On this cool September morning, I am recalling that long-ago response to my begging off on a grouse hunting trip. My pal Johnny was heaping on a little guilt over the phone. From where I stood, phone in hand, I could see out the window to the sunny spot in the yard where my old yellow lab Buster stood alert, broad yellow head and ears tilted toward the house as if listening in.
“You know Buster isn’t about to put up with your foot dragging. He knows what time of year it is,” Johnny scolded.
Old Bus was one of the second generation of bird dogs within my circle of friends, a generation now long gone but well remembered two decades later. Each of us human pals are familiar with the life history of each other’s dogs. We look upon them as we do our favorite nieces and nephews.
The dogs of today are heirs to stories of the dogs that have gone before. The names and feats of those dogs are intoned reverentially during quiet moments by the campfire, and when the talk runs that way, the current pack of canines pays attention.
They have all heard of the great blind retrieves of the brave, broad-chested black lab Bullet. I’ll never forget the day he dragged a huge goose back across a swift, ice-choked river, trusting his master to get him up the sheer cut bank. As three of us leaned over and pulled him up by the front legs, he gripped that goose.
Dogs today have quivered in awe at stories of the beautiful and reckless Woolsey, a Chesapeake named after a cardinal. Like the cardinal in question, Woolsey’s range of activity strayed far from the religious, that is, unless you consider rolling in the fermenting carcasses of long dead cattle to have some nonsecular application. Woolsey shared the front seat of the pickup with his master, and sometimes it was difficult to tell which one was driving
It’s probably because of old black Zeke that later generations generally declined to chase porcupines or skunks. Zeke took care of everyone’s lifetime allotment in the span of his own, and he turned to bird hunting late because of it. When he finally got serious in his later years, he must have lamented the time squandered in aimless pursuit of nonfeathered game.
“Aha, so this is what Labs are for,” he must have thought that first time he dropped a steaming mallard at his master’s feet and felt the congratulatory scratch between his ears.
Gentle, one-eyed Dax, a golden retriever officially named Darius for a king of Persia, was persistent to a fault. He would hunt until he couldn’t walk. He had a tough time with retrieves on birds on his blind side, but the same did not apply to bears. He knew just where to go when he had a bruin hot on his heels, and that was directly to the aft of his master, which is said to have caused some excitement at times. His last years were spent tutoring the younger Gus and occasionally swimming out to retrieve a decoy.
Later came Betts, Spud, Goose, Light, Bear, Daisy, and of course Johnny’s ever-growing and swirling pack of English setters, and all the others who ascended to those thrones in pickups and back seats for long predawn drives to secret duck ponds, networks of rose-choked coulees snaking away from vast wheat fields, and windy sage brush uplands, all full of the promise of fluttering wings.
These days, my canine pal is good old Coal, another of those gallumphing, too-big-for-his-own-good Labrador retrievers. Like Buster of old, Coal is out there in the back yard as I write this, knowing it is fall and thinking that we should be out in the hills together hunting.
Sorry, Coal, not today, but soon. I promise.
Meanwhile, I am thinking of Johnny again and his old pal Gus from years gone by. I can see him scratching Gus between the ears and gazing into the coals of a campfire.
“You know, in dog heaven it must always be fall,” he says.
Of course it is.
Greg Tollefson is a freelance Missoula writer whose column appears each week in Outdoors. He can be reached at gtollefson@bresnan.net.
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