A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  In my most heartbreaking dreams, however, I never imagined that Wes II's life would prove so fleeting. A foursquare muscle merchant with the heart of a bull, he seemed as solid as earth itself. When, having just turned seven years old, he came up lame one morning, I took him to our veterinarian, foreseeing perhaps a few doses of Metacam, and then we'd go back to business as usual.

  We had just returned from eastern Montana, after all, where for six five-hour days we'd stalked the Huns and sharptails and ringnecks of the high prairie, and where Wes had seemed nothing but Wes until the last day. Uncharacteristically, he pottered a lot that morning, but I figured only that five rugged hunts in a row had worn him down, made him footsore.

  "He's been hiding this from you for a long time," said our good vet Diane, "and I can't see how." The x-ray showed shadow in his left shoulder where bone should have been, the cancer that ravenous. It seemed nothing could be done.

  A surgeon's second opinion more or less matched hers. He did propose that we might right then and there do a radical amputation, but he was honest enough to predict an extra six months at best as a result. I couldn't imagine this stout creature as a tripod. I drove home in tears.

  As it turned out, Wes lived that six months, and several more, without any surgery. I got word of Nate Heinemann, a Cornell-trained veterinarian over in Burlington, who incorporated traditional Chinese medicine into his practice. The doctor's acupuncture, a dietary change and some herbs— together, to be sure, with Western narcotics—erased my dog's limp overnight, and gave him if anything a little too much energy; I feared that bum shoulder would snap at any moment. But like the other two consultants,

  Nate knew the game would soon be up. He cautioned that his own treatment would work no miracles, would be palliative, not curative.

  Virtually all the pointers I've trained and hunted have had one thing in common: they've been almost as unenthusiastic about swimming as your average pussycat. But Wes plain craved the water. Every July, when my family arrived at our island camp, which sits on a nine-mile lake, he'd rush out to the end of the dock and—like a champion Lab, all four feet high in the air—make his entry. He would then paddle around for actual hours. No need of September roadwork to harden him up for bird season; by the time we got back to Vermont, Wes was nothing but gristle.

  Not so long ago, that good dog's ashes floated away from the dock.

  I am barely a twentieth-century man, let alone a twenty-first. So my eventual recourse was entirely unlike me: I searched the Internet for a pup whose genetic makeup was as close to Wes's as I could find. I didn't necessarily desire another Aquadog, but at my advancing age I did want one equally biddable if possible, an ace in the field and also a good guy to hang out with in New England's much too long off-season.

  I was looking above all for a scion of Snakefoot, one of the many champions in the Elhew line developed by the late Bob Wehle. I have heard some call Elhews the most over-rated dogs in America and others call them the contrary. One thing they are is famously tractable, not a thing always said about pointers. Indeed there are wags who claim that the breed got its name because, asked a question like "Where's your dog?" an English owner's frequent response would be to point into the distance, toward, say, the coast of France.

  I have had four Elhew pointers, two brilliant and, to jump ahead, a third prospectively so. Each of these was a Snakefoot descendant.

  The odd one out in this list was lovable, eccentric—and not a good gun dog. Nor was he a Snakefooter. Yet I hold myself rather than genes chiefly responsible for Max's hopelessness; I failed to recognize him early enough for the soft dog he turned out to be. I therefore very probably and stupidly raised my voice one too many times, not so much at him as at his hardheaded and fearless kennel-mate bitch (non-Elhew), the result being that he'd start off like a champion, and then, fearful of chastisement, he'd more or less quit hunting. That example should be a warning, which I've tried ever since to heed myself, to anyone who thinks of pointers as somehow bomb-proof. Most of mine have been, but by ill temper I may well have squandered the considerable talent of the one who wasn't.

  I suspect my inclination to the genetic strain that resulted in Wes (and his predecessor Belle)—like many if not most dog-related inclinations— involves its share of superstition. Be that as it may, my search took me to a kennel in Arizona, of all places, and I picked my pup on the basis of a photograph alone.

  That was in December, but by airline restrictions the new dog couldn't be shipped until weather warmed up, which in our north country meant May. This gave me some interlude, likewise, to brace my wife—as in my cravenness I hadn't yet done, Wes still deceptively hale—for the addition of a fourth dog to our pack. In short, I never met Pete, as my youngest daughter, who names all our dogs, dubbed him, until he'd already reached nine months of age. Not ideal, but it would have to do.

  I liked what I saw the minute I uncrated him at Bradley Airport down in Connecticut. He was not so blocky as his predecessor, but he had an even deeper chest, so deep that to someone unfamiliar with the breed it might even look freakish. Oh, but he was a handsome specimen— except that he had pretty bad dentition, an under-bite so pronounced that at times his whole lower arch would jut out and cover his top lip. With a fairly short muzzle, Pete's countenance looked in such moments as much like a boxer's as a pointer's.

  Perhaps the breeder should have warned me of this defect, even discounted his asking price, and yet, like the rest of my family, I have come to delight in Pete's sudden changes of aspect. Just now he looks as though he belongs on the cover of Pointing Dog Journal, and now he looks like a cartoon goofball. His ill-placed teeth, I thought, might have an unanticipated advantage: he'd not be able to chew up any birds in his maiden hunts, even should he want to, as it turned out he did not; but I get ahead of myself.

  There have been times in late years when I almost believed the disease that brought the second Wes low to be somehow contagious. I had too many friends, hunters and non-hunters alike, who were losing their own dogs to cancer. But more importantly, there were humans in my life who confronted its horrors. My noble and generous pal of forty-plus years, Strachan Donnelley, would die of a stomach tumor around the time of Pete's first birthday; the hilarious and moving poet Jack Myers had survived other cancers but was now waiting for a liver transplant down in Texas, his last chance; a lovely local woman, Ellen Ryan, had passed on the winter before from cancer; and my cherished brother-in-law, a Massachusetts police officer, was recuperating from yet another brutal round of chemotherapy while I trained my pup.

  What brother-in-law Chip has taught me—and what, at the risk of sounding preachy, I think all of us should bear in mind, as we rarely do— is that, in his own words, every day alive is a good one. After his first bout with cancer and its hideous treatment six years before, he described raking his front lawn and musing on how lousy a chore it once seemed. Now he asked himself, "How could I ever have thought that?"

  I mention all this because last summer, as I worked young Pete on quail from a bird launcher and on a few released pheasant, and as I deeply felt the loss of Wes, frequently even calling the new dog by the old one's name, the illness and suffering of my wife's brother were much on my mind. His case reminded me, and scarcely for the first time in my lucky life, that I was and am a blessed soul, and that I therefore must cling to what and more importantly whom I love. All that seems so durable can vanish in a heartbeat.

  Even with so cooperative a pointer as Pete, I had my exasperations, as anyone who has started a dog from scratch knows there must be. A young dog breaking a point on a bird, however, and cutting rope-burns into the palm that held the check cord—well, it wasn't drinking a liquid that proved either hotter or colder than a certain prescribed temperature and thus feeling as though your mouth were full of razor blades. It wasn't watching the skin of your arms and legs flake up and peel from the flesh, your veins turning to grim black tattoos. It wasn't going cold turkey from the Oxy-Contin without whic
h you couldn't have borne your pain.

  Once, when my wife praised Chip for battling cancer with chemotherapy, he wrote that there was no fight involved; you just took the mauling. "It's like having two thugs show up at your house, tie you to a chair, then beat the shit out of you all afternoon. A week later, when you're starting to feel okay, they show up and do it again."

  I've always been intrigued and gratified by training dogs, but now to steady Pete to flush and shot seemed an utter luxury, a sort of grace that I didn't merit or have to, any more than good Chip deserved his illness and the wretched treatment it invited.

  My wife reminds me that every new dog I start is my favorite ever. She's likely right. There may well be some sort of psyche-preserving mechanism at work in me to make that so. I must therefore be skeptical of myself, must stop short of saying, after this rather brief time with the new man, that Pete's my best of all time. He may go south in his sophomore season. I've seen it happen. All I can say for now is that he's at least the quickest study I have ever handled.

  I try to keep my commands to any working dog as few and simple as possible. I have four for my pointers: heel (mostly so that I can confidently walk the dog back to my truck along a tarred road); all right, which sends the dog on; whoa and dead need no explanation, and after a brief spell, if I've been scrupulous and consistent, whoa drops out of the repertory.

  Pete learned heel, as God will witness me, after about ten minutes on the check cord. Whoa was a bit longer in the learning, not in the yard but when I launched quail; it came with astonishing speed nonetheless, and has not needed a refresher since. All right was of course a snap. Because pointers are not famous for their retrieving skills, I didn't insist on a fetch back to hand: dead only meant I needed him to locate whatever just got knocked down in the puckerbrush.

  For my money, training a pointing dog is really a matter of respecting and refining the dog's instincts, and then getting the hell out of the way. As my friend John Hayes, a first-rate professional handler in our Northeast Kingdom, once put it to me, "Some guys pay me $2500 for training their bird dogs, but most of it should go into training them." Or, as the late Bill White of Grand Lake Stream, Maine, once advised me when I was green at this business, "Soon as you learn that your dog knows a whole lot on his own, you'll be ready to use him right."

  Pete got so steady on planted quail that, even when he could actually see the dumb little things on the ground, he held, and it was gratifying that in actual woods, away from the tall grass meadow where I'd worked him on the quail, he made excellent finds and points on released pheasants, never mind the heat and dryness of August and September. But half-tame quail and pen-raised pheasants are one thing. Soon enough I'd be off on that annual hunting trip to Montana, Pete in tow—and wild birds are quite another proposition.

  My oldest hunting buddy, Peter Woerner, and I began in the Bear Paw Mountains. Usually I put off the western trip until November, because the New England season for ruffed grouse, which will always be my favorite bird, is so short that I don't want to miss any of October. I'd gone west early in the season this year only because I hoped that the sharptail— not yet having been much hassled—would be a bit more cooperative than the ruffs, and more so than they'd be themselves later along, holding well enough that Pete could get his nose into them. And the shots would be over open country, not the split-second affairs that our dense local woods afford, if they afford any at all.

  The sharpies' wing-bursts and squawks, and their occasional tendency like any grouse to change locations before flushing, confused my pointer some, but only for a forenoon. After lunch on that first day, we were lucky enough to find quite a few birds, sufficiently near to one another that there weren't many breaks in the action, but not tightly coveyed, multiple eyes and ears conspiring against us.

  There was a stiff mountain wind that first afternoon. We hunted into it, and Pete soon had scent. He went on, bold as I wanted him to be, and in the ten or twenty seconds between his making game on the first afternoon grouse and the point, I swore I saw the metaphorical light bulb flash on. From that moment forward, whether he was into a single grouse or a mess of Hungarian partridge, he looked for the most part astonishingly like a seasoned dog.

  I have hunted and fished for so many years now that what I do can bring out a jadedness in me. To fool a big brown trout, for instance, in later life feels more satisfying than thrilling. I gave up deer hunting more than a decade ago. It didn't mean enough to me anymore to compensate for the endless hours of scouting, stalking, sitting, gutting, dragging. I still hunt turkeys, but rather casually, unwilling to cruise for hours in pursuit of a gobble; either a tom responds to me from where I set up, or he doesn't, and I go home.

  To this day, however, I have an electric response to a dog holding a wild bird. The flush and shot are secondary. And there Pete was, locked up on that sharptail, the prairie grass rippling around him, the air sweet as flowers. I did not say, "Behold a miracle" to myself, but I damned sure felt something to that effect.

  Maybe my hunting, or rather my dog-handling life, for which I have sustained such enthusiasm, has qualities echoed by my writing life, for which I have sustained the same. Neither has anything to do, Lord knows, with money or reputation, at least not in my case. Rather, the seduction lies in that enlivening process of setting out in pursuit of what Yeats called the "click": a moment when all your ranging and false starts and backtracks and frustrations and experience and intuitive moves somehow flow together and you suddenly come right smack on what you've been looking for all this time.

  That's a miracle too, a payoff for having invested what you have invested in your life.

  But all this may be subject for another inquiry. What's more, there's frankly something in me that resists making allegory of my days afield, however much it tempts me to do so. What my dog and I and the game do together is not encoded; it's direct and unmediated, and that's a boon. It's what keeps those days so fresh and dear. So back, precisely, to the field.

  Our next stop was a hardscrabble ranch up near the Saskatchewan border, whose population of smaller birds had diminished significantly over the ten years we had visited there, but whose pheasants were still numerous.

  Now anyone who knows pheasants by way of some hunting preserve doesn't know pheasants at all. The wild variety, especially if they've heard a few rounds of gunfire, are nearly as smart as our ruffed grouse. Like them, wild roosters learn how to keep something—a creek bank's shoulder, a hedge of willows, a single cottonwood—between themselves and the gun. Flushed, shot at, and missed, they will fly a half-mile if need be. And of course they will run.

  Oh, how they'll run.

  I was uneasy about leaving the grouse and the Huns, just as Pete had more or less gotten the hang of them, and traveling on to a territory full of ringnecks. Those running tendencies, I believed, would baffle my pup all over again. He did take another forenoon to wise up; then he caught the knack of moving with the bird until he could pin it—if it was pinnable. Some pheasants, of course, just scamper plumb out of the countryside.

  Anyone reading this may, like me, hate the article in the outdoor magazines that claims a dog can do everything but brush the author's teeth and fold his laundry, especially if that author takes credit for these virtues. I'd hate to sound like one of that type, so let me admit that my youngster, indisposed to any mistakes I can see right now, will scarcely be flawless. I've never owned nor seen a dog to fit that description. No,

  Pete is simply a great prospect, and I suspect he'll keep getting better as I provide him with more and more exposure. He'll improve, that is, if I remember Bill White's counsel: he already has a lot of knowledge by way of genetics. I only need to get him into the cover, give him exposure, and let instinct take over.

  What will Pete's foible or foibles be? The first Wes would bring a woodcock halfway to me, then drop it and roll on it. Sam was a model citizen until his second season, when, rather than retrieving as he had in the first, he got r
ough-mouthed. Well, I understate. The first bird of season two was a woodcock, and I got to Sam just as the bird's feet were disappearing down his gorge, as if he were snake and his prey frog. I had subsequently to train him to point dead, not retrieve at all. By her second season, Belle wouldn't pick up a woodcock at all. For all of that, these were good animals, and were so chiefly, yes, because of exposure.

  Yet I underexposed Pete at the ranch.

  On our second evening there, I got sick. Very sick. Back at home, my wife and two of our children had recently contracted giardia, a debilitating parasitic ailment, and I began to wonder if I had now gotten a delayed dose of the same. I didn't know how else to explain the retching that kept me up almost to dawn.

  As it turned out, giardia was not the villain, and I still don't know what was. Certainly not the ranch owner's cooking or her water, which I had been eating and drinking for a decade, and of which my longtime partner, Peter, as good a friend as a man could want, had consumed no less than I on this trip.

  I didn't feel much like eating for a while, but the most painful effects of the bug diminished considerably after that one nasty night. The sickness left me, however, with next to no energy. I could lash myself through a morning, intent as I was on filling Pete's mouth with feathers and keeping the human Pete company; but after each midday break I was done.

  As I sit here today, I feel about as fine and fit as a man my age has any right to feel. Since Montana, I have spent a peaceful and productive week at my Maine cabin, each day getting Pete into a fair supply of ruffed grouse. Retired from teaching, I'm dreaming up a Midwestern trip for later in the year. It's as though that enervated few days at the ranch never happened.