For pure pleasure and optimal efficiency, you can’t beat one flush-and-retrieve bird dog between two hunters combing a dense, wet, thorny covert.

When the dog’s working between the two of you and under control, a flush is usually a kill. But when the gun dog “makes game” and trails a running bird left or right of center, the hunter on whatever side the animal is trailing must follow it and stay within range of a potential flush. Such a routine typically circles you back to the spot where the chase began a couple of times, then off in a different direction before the bird flushes, often but not always near a rosebush, alder row or ditch.

If both hunters are familiar with the game, work well together, and can accurately read the dog and shoot, it’s a highly effective and thoroughly enjoyable method of wing-shooting. By aggressively protecting your half of the dog’s quarter, covering both sides of high, slim, tree rows or brooks, and constantly communicating, your chances of “getting burned” by a screened or wild flush decrease significantly. But it’s rarely a walk in the park. Following a flushing dog that’s pursuing a hot running scent through big, deep cover takes spirit and a certain level of fitness, but mostly spirit.

This whole formula changes dramatically when you throw a second dog into the mix, because it’s never easy to focus on two dogs’ simultaneously, particularly when one’s an old pro, the other a well-bred juvenile with everything going for it but experience. You have confidence in the proven dog and tend to focus more on it than the puppy, but this is a recipe for failure once the puppy learns what it’s looking for and discovers how to use the wind to its advantage.

In short, hunting over one good bird dog is a gentlemanly activity, but throw in the other dog and it can quickly become chaotic, producing wild, unexpected flushes and longer, more challenging shots. For the past five weeks, now that I’ve thrown 7-month-young Tiger Lily into the mix with 7-year-old Ringo, let’s just say I’m becoming more comfortable with the latter, chaotic scenario — one that I surely could have handled much easier before my half-century-old body started deteriorating. But that’s where the willpower comes in: If you have it, you never cease to amaze yourself; and you’d be surprised what high, tightly laced boots, briar-busting pants, a light side-by-side, and 800 milligrams of Ibuprofen can do for an old guy who loves to hunt.

It’s true that a guy could save himself some trouble by refusing to hunt over two dogs and alternating between them from covert to covert. But if you love your animals, it’s difficult to leave one home with wanting eyes and wagging tail, and it’s impossible to leave one in the Porta-Kennel at each covert, then listen to its loud, vocal objection each step of the way. If you’ve never heard it, believe me, it isn’t pleasing.

Personally, I can’t understand why anyone would load a dog that earns its keep into a crate and leave it there at a covert so you can hunt another. It just doesn’t make sense to me. That’s why I refuse to do it, no matter how difficult a hunt over two dogs can turn.

Of course, if you really want to torture yourself, experience the epitome of masochism, hunt alone with two dogs, sacrificing the ability to give your partner a heads-up when the animal you aren’t following is hot and headed in the opposite direction of the other dog. Yep, you’re on your own when hunting alone over two dogs frantically trailing a bird that’s looping and stopping and sprinting down the outside of a hedgerow to escape its pursuer. And it never fails that you’re watching one animal that’s sure the bird’s a foot in front of it and — bingo! — the other dog flushes it behind you, on the other side of tall alders. All you can do is listen to it fly away, ankle-deep in black, unforgiving swamp muck.

So, you ask, why would anyone put himself in such a vulnerable position when he could avoid it? Well, the way I look at it, you buy a dog to hunt, it gets six weeks a year to do so, and I just can’t justify leaving one behind for my own selfish reasons. I was the one who decided to own two, so the problems created should be mine, not the dogs’.

Truth be told, I wish I could find a couple more “problems” like that.