Do you have a good retrieve story? I know there are some great ones out there. If you want to send your best story as a comment (please keep it under 500 words), I’ll publish the best one as a separate post (Leslie & I are the judges, and we’ll ask for a photo of you and your dog), and send the winner a copy of my new book, Chukar Culture: Memory, Dogs, Paradox.
The topic of retrieving, in fact, can be so stressful that humor is often forgotten. It shouldn’t be that way. Leslie just reminded me about the time I shot a chukar on Brownlee that we could not find. Three people and two dogs looked and looked, and finally gave up. As a last resort, we ended up looking for it along the cliffs when we were boating back to the ramp, and a friend of mine actually free-soloed up the cliff to check for feathers and found the bird! When he proudly brought the chukar back to me, we all noticed Angus sporting a wisp of arugula and a trace of mayonnaise on his lower lip, the last of my friend’s roast beef sandwich.
Years ago, when I was a kid and long before I began hunting, I loved Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. I think it was the opening of the book where he told the story of his dad’s dog who’d accompanied him downtown to a gun shop. Finding a nice side-by-side, the dad took it out on the sidewalk to see how it felt. Tracing an imaginary duck or goose, he said, “Bang!” The dog took off to who knows where, and his dad went back in the shop to haggle with the shopkeeper. A few minutes later, the dog ran into the shop with a taxidermied duck from a store down the street. At least that’s how I remember it.
Retrieving, and how well our dogs do (or don’t) do this, has been on my mind a lot in the first weeks of this new season. Bloom, for example, seemed to start off deciding he was no longer interested in retrieving; he’d be the first dog to a downed bird, pick it up, and drop it, sometimes several hundred yards down a steep hill, forcing me to lose all that elevation and get it myself. He did this on the first couple of hunts. I was dreading having to work with him to get him back on track. But before I had a chance to do anything, he shined on the next hunt, retrieving everything to hand. Since then he’s been perfect for some reason. Fingers crossed.
Bloom did so well, in fact, for a couple straight hunts that I thought Peat had decided it was much more fun to watch, like Peter Sellers in Being There. But then…
On three consecutive hunts (the last three hunts I’ve done), Peat found birds I winged hundreds of yards from where I saw them land. Each time, he hadn’t seen the bird fall because they’d busted in all directions, and — like a good shooter — he’d followed a single bird or two which happened to be birds I did not shoot at. I had to call him over to the area and hope he’d pick up the scent. In all of the cases, he went a direction much different than I thought the bird had gone. In all cases, he disappeared for at least ten minutes in dense brush. And each time he came trotting up the hill with the still-live bird softly clamped in his mouth. There is no way I would have found a single one of these birds. He’s saved me, three times now, from losing any birds this season. He’s 10-1/2 years old. I’ve raved about him before, but — as Angus did before him — Peat seems to get better every time we go out.
It’s good to be lucky.