Extraordinary Ordinary Days
Most days in a dog sport or in the field with a dog are pretty ordinary. The dogs either do the work required by the sport, or they don’t. If the dogs are gun dogs or hounds, they either find birds or critters, or they don’t, and you either harvest the bird/critter, or you don’t.
But now and then, the routine days elevate to something memorable. It can be some special dog work, a particularly great shot or just a totally fine all-around experience. Since virtually all the folks among my circle of friends either are or were hunters, our special days have almost always occurred hunting something.
I vividly remember an end-of-season hunt, on one of the shooting preserves where I’m a member, of all places. The day was crisp and clear, but the air had an edge to it. Part of it was the lingering scent of autumn, but the rest was more suggestive of the winter that had already arrived with a mid-November snowstorm. This time, the quarry was pheasant or chukar partridge, as any waterfowl that had lingered after the snowstorm had, by now, sensibly departed for a less harsh and demanding climate. No wind ruffled the switchgrass, but a few lingering yellow leaves drifted down from a small stand of aspen not far from a long stand of spruce trees that bordered the field of switch.
Over a neighboring cornfield, a massive flock of crows soared and circled, with some dropping out of the flock every now and then to feed on the corn left behind by the combine. While there was likely plenty of feed for the entire flock, crows being crows, they squabbled continually over what must have been a particularly fine patch of spilled corn. On the way to the field, we had been stopped for many minutes while an enormous herd of whitetailed deer — does, fawns and some bucks, most of them spike or forkhorns but a few with an impressive antler rack — crossed the county road.
I was sitting on a large, moss-covered rock at the end of a switchgrass field, one of several enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program. A fully colored pheasant rooster was lying alongside the rock. My conformation champion dog, now busy with his “second career,” was responsible for that bird being harvested and was rather impatiently waiting for one of us to get moving and begin hunting again.
Just a few minutes earlier, he had found and flushed the pheasant that was now alongside the rock out of the spruce trees, with dry needles and wet snow marking bird’s path as it blew out low, cackling imprecations at the dog for rousting it from its comfortable roost in the trees, occasionally hitting branches along its escape route. So startled was I by the pheasant’s flush, since the trees had concealed the dog from my sight, that my first shot was a clean miss. However, as the bird swung back into the trees, the pellets from my second barrel seemed to catch him, but about at maximum range.
Unsure whether the shot had connected, I called the dog and sent him down the edge of the tree line. At about the spot where I thought the bird had re-entered the trees, I stopped him and cast him into the trees. Then there was nothing to do but wait and let the dog do his work. It was a long wait, which likely meant a running bird. Finally, he emerged from the trees with his “trophy.” The pride he took in his accomplishment as he pranced back with the bird was pretty obvious.
One of the guys hunting with me laughed at the dog’s demeanor. He said, “Now that’s what I’d call waiting for the applause.”
One of the other hunters added, “Yeah, but will he deliver the bird if nobody shouts, ‘Bravo’? Remember, he was a show dog, and they love the cheers.”
Turned out neither was necessary, as the dog nonchalantly handed me the pheasant and trotted off to find another. While it was just an ordinary bit of work on an ordinary late-season hunt in the dog’s view, to my hunting partners and I, it was still pretty special.
Some fine dog work created another memorable day in Nebraska. That morning, fog that held the promise of winter weather in its embrace covered the three of us — two hunters and my dog — as we sat in a makeshift blind of willow brush and reeds on a backwater of the Republican River. This river, which spends part of its time flowing through the southern edge of Nebraska, and the rest of the time the northern edge of Kansas, has a storied history. As dawn — and with it, legal shooting time — approached, the edge of the river around us held a sort of gauzy vapor while a thick bank of dense fog hung over the water.
While the Republican River is a great place to hunt waterfowl late in the season, there’s also more than a little history connected to it. It bears the name of a branch of the Pawnee tribe known as the Republicans, who, unlike many of the nomadic Plains tribes, were agrarians growing corn, beans and pumpkins in the fertile river valley.
In 1806, both the Spanish and the United States were seeking the tribe’s assistance enforcing competing claims to the Louisiana Territory, and representatives of each journeyed to the large Republican Pawnee village located near what is now Guide Rock, Nebraska. Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, for whom Pike’s Peak in Colorado was later named, convinced the Republican Pawnee to fly the American flag rather than the flag of Spain, and the area became part of the United States instead of Spain.
In Kansas, Fort Riley is on the Republican River. Following the Civil War, the Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment was based at Fort Riley and was commanded by George Armstrong Custer, who, a few months later, would meet disaster in a battle with the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes along the Little Bighorn River.
But on that foggy morning in late November, none of the area’s colorful history was on anyone’s mind.
The air was cold and raw, near the edge of freezing, with moisture beads forming on the oilskin of my jacket, on the surface of the shotguns’ barrels and on the head of the conformation champion retriever sitting next to me. Although a group winner with several other group placements both in the U.S. and Canada, the dog was a much better gun dog than a show dog, as now and then he lived up to his call name, Rowdy, in the show ring. Even though he had been a successful show dog, the dog was now what he was bred to be — a working gun dog and a dog that loved his work.
A threesome of bluebills, closely trailed by a pair of canvasback pushed down by the fog, passed over the dark lumps that were our decoys. A few brrrr, brrrrs on the duck call brought them back. Three shots, slightly muffled by the fog, and three birds hit the water — two bluebills quite close together and the third, a canvasback drake, much farther out, barely visible in the fog. The dog was sent for the first duck, but as he picked it up, he spotted the second a few feet away and swam over to it. Intent on saving himself a trip into the cold river, he carefully arranged both ducks so he could grasp both necks and tow the pair back to the blind.
My long-time Nebraska upland bird-hunting partner, coerced into doing some waterfowl hunting that morning, laughed and said, “Well, that probably wouldn’t earn him any points in a field trial, but that’s a dog after my own heart.”
Send for the third bird, the dog disappeared in the fog and was gone a long time. Long enough, in fact, that I became worried. When yelling “Here” repeatedly and giving the “come” call on my whistles produced no response, it was time to get in the boat and look for him.
As I was putting the oars in the oarlocks, I heard Bill chuckle. Annoyed because my dog was the one MIA, I asked him what was so damned funny. He said, “Look behind you.” There, sitting quietly, calmly and comfortably on the edge the reeds right behind the blind with the “can” in his mouth was the big dog, his head cocked to one side and a very quizzical look on his face, clearly wondering what had triggered all the fuss. Just an ordinary bit of work, in his view, but, again, pretty special for both my partner and me.
One of the folks I know is a guy who hunts rabbits with his Basset Hounds that, at other times of the year, are his wife’s and daughter’s show and performance dogs. “My wife and a friend of hers show them and my daughter does rally, agility and trick work with them, and she said she was going to try scent work and perhaps barn hunt this next spring and summer. So, the dogs keep pretty busy, especially since I don’t need much of an excuse to go hunting when the rabbit season is open.”
The occasion of this memorable hunt was Christmas Eve, and the man’s wife and daughter had made it clear that Sam and Molly the Bassets and the man of the house were just nuisances getting in the way of preparations for an extended family Christmas Eve with about 30 people expected in a few hours for dinner. After several none-too-subtle hints, culminating in his wife finally saying, “Martin, take the dogs and get out of the house, will you please?” he replied, “Point taken” and left, picking up his rifle on the way out almost as an afterthought in case they encountered some game.
“We live on 80 acres of farmland, and the backside of our property is an old pasture that we’ve let go wild. While it’s now a pretty brushy area, I do have a well-packed snowmobile trail around and through it. But with the brush, trees and the brush piles, it’s perfect rabbit habitat, especially since we have bird feeders on the acreage and the critters like the corn, sunflower seeds and the bales of good hay that we put with the feeders.
“The air this day had the kind of crispness I like to feel at Christmastime, and I could smell frost in the air. A few minutes into our walk, it started snowing lightly, but with big, beautiful flakes — Christmas snow, if you will.”
He continued: “We hadn’t been in the old pasture very long before Molly started giving me her ‘Hey, boss, I smell a bunny here somewhere’ bay. Then both dogs started running around in the brush yelling about rabbits while I stood there for a good half-hour, every now and then catching a fleeting glimpse of something — rabbit? Basset? — scurrying through the brush.
“In single-digit-above-zero temperatures, waiting for the dogs to push the rabbit across the trail so I could see that it was a rabbit not a Basset, my feet were turning into ice blocks and I was starting to shiver so hard I wasn’t at all sure I could hold steady enough for a shot. About the time I figured my blood was turning into red slush and somewhere in my core an icicle was forming, rabbit number one hopped out onto the trail. With no Bassets in sight and thanks to the sudden, warming shot of adrenalin I always get when the dogs are successful in getting a rabbit in range for me, I was steady just long enough to dispatch the rabbit, which actually turned out to be a nice, big, fat snowshoe hare. It was followed just seconds later by a second snowshoe hare, and fortunately there was still enough adrenalin rush remaining so I was able to also get it.”
He added that as he walked up the trail to get the hares, the two Bassets came busting out of the brush hot on the trail, and hounds and hunter reached the dead hares about the same time. Wagging all over while the hunter hooked the hares to his game carrier, the dogs seemed to leave no doubt they believed they merited his comment that they were, without doubt, the finest rabbit dogs ever, and they frolicked along ahead of their owner as they started back toward the house.
“On the trip back to the house, it became just dark enough so the colored lights on two of our spruce trees and the fence came on, and someone had lit the Christmas candles in the windows on the back of the house. Not only did the winter scene with the snow, the colored lights, the candles and the happy hounds create a perfect, almost Dickensian, Christmas scene, but it also dawned on me that, for once, I wasn’t going to have to eat leftover turkey the day after Christmas. Instead, we’d be dining on a glorious treat of wild hare stroganoff with morels I had dried from the spring harvest and some of my wife’s sensational homemade basil egg noodles, accompanied by a fine Napa Valley merlot I had purchased a few months prior to Christmas for just such an occasion.
“Once I thought about it, I said to the dogs, ‘A pox on turkey. Let’s have the hares for dinner on Christmas Day instead!’ I couldn’t think of a more appropriate Christmas feast than something that was born and grew up on our land, the hounds found and I harvested than these two hares. The bonus was that other than the noodles, my wife didn’t, for once, have to spend half of Christmas Day in the kitchen cooking dinner!”