The Run-Around

An ex-U.S. Navy SEAL, I know used to run marathons in his youth. As he got older, he switched first to half marathons and then to five- and 10-kilometer runs. Even when he was young and in the prime shape of his life, he says he experienced some pretty high-intensity pain — usually starting about mile 15 or 16 when he was running full marathons and around mile eight or nine when he switched to half marathons.

“It used to start in my lower leg, progress upward to my knees and then my thighs. It was pretty miserable, as the pain level often reached six or seven on a scale of one to 10. I experienced some of that same sort of pain later when I joined the Navy during BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training) running in the sand at the Naval Amphibious Base in Cornado, California, with a stress fracture in my left leg that was severe enough to cause me to be rolled back to a later class, although, thankfully, I didn’t have to go through Hell Week again.

“But,” he adds, “I NEVER experienced the level of pain running marathons, during the worst times in Coronado or even on deployments in Afghanistan that I have experienced after following my German Shorthaired Pointers for miles in pursuit of pheasants or, worse yet, chukars. If you want to hunt wild chukars, those birds live in the mountains of Utah and Idaho. The dogs run up and down those crags as easily as they run around my dog yard, but even though I’m still in pretty good shape, I am in my 50s and I’m here to tell you that hunting chukars for a guy in his mid-50s, behind my GSPs, can be worse, from a pain standpoint, than running an ultra-marathon.”  

If you want to hunt wild chukars, the birds live in the mountains of Utah and Idaho, a challenge even for a former marathon runner and an ex-U.S. Navy SEAL.

He continued that making things even more uncomfortable, the pain didn’t seem to abate for several days after one of those long-distance, mountain-climbing chukar hunts.

“Even with a maximum dose of ibuprofen — or vitamin M, as we called it when I was a SEAL — I swear I’d have been less stiff and sore if I hunted bighorn sheep or mountain goats than I’ve been after three days of chasing the dogs up and down the mountains of Utah and Idaho chukar hunting. Much as I hate admitting it, even though my dogs are my wife and daughter’s show dogs, they’re in better condition than I am because the terrain never seems to phase them, and I can’t say the same for me.”

I know whereof he speaks. For years my upland hunting partner was the assistant chief of wildlife for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. As such, he spent most of each day perched on a chair behind his desk in his office. As nearly as I could determine, the only real exercise he got most days was walking to his kennels to feed and play with his Brittanys, and then walking over to the barn to feed the horses. On top of that, he was a very heavy smoker. By rights he should have been totally gassed within a half-hour of upland bird hunting. Instead, put a shotgun on his arm, a couple of Brits on the ground ahead of him and he turned into a world-class walker possessing unlimited stamina.  

Behind a pair of Brittanys with a shotgun in the crook of his arm, the desk-bound wildlife chief became a world-class walker with unlimited stamina.  

I have never forgotten one time — actually, one time of many hunting with Bill. At the end of what I viewed as a four-hour reincarnation of the Bataan Death March, during which the only breaks had been to remove a half-dozen quail or the three pheasants we had bagged from my retriever’s mouth, by summoning the last scintilla of energy I possessed I finally managed to collar Bill and drag him to a halt. Since all the birds were sitting in my game vest and through some magical process even the tiny quail now weighed roughly 100 pounds each, like a racehorse carrying lead in the saddlepad, I was seriously handicapped by the additional weight while Bill cruised along unencumbered. 

Still, he should have been at least showing some signs of fatigue. But he seemed as fresh as he’d been four hours earlier, while I — who walked three miles every day with my dogs and rode my retired racehorse for another hour or more — wasn’t at all certain that the next few moments wouldn’t mark my drawing my final breaths as I collapsed in a moaning heap.

At the end of a marathon quail and pheasant hunt in Nebraska, it seemed sensible to look around for the farmhouse, the remains of the Wicked Witch of the East and the ruby slippers, because it had to be Kansas.

Since I was suffering from serious oxygen deprivation at the time and it was more than a few years ago, I can’t be totally sure of what exactly was said. But, as nearly as I recall, the dialog went something like this, minus the obscenities and profanity that I’m sure were part of it, at least from my side of the conversation:

Me: “Bill (pant, gasp), we gotta stop and turn around.”

Bill: “Why?”

Me: “Because (wheeze) we don’t have a license to hunt here.”

Bill: “What are you talking about? Of course we have a license to hunt here. The small-game license covers the entire state of Nebraska.”

Me: (croak) “We’re still in Nebraska?  I could have sworn we’d long ago crossed the border into Kansas, Toto.”

Bill: “Nope, we’re still in central Nebraska.  In fact, we’re still on my land.” 

Me: “Can’t be. Not possible. (Puff, puff) After all the walking we’ve done, we HAVE to be in Kansas. If you look around, I’m positive you’ll see the farmhouse, the remains of the Wicked Witch of the East and the ruby slippers.”

A Whippet owner I know became part of a marathon jackrabbit hunt, mainly because an Oglala-Lakota Sioux elder, who had been a fellow-Marine officer, needed some help protecting his grandson’s 4-H garden. 

“I have a good friend who also has Whippets, and we decided to visit his cousin’s ranch in western South Dakota because the cousin said the place was overrun with jackrabbits and his attempts at population control had been minimally effective, at best,” the Whippet owner says. “He thought maybe being chased by the hounds, if it didn’t do anything else, might drive the jacks off his land, and he hoped into the Badlands, where they’d be the government’s problem.”

The ranch owner hoped being chased by the hounds, if it didn’t do anything else, might drive the jacks off his land and into the Badlands, where they’d be the government’s problem.

He continued that the cousin hadn’t been kidding about the ranch being jackrabbit heaven. The hounds would barely catch and dispatch one jack before they’d spot another, and it would be off to the races. 

“By the end of the day, to say that my buddy and I were dragging would not even begin to describe the total exhaustion and the pure agony of just trying to walk that both of us felt. I swear, every square inch of my body — including my hair — hurt, and I thought both of us were in pretty decent shape, as I had just retired after 20 years of active duty in the Marine Corps, and he was still a couple of years short of retirement from the Air Force Reserve. But after that day’s jackrabbit hunt, the only possible way either of us were going to be able to drive the truck home the next day was to find an all-night drugstore in Rapid City so we could load up on naproxen and a motel with a spa. Even so, at breakfast the next morning, it would have required a considerable upgrade to classify us as physical wrecks. I couldn’t stick a fork in my scrambled eggs and lift it to my mouth without moaning.”

Enter the Sioux elder. “We were just finishing breakfast when this tall, very dignified, elderly Native American approached our table. He said the manager had told him that we had been hunting jackrabbits with our hounds the previous day. Then he looked at my shirt, as I was wearing one with the Marine Corps’ eagle, globe and anchor symbol above the left pocket, the only shirt I’d been able to put on that morning given the amount of pain I was feeling, even with a maximum dose of NSAIDs and a good hour in the motel spa’s whirlpool, from the previous day’s hunting.”

He asked: “You a Marine?”

“Yeah, used to be.”

“So was I,” came the reply. “Chosen Reservoir. You come with me.”

“Well, I’d been a Marine and my buddy in the Air Force long enough to recognize command tones,” my friend continued, “so, stifling our moans and groans as best as we could, we followed him into the restaurant’s parking lot.”

In the parking lot, the elder explained that he needed the two Whippet guys — but, more especially, their hounds — to go with him to his home, as jackrabbits were destroying his grandson’s 4-H gardening project. The boy, the elder explained, was living with him and his wife along with his little sister, as their father, the elder’s son, had been killed in the Gulf War and their mother had disappeared. The elder noted that the kids hadn’t had a lot of joy in their lives, and he really wanted his grandson to get some recognition at the county fair for his gardening project, but that wasn’t going to happen if the jacks kept marauding. While grandpa had fenced the garden and killed numerous jacks, they were still damaging the boy’s produce. He thought adding the “fear of dog,” as he put it, to the jacks’ fear of his rifle might be a useful deterrent.  

 “The last thing we wanted or were in any shape to do was another ‘Whippet chase,’ but it was abundantly clear that ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ was not going to fly. Also, I wasn’t about to say ‘no’ to a fellow Marine officer and certainly not one of the ‘Chosin Few’ who walked out of that hell in 1950. So, we got the hounds organized — they were fine despite their full workload the previous day — and cut them loose on the jacks. Since my buddy and I could barely hobble, the Whippets, despite being mainly show dogs, were in much better shape than either of their human hunting partners. But by the time the dogs had caught one of the jacks and, we hope, scared the livin’ bejesus out of the other, I think half the tribe had gathered to watch, and it turned out that there were at least a dozen others who had jackrabbit issues needing a little Whippet attention.”

He continued: “By day’s end, although I’m convinced we’d covered every inch of the Black Hills and the Pine Ridge Reservation, we somehow missed Mount Rushmore, but we may have caught a glimpse of the Crazy Horse Memorial. I can’t even begin to find words to adequately describe our level of exhaustion or the amount of pain we were experiencing. In fact, it would have been difficult to convince either of us that we weren’t crippled for life. On the other hand, we’d done some good work not only for a little boy and his grandfather, but also for several other tribal members. And the dogs, tired though they were, had the time of their lives. Exhausted and miserable though we were, we had the satisfaction of having watched our hounds do the work they were meant to do, although for a lot longer than we ever would have thought our aching bodies could tolerate.”

He added that the jackrabbit hunt had reminded him of something his very first drill instructor at Quantico, the base in Virginia where the Marine Corps trains its officer candidates, had said: Three strikes and you are not out.  You can always do one more thing.

“We found that was true in spades on the jackrabbit hunt in South Dakota,” the Whippet owner says.  

So, it’s wise to always be aware that gremlins, human or otherwise, lurk everywhere, and in a heartbeat, they turn what was supposed to be a nice, quiet little hunt or even a simple walk in the sun into a marathon for both you and your dogs.