This final Sunday of a marvelous chukar season finds us all, for the first time this season, called to something other than hunting. Leslie and I, forced to take a sick weekend, are watching the growing covey of quail scarf corn while the dogs get an unprecedented seventh straight day of no exercise. These diluvial days seem not to have had a beginning nor can I, right now, imagine their end (especially given the forecast).
But with dogs, it can’t ever be all doom and gloom, no matter how determined the effort. Peat, despite — and, more likely because of — his characteristic pent-up-edness, entertains us at irregular intervals throughout the day and night, improvising doggy stand-up: stealing bras and getting tangled in them while trying to break their necks, nose-diving momentarily un-minded cupboards for Tupperware, getting the Cong stuck on his lower teeth while trying to keep us from picking up what he can’t quite drop, giving himself a massage by rolling ecstatically on the floor over his Nyla-bone and elk antler chews, growling maniacally all the while. It’s the Call of the Child-we-never-had. And Angus, obliviously enjoying the retirement of his hearing, seems simply to alternate between a textbook demonstration of contentment and manic hunger. We’ve been relieved these past couple of months that the only symptom of his cancer is the blood dripping sporadically from his penis.
Most people who’ve been touched by dogs like to tell stories about what it’s like. I like to hear theirs. Billy Collins has two poems I want to share. Enjoy.
We’ve never been huge-mile hikers. We’ve never logged more than 9 miles on a chukar hunt, and I think our average hunt is less than 5 miles. But for some reason, each season we seem to go longer. Last weekend I hunted Saturday and Sunday, and totaled about 17 miles, which is a lot for me.
Angus did about 44. Something about the sensitivity to his condition, and wondering how much he can take, made me realize that I’ve taken for granted the fact that we do this together, human and dog. It’s deliberate, intentional, the heading out, returning together, and everything in the middle. All that cooperating. Checking in. Communicating. Sometimes the obvious things are the most interesting because we take them for granted. Not a new idea, I know, but when you think about what happens between you and your dog(s) on a hunt, it’s really pretty amazing.
I’m not the kind of person who’s used to tributes being paid to him (one can only hope), but for a dog to hunt with you, you’re being honored. The irony of my just now noticing this is not lost on me since the last post I wrote focused on how Peat honors Angus. Both dogs honor me simply by putting up with me, but to spend most of the day looking for birds I can shoot so they might be able to bring them back to me is ridiculous. It’s idiotically sublime, and kind of a source of shame; it makes me think of that saying, “I’m not sure I want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.” I do a lot of dumb, thoughtless things. What did I do to deserve this honor?
The answer is: nothing. Dogs grant us themselves. It’s an act of grace, “undeserved merit.” Yeah, we might think that without us the dog would be nothing. We might think that since we spent some serious cash rescuing them from someone who’d give them a more horrible life than we do that they owe us whatever we get from them. We might think other dumb things. Humans do that a lot. We think the world was made for us, that “lower” creatures were made to serve us. Our founders thought this justified slavery. They were wrong.
This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for my dogs and their unfathomable and bottomless generosity. I’m thankful for their beauty and grace. I’m thankful for the fact that we go places together to do things together, and that we get out of the truck at the same time, hike in amazing country pursuing a variety of pleasurable experiences and recognizing each other in the process, and return to the rig together, continuing the bond of trust that threads my life together like the golden stitch. I’m thankful they want to be with us no matter what, that they’ll spend day after boring summer day baking in the bottom of the drift boat while I get increasingly grumpy from putting down countless trout. Like the honey badger, they don’t give a sh*t: they’ll still love my sorry ass.
It’s not like I never realized any of this. But it just hit me after two wonderfully long days with a dog living on borrowed time: this is a partnership only because he’s willing. It can’t be forced. He’s granting me himself. He’s done it, without fail, his entire life. That right there, that’s worth thinking about.
It was warm outside, t-shirt weather, and I was hoping for a crisp, cool morning on grouse opener but the air felt thick and muggy. You could hear a pin drop in all of its calmness. I worked my way up through the deep draw that was nestled between stands of tall sage, weaving my way through the thick brush, tucking and carefully maneuvering my shotgun, always aware of where it was pointed while crawling over and under branches. Some branches catching the back of my upland hunting pack, I fought my way loose. I could hear Angus intrepidly and noisily moving below me, sticks breaking and dried arrowleaf balsamroot leaves being crushed like potato chips. I caught a glimpse of him as he ran uphill past me. Angus was birdy, his docked tail moving back and forth quickly like a hummingbird. I was hoping to hear the sudden fluttering of a grouse busting for freedom but I heard a different sound instead.
A quiet staccato cak-cak-cak noise came from overhead in the tall pine trees at the top of the draw. I stopped, picked out a tree and squinted into the sun looking for an outline of a bird overhead somewhere. Balancing from a skinny branch like a tightrope walker, I caught the glimpse of the big dusky grouse staring down at me. Bob and Peat were coming up the other side of the draw and heard the grouse calling. I motioned him over and singled out the grouse in the tree. He pointed at my forearm covered in fresh blood and asked “What happened?” I answered back “Hawthorn spike, I guess?”
My preferred style of hunting is not seeing or thinking about killing a bird too much beforehand. The killing part of bird hunting is the part that I hate the most. “I’m not going to shoot that grouse out of a tree!” I shouted to Bob. In my mind after I made eye contact with that bird, we now had a relationship. Bob said “It’s just meat, I’ll do it.” The grouse impatient from our conversation about who was going to shoot it flew from the branch. Bob shot and missed and then he continued up the draw where he found a large mule deer shed laying on the ground. Bending over to pick it up, another grouse busted from the ground nearby. He proceeded to mount his gun, spin around, and hit the bird as it flew past. It was an amazing shot. Falling from the sky and into the ticket, Angus was first to the retrieve and took the bird directly to Bob. I was proud that he beat Peat to the grouse.
The old warrior, or aged warrior, as we call him, Angus seemed perfectly normal and fine during the hunt but after we got home we noticed some tiny drops of bloody urine on the kitchen floor. We had noticed some drops of blood before, about a week prior, but didn’t know where it came from. Examining Angus, we realized it was coming from him. I called our regular vet who’s taken care of Angus for seven years. His answering machine said that he was still on medical leave, which he’d been on all summer, but that he might start taking appointments on the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend. Anxious to get Angus treated right away, we called another vet clinic in another town and they said they could see Angus that afternoon.
The veterinarian, one we’d only met for the first time that day, walked out of the back examination room and into the waiting room where Bob and I were anxiously awaiting the results of Angus’s urine test. Expressionless, he made eye contact with me and looked away. He began by saying “I have some bad news…….[pause]………the good news is that his lab work looks good……..[pause]……..the bad news is that we went ahead and did a quick ultrasound and he has a urinary tumor and most likely has one to three months to live.”
Devastated.
I stared down at the concrete floor and looked up as someone walked past close by, and another person with their dog was heading out the door. Without saying any words to me and just from his expression I could tell the vet was saying, “I’m sorry.”
Instead of being handed a bottle of antibiotics to fix what we thought might be just a simple urinary infection we were being handed a business card for a vet clinic in Boise that we could call the following week to make an appointment so they could discuss starting chemotherapy which might buy him another six months at the most.
The long Labor Day weekend was ahead of us, and anxious to get a second opinion right away, Bob called a good friend of ours who’s a vet in Washington state to ask him for some advice. Ethan suggested getting Angus on Piroxicam because it’s been shown to sometimes give good results to dogs with transitional cell carcinoma (TCC) and that surgery was too risky to remove the tumor.
Tuesday, Sept 3rd.
After the long weekend, doing our own research and giving it plenty of thought, we decided against pursuing chemo because Angus is 12-1/2 years old. Bob called the vet to see if he could get us some Piroxicam, but he’d never heard of using it for TCC. What!? That same Tuesday Bob called our normal vet , Dr. Gardner, who we liked and trusted, and who’d miraculously made a complete recovery from his illness and was back to business full time. Dr. Gardner called into our pharmacy the prescription for the Piroxicam. We started Angus on the drug on Sept 5th.
Chukar opener was Sept 21st, and I’ve hunted with him eleven times now since they found a tumor in his bladder. He’s been hunting hard and pointing chukar and Huns just like he’s always done, and I’ve had the pleasure of shooting over him and have him retrieve birds for me. Looking at him you wouldn’t know anything was wrong with him, but now knowing that this is his last season makes me appreciate things more than ever. Bob and I take turns following him around outside to watch him pee, but the moment he can’t urinate anymore because the tumor is blocking his urinary tract it will be time. Just like in that moment you choose to shoot and kill a wild game bird, it’s a choice we make or are forced to make, and it’s never easy ending a life.
Miracle dog?
I’ve been crying a lot lately but don’t want Angus to see me doing it. Dogs are perceptive, they key into your emotions. He doesn’t know that he’s dying. We took him for his two month check up a couple of days ago, and Dr. Gardner said that the tumor was shrinking.
When Peat was 7-months-old, we took him hunting with Angus to a place where his day of hunting lasted exactly 15 seconds. Upon arriving to our hunting destination, we let both dogs out of the pickup and before we knew what was happening we saw Peat streaking a 200-yard beeline to a covey of Huns that were hunkered down in the sage. Standing next to the pickup, we watched in horror as he flushed them before we could get there and then he proceeded to chase them for another 200 yards. Bob was furious and immediately banished him to the pickup and into his crate of shame for the remainder of the hunt. He sat there, staring out through the metal grates wondering what he’d done wrong.
Yesterday, I took our old Jeep out for a long drive with the dogs on dusty, washboard, gravel back roads near that place with them bouncing around in the back and thought of Peat and his rough start into the world of hunting his first season. If you’ve been following this blog since we got Peat, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
The following video is a tribute to the dogs. Most of us wouldn’t be doing this compelling sport if it wasn’t for them.
“The man must learn to know his dog as a personality, not a formula.” -George Bird Evans
“Peat No!” I yelled at the top of my lungs as he booked full speed through the dog door and outside to the backyard with a big piece of cauliflower firmly gripped in his mouth. The piece had rolled off the kitchen counter and onto the floor. I followed him outside to the backyard out of pure curiosity to see if he’d actually eat his sudden treasure. He did eat it. It surprised me because our dogs have always disliked raw vegetables in any shape or form. Peat has an uncanny knack for appearing to be sleeping but the second somethings falls on the kitchen floor or when a bird hits our big living room window outside, he’s all over it. Angus with his deafness hasn’t been part of this game lately. A sad reality.
Two-month old Peat
The week before, while getting the toaster from the pantry, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a lightening streak zip past me. Peat was just starting to bolt through the dog door with a plastic package in his mouth that he pulled off the shelf behind me. I managed to grab his fast, furry hind end just as he was halfway to a corn tortilla bliss.
I started making handwritten lists of things Peat has snatched and taken through the dog door. I’m not sure why I started it, but maybe because deep down in my perverted mind I thought it was funny. How can you get mad at a bird dog that is so obsessed with putting things in his mouth and carrying them around?
Prescription glasses, two pairs — one of Bob’s, one of mine — were the bigger ticket items Peat carried outside and destroyed. The rest were smaller items, like a $10 coffee gift certificate, boxer shorts belonging to a guest, throw rug, entire pan of brownies that were in a plastic container, silicone computer keyboard protector x 2, kitchen sponges, 3-, dime store reading glasses (several pairs of which he’d sometimes bring back inside to chew on some more in front of us like it was no big deal), kitchen spatula, custom osage wooden spoon, entire loaf of nice artisan bread, insulated cooler bag, Tupperware container + lid, fleece blanket, towel from bathroom, lunch bag with apple inside which he pulled out and ate in front of us while we were in the hot tub staring at him with disgust, pot holder, brewing equipment foil insulation, Zippo metal hand warmer, Kitchen-Aid mixer lid, stack of old Christmas and birthday greeting cards, expensive fly-tying rooster hackle, Tupperware bowl full of huckleberry muffins of which he ate the entire batch. I’m sure I’m missed things, but you get the picture and not everything was destroyed. He’s very selective. He ate some of them and has earned more than one trip to the vet. Remorse was nowhere to be seen in Peat’s visage.
Boxer shorts, not our guests but another pair found by an alpine lake.
Bob on the other hand isn’t so amused by Peat’s shenanigans because during Peat’s first season of hunting he grabbed from Angus’s mouth at least the first 6 chukar Bob shot that season and refused to return them. I don’t think Peat really cared. Bob did.
Yes, it’s okay that you blame us or me. We put things where there is a good chance he might grab them. The one second you let your guard down he takes advantage of it because he’s no dummy, plus he’s one fast mofo. I’m sure some of you can relate and have similar stories of your own high energy bird dog and their attempt to get your attention. We didn’t have a dog door until Angus was about three years old but do remember him managing to squeeze one of the large couch cushion pillows through the medium-sized dog door to take outside to chew on. Angus had his share of destroyed objects but not as many. You forget these things and end up with another puppy sometime in your lifetime again, and then you remember. Some of us, like a bad habit, keep doing it over and over.
I’m the first to admit that Peat isn’t perfect. He’s not spectacular, and he’s a total piece of work. Bob blames it on not enough exercise in the off season. I blame it on Peat being Peat. I could also blame it on some bad advice we got from a dog trainer friend that told us when Peat was a puppy, “Don’t yell at him when he puts something in his mouth and try to make him give it up; he might get confused and think it’s a bad thing and then not want to retrieve anything.” Some of us aren’t the best dog trainers and handlers, and we are included in that group. Peat, our badly behaved dog at home turned into a fantastic upland hunting dog. The only downfall from Peat is now Angus has to be coaxed into releasing a retrieved bird to hand because of his fear that Peat might intercept it.
We almost gave up on Peat. I’m glad we didn’t. Don’t ever give up on your puppy or dog. He or she might come around and surprise you, and allow you to buy that new pair of glasses you really wanted.
Fond of finding things to carry around. Peat pointing with a bone in his mouth.
