had diminished the Deadwater pigeon supply down to almost nothing and Boggs was about at the end of his pickpole. “Maybe it ain’t no use,” he muttered as he sat on the ground looking all glum and discouraged while Burt chewed the head off another pigeon.
How this whole impasse got fixed up is by none other than Otto von Pissmark who came racing down the hillside one morning. Right off, he smelt Burt who was flicking his tail in preparation of pouncing on another pigeon. Otto began walking on eggs until his nose was almost pressed up against Burt’s butt.
But now, instead of pouncing, Burt was eyeballing both the pigeon and Otto and starting up that high-pitched growl of his that didn’t sound anything like a dog growl. They didn’t budge for two minutes. Charles, who was spry again, jumped up and yelled, “Look there. He’s honoring point.” And Boggs shouted, “Now he’s broke. He’s really broke. Boys, we done it.”
Except that we had not reckoned that Burton Spiller would be gun-shy. The first time we touched off the blank pistol, he raced around looking for curtains to climb, but since we were in the woods, he couldn’t find one. Instead, he took refuge up in an old maple in whose green embrace he spent the whole rest of the day. According to Boggs, this was because back in Burt’s barn-cat days, road hunters had seen his stump tail and thought he was a bobcat, dusting him a few times with birdshot.
So we started giving Burt a pigeon every time we shot off a blank. And just a few months later, the bang of the pistol became like a dinner bell for Burton Spiller. In fact, when he was too far away to hear the rattle, he would come to the shot.
Another tip that you might find useful is this one: If you enter your bird cat in a field trial, don’t book him in the open derby stake on account of they’ve got pro handlers who ride around on horses.
When we went to book Burt in for his first-ever field trial, the chairman, who was sitting at a big wood table, got real disdainful and said, “No cats.” But we had suspected this.
Boggs, who had already got on his argumentative look, said, “Boys, let me handle this.” With that, he slapped down the American Field rule book and said, “You show me where it says ‘no cats.”
Well, the chairman flipped and flipped, and finally he trotted off and fetched a whole slew of judges and handlers, and they flipped and flipped. And they couldn’t find it either. But just the same, they said: “No cats.”
“Dogs hate cats,” said the chairman.
“That,” responded Boggs, “ain’t the concern of our bird cat or of us.”
Well, Boggs argued and argued and argued, whilst a whole long line of dog men formed up in back of us, until finally the chairman flung up his arms and hollered, “Okay. Okay. Okay.”
“Say “Halt Arrff,’ not ‘Whoa,’ Boggs told Burt’s handler, who had a mad-looking expression on his face.
Burt looked real confident, and we could all tell that he was just chafing to fling mud into the eyes of all these hoity-toity, pure-bred bird dogs.
Boggs turned to us and said, “All of us here are aware of what we are at, that we have flown in the face of tired, old, stuffed-up tradition and custom that don’t have a place with independent thinkers such as us. This here is the culmination of our investment in time and blood. Gentlemen,” and now his voice got real low and dramatic, “we are about to cause a revolution.”
But it was not the kind of revolution he had in mind.
When Burt marched past all of the dogs, he was too proud to even cast his eyes on them. No dog who ever set paw on this planet scared Burton Spiller. But the dogs all went wild, and about seventeen of them busted loose from their handlers and danced around Burt. “Arrfety, arrff, arrff, ARRFF,” they sung out. And when Burt heard that, he halted and went all rigid, just like we trained him.
The boldest of the dogs ran in quick and punched Burt in the gut with his nose, leapt back, then ran in and punched him again. But Burt was so well trained, he didn’t lift a paw.
We could have handled the situation just fine ourselves, except that these damn-fool handlers came galloping up, shouting “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.”
And when Burton Spiller heard that awful old word that us cat men knew should never be used in his presence, he busted loose and raced around all frantic and clumb the hind end of his own handler’s horse. The next thing we knew, the handler was on the ground and Burt was in the saddle. And the horse was tearing around the whole field, kicking and twisting. Which in turn made more dogs bust loose and more horses buck off their riders.
By now, Boggs was tearing around the whole field, too, shaking the rattle over his head and screeching, “Puss-puss-puss-puss-puss-puss,” which further agitated both the horses and the dogs. And Charles was stirring in confusion of his own by firing off the blank gun over his head like a drunk cowboy and also yelling “Puss-puss-puss-puss-puss-puss.”
When we finally got a lead hitched onto Burton Spiller, we left without much talk to anybody.
Bird cats have not caught on around these parts like we had hoped. But we are breeding them here at the club. All of them have been sired by Burton Spiller himself, and we have had special papers printed up that show it. Also, on each bird cat we have docked the tail down to five inches.
So right now we have got quite a surplus of top-shelf, pure-bred bird cats. And if you want to purchase one real cheap, you can do it by contacting Charles Letourneau at: BSBCC@LittleLongPondTownship.com.
Editor’s Note: Ted Williams has cut pulp, caught brook trout and shot patridges in Maine. Until his recent dismissal by the editorial staff of the Deadwater Dairyman he served as Regional Fishing and Hunting Editor for that fine publication. Currently, Mr. Williams is President of the Burton Spiller Bird Cat Club and editor-in-chief of our newsletter. An un-updated, longer and very inferior version of this same article got run in the March-April 1994 issue of Shooting Sportsman Magazine.
--Charles Letourneau,
Regional Fishing and Hunting Editor, Deadwater Dairyman