In Harmony
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By Chris Robinson
There are some days when everything about life with dogs seems to be in total harmony. There isn’t one clinker to provide a single note of dissonance to a perfect melody. Perhaps the weather forecast for the next few days of minus-20 degrees Fahrenheit and those temperatures’ disharmony with the idea of mere existence for human and canine alike is what set me to musing about harmonious days afield with my dogs. I’ve been lucky enough to have many of these grand days with my dogs over the years. Because I have sporting dogs, all of the most glorious of these have occurred during autumn hunts.
On one of those days on my late hunting partner Bill Baxter’s farm in central Nebraska, the air was crisp and clean with just a light breeze that carried a late-October edge to it. Yellow leaves drifted down over me from some scrubby aspens that flanked a pond. One of my young retrievers play-chased a few of the leaves all the way to the pond’s edge with the inexhaustible energy of puppyhood while Sparky, the old Brit, a master hunter in more ways than just possessing the title, knowing the need to restore and husband her energy for the inevitable summons to once again “Go find birds,” was content to snooze in the sun on the carpeted floor of the pickup bed lazily lifting her head now and then to reach over and take a few laps of cool water from her bowl.
The gin-like scent of juniper berries from the trees in a nearby grove permeated the fall air, a particularly appropriate smell in view of the fact that juniper berry sauce is an excellent accompaniment for pheasant and quail that wind up as table fare. Across the pond, a flock of crows squabbled over the milo remaining in a field after the combine had removed Bill’s share of the grain. On the other side of the grassy field next to the pond, I could hear the faint whistle of a lonely bobwhite separated from its covey and looking for a friend, while in the game pouch of my vest quite possibly were several of its covey mates. The Brit, savvy about the ways of puppies determined to garner a share of the credit for any harvested bird, had made certain that the area chosen for her nap was between the truck’s tailgate and a pair of pheasant roosters that she had found, pointed and ultimately retrieved earlier in the day so that if need be, she was in position to remind the pup of just who was the master hunter and who was the dumb puppy even though, in this case, the pup at the age of nine months, outweighed her by a good 40 pounds. However, her opponent’s size was never a deterrent for Sparky when she felt a need to exert her authority.
One of the two roosters had not fallen dead despite a considerable burst of feathers when the shot hit it. That bird had led her on a chase of nearly a quarter of a mile before she finally ran it to ground and pulled it out from under an overhang of turf where flowing rainwater had created a sort of tunnel on an old furrow dating back to when the land had been tilled prior to its enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program.
By the pond, I was sitting on a decaying, moss-covered juniper stump, the remains of a tree cut decades earlier and turned into a knotty but very pretty bench that now graced the front porch of my hunting partner’s home. Alongside were a pair of bobwhite cocks that about a half-hour earlier had been part of a strung-out covey at the head of the draw which led to the pond. The Brit and I had taken a cock and a hen from the covey rise that occurred in two segments about a minute apart, which was fortunate because I had missed a shot on the first covey rise before tumbling the hen bird and needed those few seconds the delayed second rise provided to reload the over/under shotgun I was carrying that day. Bill had also taken a pair of birds from the covey and was doing a bit of crowing himself about his wingshooting skills. The remainder of the covey flew on down the draw so after the dog had retrieved all the birds, having harvested the cock bird of my pair when the second part of the covey took off, we sat down for a few minutes, took a rather lengthy pull on our respective water bottles, offered some to Sparky and ate a couple of Snickers bars while we gave the birds a chance to settle and begin to move about and put out scent.
When we moseyed down the draw a bit later, the dog disappeared from sight behind a juniper deadfall and the gentle tinkling of the Swiss sheep bell on her collar fell silent. Seconds later, her collar’s locator beeper began putting out its far less pleasant sound but one that had proven to be very necessary on several occasions when trying to find an orange and white dog immobile on point in a field of fall grasses. As I walked up to the deadfall, I caught a glimpse of blaze orange from the dog’s collar and by bending down a bit, I could see her nostrils flaring as she crept almost imperceptibly nearer the deadfall. Then, her head shifted slightly and she froze.
I circled the edge, branches snapping under my boots, stopping now and then to check her position. When I was directly opposite her point, the quail, caught between my noisy approach and the dog’s silent presence erupted from under the deadfall. Dry needles scattered along the birds’ flight as they made a low pass over the deadfall using it as cover until they were right in front of the dog. Then, in an eyeblink, they reversed course tumbling in the air almost like woodcock rather than bobwhites away from the dog and back over the deadfall barely missing me on the far side. Their attempt at escape and evasion nearly worked because I pivoted too quickly and then had to play catch up with my swing which caused me to miss with the top barrel. There was nothing evasive about the birds’ flight now as they hit the afterburners making for the juniper grove. But that was where my second barrel caught both birds in a perfectly aligned position to take them with one shot and they hit the ground in a tumble of feathers. Then I walked around the deadfall and tapped Sparky on the head sending her for the retrieves. As she placed the second of the two birds in my hand, I could see Bill smiling and in his rich baritone all he said was, “That’s why we hunt with dogs” even though I expected some remark about how luck beats skill any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
When we roused ourselves from the reverie of the hunt to look for another pheasant or quail covey, me from the mossy stump and Bill from his spot against an aspen on the pond’s bank, and walked over to the truck, Sparky raised her head. In the corner of her mouth was a quail feather. I reached down to pluck it off but Bill stopped me. He said, “Leave it there. It belongs where it is and it’s never wise to disturb the magic.”
On another harmonious day, the birds were ducks and geese on a prairie slough in southern Saskatchewan. After I had managed to wade out on a typically treacherous prairie pothole bottom to scatter a few decoys in the water and not lost a boot in the mud or stepped in a hole deep enough to send cascades of water over the top of my hip boots, I found a nice spot to sit on the bank under a stunted tree behind some reeds. By traditional standards, the spot was more a brush pile than a duck hunting blind but it was just fine for what I needed on that particular day. The farmer who owned the land said that the area had not been hunted which is probably why, when I first glassed the slough, it was full of puddle ducks–mallards, gadwalls, widgeon, spoonbills and even a few green-wing teal. There was also a pair of small, by Saskatchewan measures anyway, flocks of white-fronted and Ross geese on the pond. The birds were all in a relaxed pose, having found security, comfort and seclusion in this isolated slough.
On this particular day, I was seeking roughly the same sort of comfort and seclusion as the ducks and geese where I could relax and forget the tension-filled phone calls I had received the previous evening from my editor in which he informed me that, among other things, a pair of U.S. Marshals had shown up at the magazine’s office bearing subpoenas demanding that my reporter partner on a recently completed story and I appear before a federal grand jury investigating the people who were an integral part of that story. The subpoenas also demanded that we hand over all our notes, photos and any recorded interviews that we had from the story. When I asked my editor whether he had told the marshals where I was, he said, “Yeah. I told them you were hunting somewhere in Saskatchewan but I had no idea where.” He assured me that my partner on the story, who was also out of the country when the subpoenas arrived, also had no intention of providing any information other than what was in the story to the grand jury. But, he said, the date when we were supposed to appear was only a few days away so he asked if I was going to return from the hunting trip in time. My initial reaction was, “Hell, no. In fact, I may stay here a week or two longer than I originally planned. If the government doesn’t like it, let them come across the border and try to find me.” Since the outcome of the confrontation with the government was very likely going to be that my reporting partner and I would be cited for contempt of court and jailed for refusing to testify before the grand jury, I was in no mood to hasten that outcome. However, after a chat with the magazine’s lawyers, obstinate defiance didn’t seem to be the wisest course of action so I told my editor that I’d think about it. What I needed was a quiet, peaceful place with a warm dog, whose formal name, ironically, contained the words “chief justice,” snuggled next to me to do that thinking. The placid slough filled with cackling waterfowl provided a perfect setting to mull my options, limited though they were.
Although the birds had skedaddled the second the dog and I appeared on the hill overlooking the slough, they soon came drifting back in twos and threes. I shot a few birds, including a beautiful fully-colored pintail drake, just to make the dog happy, but I mainly just sat beneath that sorry-looking, denuded tree and watched the variety of puddle ducks that called that slough home come fearlessly winging in and sit down. I even passed up an easy shot at a pair of Ross geese sporting colored neckbands content to simply share the same prairie slough with them for awhile. I did shoot a blue-phase snow goose later that morning that was banded but it only had a leg band, not the colored neck collar–a goose hunter can only resist just so much temptation! For the most part, I spent the entire morning revisiting memories of past hunts, soaking up the pleasure of the current one and tinkering just a bit with thoughts of what lay ahead with an arm draped around Chief, explaining to him why he had to spend so much time sitting and watching with little action. But, he had hunted with me for several years and if that’s what I wanted to do, well, it was okay with him. For a long time, we sat under that tree staring at the gunmetal color of the water, the low white cloud bank on the western horizon with its promise of nasty weather in the very near future and the birds, milling around the slough, already restless with their migratory urges. Soon it would be time for all of us to pack up and go south, the birds to avoid the realities of the Canadian prairie’s winter and me to face the realities of being an investigative reporter at odds with the wishes of the U.S. Department of Justice. But, for those few hours, the birds, the slough, Chief and I were in perfect harmony.
Short URL: https://caninechronicle.com/?p=100243
Posted by ralbee
on Mar 21 2016. Filed under Current Articles, Editorial, Featured.
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