Out of the ashes: 87-year-old hunter pledges to keep training

Don Gerstner looked out a window Wednesday where there had been only smoke a few minutes before. Now there was a wall of fire a few yards away. Knowing he was probably down to seconds, Gerstner thought of his two most important things.

“I told my wife to get her pocketbook and meet me at the truck, I was going to let the dogs out,” Gerstner said.

But when the 87-year-old stepped outside, he said, it was like stepping into an oven. He knew there wasn’t time to make the short distance to the kennel and back.

“I told Carol we’d have to leave them. The trees all along the driveway were on fire,” he said. “We barely got out.”

The house they’d built early in their long marriage was turned into charred rubble, a victim of the 400,000- acre wildfire that burned in parts of Kansas and Oklahoma last week. Every possession left in the house was gone. Two of his three dogs escaped from their pen and waited by rubble.

The third dog, his favorite English pointer, Sam, was found dead there Friday morning.

Thursday afternoon, when there was still hope for Sam, Gerstner talked of the 8-year-old dog. They’d hunted together for 90 minutes on Jan. 31, the last day of quail season. Sam had pointed three coveys and nine single birds.

“When he went on point, they were there,” said Gerstner.

Six decades of great dogs

For 60 years, English pointers have been meaningful to Gerstner.

“You get him talking about his bird dogs and he’ll probably stay out there for hours,” his daughter Gwen said.

Gerstner got his first pointer as a gift in 1955. Friends and family find it interesting he can remember that, but he and his wife bicker about what year they got married, and with his son, Kyle, about his age.

That first dog did well in an Oklahoma field trial that year. Wide-running dogs with long pedigrees became the driving part of his life.

“Dad was a carpenter in the summer and spring, when it was too hot to run his dogs,” said Kyle. “As soon as it was cool, he was working with his dogs.”

For 28 years he delivered the Wichita newspaper and loved that it gave him most of the day to work with his dogs.

Unlike many trainers, who use only released, domestic quail for their training, Gerstner worked his dogs on the wild coveys of the broad pastures near his home.

“You take those pen birds and drive them out and put them down, the those dogs just learn to follow the (tire) tracks,” he said. “You get a dog that’s been on wild birds, they learn how to actually get out and hunt. My field trial dogs did a lot of hunting.”

Most of his field trial dogs met with success. Sam, the dog that died, had won field trials.

“I had the only dog in history that won the National Open Shooting Dog Championship back-to-back years,” he said, “and I only ran him twice.”

Around 1970, he sold that dog to a buyer from Japan for $12,500, more than many made annually around Medicine Lodge at the time.

His current pair of dogs, both close relatives of Sam’s, should still do well. He won’t run them in a national-level field trial to be held in Barber County next fall.

“This is where my dogs live and were trained,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a fair contest.”

Hunting in his future

Only a few quail seasons shy of 90, Gerstner is in a tough contest as he tries to overcome the deep blow the fire dealt him last week. None who know him would bet against him.

Kyle Gerstner said his dad grew up a fighter, often because someone mistakingly thought he’d be an easy mark because of his 5-foot-2 frame. Many lost to the man’s quick, powerful fists.

His dad made the Kansas State wrestling team though he’d never before been a competitive wrestler. After only two weeks on the team, he beat the wrestler who’d won a state high school championship. He was drafted while still in school and sent to the Korean War.

“Oh yes, the napalm in Korea,” he answered when asked if he’d ever seen such devastation as left by the fire.

For now, he and and Carol are living in an apartment in Medicine Lodge, but he plans on rebuilding that house, doing much of the work himself.

Even though he lost his shotgun to the fire, a venerable Franchi 20 gauge, he hopes it can be replaced.

And as surely as grass will soon grow green on the fire-blackened prairie, Gerstner will be afield with his dogs when the grass turns brown this fall.

Late Thursday afternoon, Gerstner talked highly of the dogs that survived. He’s also hoping to start yet another pointer pup. Together they’ll probably find plenty of coveys in the future.

English pointers and Don Gerstner have served each other well for about the last 60 hunting seasons, and there’s no reason to believe that will end anytime soon.

Even the state’s most devastating prairie fire in history can’t change that.

This story was originally published March 26, 2016 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Out of the ashes: 87-year-old hunter pledges to keep training."