I will never get used to it. The suddenness of it. In human, it is difficult enough. Wake up one morning and you’re having to use one point five readers for the newspaper. The tromp through the cattails seems to go a little slower, the truck’s warmth a little more welcome. The fire for another push needs more stoking. It’s more of an erosion, a slow spin.
But in canine, the slap of years is stunning. One day you look down at her and she’s an old lady, her joints swollen by arthritis, various bumps and warts in her hide, a once-stunning feathered tail now something a rat might sport. She totters where once she used to float. She huffs and coughs at the fountain she once drank.
We drive east, across the roll of Montana, past coulee and pine, pump-jack and silo. Past corn and scrubland to the Dakotas. It has been a long span for me and for her, this leave from the Dakotas and now it is late in this season and late in her life and I wonder how it all happened.
She gets the princess perch, behind the driver, the other dogs in back in the camper shell. She rides in the warmth of the cab for after a dozen years of bringing me to all of those different birds, the least I can do is bring her into the truck where she can curl in a tight ball against that rat tail and snore.
There have been other trips. Many. I view her mostly backward. Pups are forward, what lies ahead. Old dogs are what you have been and what they were and what it once was. Over the shoulder, behind, when she was young and the truck had one hundred thousand miles instead of twice that and she had ten thousand miles instead of twice or thrice that. I will make one trip to the Dakotas this year, one visit to the river of scent that is hundreds of pheasants in one section of CRP. This journey, I tell myself, is for the young pup who is fire and burst, an uncontrollable effervescence of puppy joy. But really it is for grandma, kinked with time, crippled by the uplands of the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico. Knotted and rusted by roosters and blues, sharpies, ruffs, sprucers and sage chickens, chukar, Huns, Mearns, cottontops, Californias, mountain and Gambel. It has been one hell of a run.
So she sits behind me as the diesel growls east, through Baker and Hettinger and Lemmon and Mobridge. East. Toward. One last trip, one last bird, one last point. Please, God, just one more.
—TR
Mouthful of Feathers 
Its a hell of a thing, man and dog.
Yes, may there be one more hunt for these partners.
This reminded me of a good Leonard Cohen song.
My it sounds like she has earned that spot in the truck. Sounds like a beautiful bond between you too.
Shit, man, this one brought tears. I paid $50 for my first bird dog 12 months ago. A black and white pointer named Bonnie. She’s 4 years old and I’m told that an old dog like her will never amount to anything. But we’ve worked damn hard this year and although she ain’t no beauty queen she’s hell on quail here in Northern California. She averages at least 6 staunch points each outing. I quit my “real” job this year to fish more and learn to shoot; great timing: She was diagnosed with Lymphoma yesterday. Where the fuck did the last 12 months go….
Joey, damn that sucks. You and Bonnie hang in there and have a Merry Christmas.
TR
For all of us who measure our lives in dogs, well said Tom.
Joey, very sad news. Whatever time you have left with Bonnie, make the most of it.
Sixty years. Two dozen setters, pointers, Brittanies. Every one of them broke my heart, in the end. The last one is here beside me, 12, going on 13; all the age signs you vividly describe, plus senility. “Then you will find–it’s your own affair; but you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.”
Thanks, TR.
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