A wet reminiscence
Trending
With the boggy grasp of the slough gripping at my loosened boot, I pushed my way through the last 10 yards of cattails with my large, lumbering lab behind me. Wedging my foot back inside, I pulled the boot free from the grip of the stinking mud and made my way to the edge of the slough and saw the rooster floating square in the middle of the water. It was the same scene which had played out when my dog was just a pup, his second season in the wild chasing roosters on the exact piece of public access land.
This time, however, it was my buddy Adam's shot that had brought the bird down, and I gave him the play by play as each attempt to draw my tired lab's attention to the floating pheasant failed. Neither my dog nor I are waterfowlers by trade, so such a scenario of a water retrieve was a one-time ordeal more than seven years ago; even though we were both fond of endless summer sessions of toss-and-retrieve at the lake, including targets such as scrap wood, sticks, tennis balls, bumpers, and anything that floats which can be found at a lake cabin. My dog, now much older, wiser, and perhaps a bit lazier, was keen to the fake tosses I had attempted, which in the past worked perfectly to get him to retrieve a similarly-downed bird as a puppy, and he simply wasn't having it on the beautiful weekend morning. That was, until I turned to the ultimate key in Pavlov's arsenal.
As anyone will tell you, I'm a fan of loud sounds, particularly with the "thunder clap" I was blessed with. Be it a sporting event, or simply imitating the resounding boom of a shotgun when I have tossed my dogs' pheasant dummies over the past two decades; the unusually loud snap of my hands on every clap has been part of their conditioning. As such, you should see how excited they have gotten in our living room when the Vikings score a touchdown.
So, despite all my hand redirection and shouting, it was that auditory clue I turned to in order to get Ole's attention back on the rooster which was slowly drifting away on the breeze blown surface of the prairie pothole. I loaded the lower barrel of my over-under 20 gauge and took aim at the blue sky above the western horizon in line with the downed rooster. Firing at nothing in particular, I followed the shot up with the "dead bird, find the bird," command which always accompanied the sound of my loud clap when tossing dummies in the backyard.
As sure as October is my favorite hunting month, Ole bounded from the clump of cattail roots we tenuously balanced upon on the muddy shore and headed straight for the wet bird. The water was no deeper than his chest and he waded up to the soaked pheasant, sniffed it quickly and, as if to pause at the strange moment or perhaps tapping into the memory from seasons long ago, he grabbed it and turned back to shore with the gray, sloppy target in his jaws. He released it just out of my reach, as if to play a joke on me, and stood above the body as the final ripples of his return to shore carried the quarry to my hand.
Making my way through the funky undercover and towering cattails and cane with the bird in one hand and open shotgun in the other, all while trying to keep my feet in my boots as I made my way toward the final portion of our walk, I warned my buddy that he'd be carrying the pheasant back to the truck. Handing it over, wiping my hand on my vest, and smiling, I recounted how much of the moment mirrored that early experience -- from the rooster shot deep over cover with a splashdown landing, to the same location on the cattail clad shore, to that little extra encouragement required to have an uplanding dog do his best waterfowling impersonation. The slightly soaked and certainly stinky reminiscence seemed a fitting end to our morning hunt, and one more exciting set of bookended memories ... in our outdoors.