Sandhill pheasant and sharptail -- November in the Panhandle

Some people don't see the beauty of the Nebraska Sandhills. I understand; it's a dusty kind of beauty. But to me, the hills and thick grass create an austere beauty that provides contrast to the lush beauties of terrain that is easy to love.

We come here with our dogs, supposedly looking for birds. In truth, birds are only an excuse to let the wind and the grass and the sky cleanse us.

  The skies are big here, and the horizon is more than just a theory.

Those damn four wheelers

I bought an ATV a while back, which surprised some people; especially those who have heard me threaten to shoot out the tires of the next one that roared past me.

            I rationalized the purchase by telling people that anyone who frequently hunts elk solo needs all the help he can get, but the truth is I have reached the conclusion that the machines themselves are not inherently evil. Like any other machine, they are as good or bad as the person running them. Plus I got tired of fixing my jeep every time I tore the bottom out of it.

            I felt pretty conspicuous the first time I unloaded the ATV in the quiet dark of a frosty fall morning. I looked around to see if others were annoyed at the noise I was making as I started the machine up and backed it down off the pick-up bed. No one was annoyed because the others were busy unloading their own ATV’s.

            The area I was hunting is a popular spot for elk on the National Forest. One of the reasons it’s popular is because a lot of it is accessible to ATV’s. It’s also a place where I have cussed four-wheelers a lot. Most loudly I cussed a hunter who told me how he spotted an elk while cruising the roads on his four-wheeler. He shut down the machine, grabbing his rifle as he stepped off, and shot a spike.

            I don’t know why God lets things like this happen. In a just universe, people who hump the boonies day after day, slogging through swamps and blow-downs, would get the elk. Hunters who cruise the roads would always get skunked.

             I loaded my gear on to the four-wheeler and headed down the road. My headlights showed a swampy area ahead. I switched to four wheel drive and eased into the standing water. I was gratified to find that the four-wheeler putted on through without spinning its wheels like my jeep would have. When driven gently, ATV’s often tear up the trail less than conventional four wheel rigs, because they are superior four wheel drive vehicles.

It was getting light in the east as I followed the two-track around the edge of the huge meadow that marks the beginning of the area I wanted to hunt. I was trying to stay on the approved four wheel drive road, but it was getting hard to figure out what was approved road and what were illegal tracks. The Forest Service restricts motor vehicle use in the National Forest to designated roads, a restriction I support. But in other areas the forest Service does a better job of marking the approved roads. Should I have followed the newer looking tracks across the meadow? Or is that an unauthorized route? It’s frustrating when you’re trying to do the right and legal thing, but you can’t discern what it is.

Finding the road also gets difficult as new tracks form to avoid washed out areas, and the road gets wider and wider. ATV riders contribute to this problem by going around perceived obstacles. This creates more ruts, unnecessary ruts in my view. I can’t understand why people who buy a machine that will crawl over big rocks feel compelled to go around insignificant bumps in the road. When I am driving any kind of four wheel rig, pick-up, jeep, or ATV, I feel I have an obligation to avoid making new ruts.

            I drove on through the meadow, trying to stay on legal roads as best I could, and then followed a clearly marked trail into the timber. It was almost light enough to shoot now, and I was starting to think that I should get off the machine and walk. I was heading for a particular spot, the head of a draw where I had jumped a cow the previous year. I wanted to get there quickly, but elk could be anywhere in this area. Besides, I didn’t one to be one of those road-hunters who just cruise around on the four-wheeler all day.

            I parked in the trees and started down the road on foot. I stopped for a moment to glass an opening, and that’s when I heard them; two ATV’s coming up from behind me. I waited a moment as the sound of the engines got closer and then they appeared. They nodded and waved as they went by me, and disappeared across the opening.

            I had a sinking feeling I knew where they were going. I walked half a mile further down the road and discovered I was right. I found their ATV’s parked at the head of the draw I wanted to hunt.

            At the time I was mad at myself for getting off the machine too early. I could have beaten them to that draw. But now that I look back on it, I am glad that I am the kind of guy who parks the vehicle sooner rather than later. When I was a kid, hunting with my dad, he always avoided getting into any situations where he was competing with other hunters, and I like that philosophy. Trying to beat the other guy to the “good spot” makes hunting into work, and makes killing an elk into scoring points. That’s not the way I want to hunt.

            ATV’s have given ordinary guys like me, who want find the elk on their own rather than hiring a guide, and who don’t have room for a string of ponies, some enhanced opportunities for reaching the elk. With those opportunities comes the responsibility of using the tool without harming the experience. We all want to reach the elk. But when trails become highways, and we can’t hear the elk bugle over the sound of the engines, we’ve lost what we came to the woods to find. We all need to make the choice to stop the machine sooner rather than later. I found another draw that day, a good one, better than the one I was planning on hunting. I wouldn’t have found it if I had been focused on racing the other guy to the finish line.

To all the dogs I've loved before

Frank and I

My first dog was a dachshund. He was not a hunting dog, and he is worth an entire book to himself. We brought him home as a puppy when I was two, and he lived to be nine. He was lecherous and depraved. Snipper could be a loving house pet for months, and then suddenly one day without warning he would go off on a binge. My dad said that Snipper was the only dog he ever knew who could thumb his nose at you as he ran away. He would run off and eat garbage, and chase women, and fight with rivals for a lady’s affection. He was vicious in a fight, often defeating much larger dogs with his submarine technique of chewing away at the soft underbelly. He would come home eventually, reeking of garbage and combat, and collapse on the couch for a couple of days.

               The first hunting dog I ever knew was Lady. By the time we had Lady, I was old enough to go hunting with Dad a little bit, so I was probably five or so. Lady was a Lab, allegedly; she was all black, and she was a bargain dog. I think my dad paid twenty bucks for her, and she was about two years old when we brought her home. She would retrieve; I’ll say that for her. She was birdy as hell, and she loved to chase crippled pheasants, which she always killed with a bite to the neck before bringing them to hand, as a big rooster had spurred the crap out of her once. Apparently she had vowed that would never happen again.

She also loved to chase a whole lot of other stuff, including rabbits, cows, horses, sheep, deer, cars, sparrows, meadowlarks, coyotes, and tractors. Lady was all about the chase. She was not into coming when called. If she saw a jackrabbit, you might as well plan on hunting by yourself for some time. You could punish her, but you could not stop her. She caught several pen-raised pheasants before they could be shot at by the guns. She is the only dog I ever heard of who once caught a jack rabbit. (The jackrabbit could run faster, but Lady could turn quicker.)

               Lady was also psychotic. Riding in the car with her was miserable. This was in the days before anybody crated a dog, and Lady was all over the car. She tried to chase cars from INSIDE the car. She would leap from seat to seat, window to window, barking and growling and frothing at the mouth. My dad would scream at her to lie down and shut up and she would pay absolutely no attention. The car would veer from side to side on the road, nearly in the oncoming lane, and then nearly in the ditch.  Whoever was in the car with the two of them would alternately cower in their seat and then shriek with terror.  You couldn’t keep her in a duck blind either. Dad finally gave her away to somebody. I wasn’t very old, six or seven maybe. I don’t remember being sad or missing her.  I guess she didn’t have a very loveable personality.

               I wonder now if, with all her desire to hunt, if a really good trainer had worked her with an e-collar, and crate trained her, if she wouldn’t have been a good dog.

               My dad loved bird hunting, and he was having trouble finding enough to satisfy him in southeast Wyoming, so he joined a game preserve in northern Colorado, near Wellington. In this case, a game preserve is defined as a place that had pen-raised birds which could be purchased and then planted for the dog to find. It wasn’t the best bird hunting around, but it was something. I don’t know exactly how it came to be, but it was from the owner/operator of this bird farm that our next dog appeared: Brandy, the German Shorthair. Somehow the owner had steered my dad to another bargain dog. Brandy was a year old when we got him, and a completely wild animal – he had had no training of any kind. I remember picking him up at the preserve headquarters and thinking “Oh no, here we go again, another bargain dog.”

By this time, when I was seven or eight, I had been reading everything I could get my hands on about every facet of hunting. In doggy reading I was strong on Bill Tarrant, the dog columnist for Field and Stream, and James Lamb Free, who wrote Training the Hunting Retriever. Both of them scoffed at the notion of a bargain dog. The initial price for a dog, they argued, pales in comparison to the cost of food, veterinarian, and other expenses. Why be cheap about the price for a good pup, one with the breeding to become a good dog, when you’ll be feeding and caring for the dog his or her whole life?

Brandy pretty much proved the experts…well, not wrong exactly, but Brandy was a pretty good dog, considering. He pointed staunchly. He didn’t cover a LOT of ground, but he found the birds. He would go to a downed bird and find it, preventing a cripple from escaping. At the point Brandy found the dead bird, dad would break into a run, because Brandy could not be trusted around a dead bird for very long, as he would eat them. All of them. Bones, feathers, everything. Several times dad lied to a hunting partner and claimed that the partner’s bird had escaped when it had, in fact, been eaten. Preparing some of our birds for the table involved Mom doing a bit of trimming and cleaning, paring away at the tooth marks so that company wouldn’t realize their dinner had been pretty well mangled by Brandy. Some of those birds were pieced together like Frankenstein’s monster.

We had a lot of fun with Brandy, though. The shooting preserve folded, and Dad went looking for a new place to hunt. He found a place call “Highland Acres Shooting Preserve.” Dad joined it, and we went on a pen raised quail hunt with Brandy. The owner, Charlie, put out a dozen or so pen raised quail in a field, and then we got the dogs out for the hunt. Charlie wanted to hunt with us and put his dog down: Christie, a kennel accident. She was half-Lab and half German Shorthair. Charlie had known his lab female was in heat and had wanted to breed her to a good Lab stud, but his male Shorthair had jumped the fence, and a litter of cross breeds was born. Charlie gave the pups away for free, but he had to keep one that he was unable to get rid of. She turned out to be one of the best dogs he ever had. She would point, retrieve, water retrieve, ducks, geese, quail…anything.

We put Brandy and Christie down together, and they fought immediately, snarling and snapping, like dogs will with a stranger. This continued until Brandy hit a found a bird and pointed. Christie back stood him perfectly. The bird flushed and was dropped and Christy retrieved. For the rest of the day they were a perfect pair. Christy did the retrieving so Brandy’s…um…gustatory habits never surfaced. For one afternoon, on pen-raised quail, Brandy was the bird dog Dad had dreamed he would become.

Highland Acres was primarily a goose hunting club. There were pen raised birds for a few years, but Charlie eventually gave that up and focused on the waterfowl, especially geese. We hunted without a dog for a couple of years, but Dad eventually ran into a guy at the club who bred hunting Labs, and bought a pup. Heidi was our first AKC registered Lab, and I think Dad shelled out a hundred bucks for her in about 1976. I was fourteen, and I pretty much took over her training. I would take her over to the vacant lot and throw a bumper for her, and she would bring it back…the first couple of times. After about three or four repetitions, she would decide she had had enough, and take off for home with the bumper in her mouth. I would chase after her, screaming threats, but I would be unable to catch her. She would wait for me at the kennel gate wagging her tail. I was a little frustrated.

I had read in the books that you should carefully introduce a gun dog to gunfire, water, and live birds before hunting with the dog, but Dad didn’t fool with such things. He just took her hunting. We took her out to the duck blind for opening day, and when the first shot was fired, Heidi panicked and headed for the truck. We brought her back, and Dad pointed out the duck floating in the water. Heidi would wade toward the duck, but didn’t want to swim. Dad finally went and got a rowboat, forced Heidi into it, rowed out to where duck lay, and pushed Heidi out of the boat. She floundered, but she swam to the duck and grabbed it. Dad rowed for shore and Heidi followed. When her feet hit dry land, she spit the duck out. First retrieve. Not exactly textbook.

Eventually Heidi got to the point where gunfire didn’t bother her. She would retrieve, but she wasn’t very enthusiastic. She would swim out and get the duck, but she would drop it as soon as her feet hit the ground. What she really liked was snuggling close in the blind on cold days, and being petted by my brother and I. We hunted a lot with a guy who fed her Nutter Butter cookies, and she liked that part of hunting too. As she got a little older, she would only retrieve from the water. Apparently she felt that anything that fell on land could be picked up by my brother or me without having to bother her about it.

Still, by the standards of the dogs I saw at our club, Heidi was a pretty good dog. Charlie’s were better, but that was by dint of getting to hunt every day and getting to work on a lot more birds. I had read in books about teaching a dog to “blind retrieve”, that is to find a bird that the dog didn’t see fall. The books said that the dog should learn to “take a line” or follow the hand gesture of the handler and keep going in the right direction until the dog found the bird by scent. None of Charlie’s dogs would do that. If the dog didn’t see the bird right off, then you threw a rock, or an empty shell, or something in the direction you wanted the dog to go. A lot of the dogs in the club wouldn’t deliver to hand anymore than Heidi would. As soon as the dog got the bird out of the water, the dog dropped the duck and shook itself. Or the dog would run in circles around the owner while the owner begged, screamed, and pleaded for the dog to bring him the bird. Heidi was a typical “meat dog”; she would find it and bring it somewhere near your general vicinity.

Heidi was a great companion, and I loved her a lot, but she left me with a desire to learn how to really train a dog, and end up with the kind of dog that the book writers talked about. I didn’t get many chances to hunt after I graduated high school and left home, and there was no time at all for dogs. I did a hitch in the Navy, and then got involved with acting and theatre. Neither allowed room for a dog.

About twelve years ago I managed to find a steady job, and my wife and I bought a house. After the shock wore off, I started hunting again. And soon I started longing for a bird dog.

And what kind of a dog did I decide on? A bargain dog, of course! I figured I could beat the system, and make a world-beater out of a pound reject. I remembered Christie, Charlie’s Lab-Shorthair accident, and decided to try to re-create her. I started scanning dog pound listings, looking for a cross between a Lab and some kind of pointing dog. Eventually I found the website for the Denver Dumb Friends League, which had online listings for hundreds of dogs looking for a home. I kept watching, and soon…bingo! Just the dog I was looking for. A six-week-old Lab/Shorthair puppy.

I called the Dumb Friends League, and the pup was still unclaimed when they closed at 5pm on Wednesday. I took Thursday of work and drove hard for Denver, stopping only for gas. I arrived in Denver to find the pup gone, claimed by someone who was in line after the doors closed. But…they did have a similar dog, the clerk said. An English Pointer-Lab cross. Six months old, by the name of Sasha.

Of course I took her home. Six months was a little older than I had wanted, but I figured that was young enough I could still make a bird dog out of her. Of course I was wrong.  She is so terrified of loud noises, probably due to bad experiences in the past, that she can’t stand to be around gunfire. She trembles and pants and tries to crawl into my lap during thunderstorms. She has to be given a mild sedative on the Fourth of July. In addition, she has no interest in birds whatsoever.

But she is a great dog. She was a tremendous hiking companion when she was younger, absolutely tireless on the trail. She was happy to go fifteen, even twenty miles a day with horses or with four-wheelers. She learned to stay behind me when I waded in creeks while fly-fishing. She loves cats, having been raised by one.

Her biggest issue is separation anxiety. She hates to be parted from me. I picked her up from the pound in May. As I am a teacher, I was able to spend the summer with her. We were together all day every day. When fall rolled around, my wife and I built her a kennel she could stay in while we were at work. I laid down chicken wire and poured gravel over top. I set a chain link pre-fab kennel on top of the gravel, and wired the edge of the chicken wire to the chain link, put in a doghouse, and figured I was done.

She climbed out over the top.

I covered the kennel with a combination of hardware cloth and plastic safety fence. She pulled the chain link up at the bottom, pushed the chicken wire out, and crawled out.

I took six inch wide pieces of wafer board, sandwiched them around the bottom of the chain link, and screwed them together, so she couldn’t get at the bottom of the chain link. She climbed on top of the doghouse, pulled the chain link down, and crawled through a hole so small it scraped up her elbows and sides so that they bled. It must have been like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube.

At that point I quit. I decided she would have to stay in the house when I was at work. That night I came home and she had chewed a vinyl ottoman and a potted rubber planet into pieces not bigger than a dime. I found the pieces, thoroughly mixed with potting soil, in a large pile in the middle of the living room.

That was eleven years ago. Things have gotten better since then for the most part. I can now leave her in the house, trusting that she won’t shred the interior. I still must be sure that no windows are left open when I leave. I slipped up once a couple of years ago. I left a second story window open when I was packing for a camping trip and ran to the grocery. She thought I was going camping without her and pushed through the screen and leapt fifteen feet to the ground. She didn’t break anything, but she was very sore for a week or so.

The other reason Sasha never became a bird dog is I didn’t know where to find birds. As the years wore on, I started hunting with a friend who helped me find a lot more birds. Also, when my Dad died Charlie came to the funeral, and I started thinking about how Charlie is almost eighty, and if I wanted to hunt with him again, I’d better hurry up. Evidently my brother was thinking the same thing, because we both re-joined Charlie’s hunting club that year.

All of a sudden I found myself hunting pheasant, chukar, ducks and geese. Without a dog. This had to change.

Thank goodness my wife supported me getting a bird dog. I vowed this time I would do it right. No bargain dog. But I also vowed I would not spend one unnecessary penny. I wanted a good dog, and I wanted him from the first puppy. Some are able to try a dog and if he doesn’t work out, give him away and try again. I would not be able to do that, and even if I could, I wouldn’t let my kids get attached to a dog and then get rid of him. I had to get it right the first time, and I had to do it on a limited budget.

I spent a lot of time researching kennels, and I finally picked Soap Creek Kennels in Grand Junction, Colorado. I visited them, and got to know their dogs a little, and decided to get a pup from their two Chocolate Labs: Amos and Emma. After months of waiting, the pups were whelped and ready to take home. My daughter and I went down to get him. She commented he looked exactly like a football. We named him Frank.

I started basic obedience training with him immediately, and it went pretty well. Then he went through teething, and when he was finished, I started training him to retrieve. The results were appalling. Frank would not bring the training dummy back. He would run around with it for a while and then lie down and start chewing on it. This went on for most of the spring with no change. I was starting to panic. I couldn’t stand it if Frank turned out to be a good companion but not a hunting dog. I wanted him to be good, but I didn’t know how to get him there.

I finally decided to seek professional help (for Frank, not for me). A colleague at worked mentioned he had gone with a friend to watch the friend’s dog work with a professional trainer. He had been very impressed by the work the trainer had done. The trainer’s name was Bo Allen. The colleague sent me a link to Bo’s website. I looked at the prices for dog training and I blanched. There was no way I could afford this. The basic program was three months at $750 a month.

I sent Bo an email anyway. He was very helpful, and said he would work with me to keep the cost down but still do a good job with Frank. He suggested we try one month of training in August, right before the hunting season opened.

My wife – well, let’s just say I married well. My wife supports my mania for hunting and fishing, and she wanted to see Frank improve. She likes him too. It wasn’t easy, but we found a way to pay for a month.

I was determined to learn everything I could about dog training from Bo. I asked if my daughter and I could watch some of the training. He was very obliging, and said we could come visit any time.

Watching Bo work with dogs was revolutionary for me. I learned so much from him, but the main things I saw were confidence and patience. Bo doesn’t panic and get frustrated like I had. He has tools. He showed me that if the dog does it wrong, it’s not the end of the world. I was pushing for too much too fast, as if I was expecting my college freshmen to write Moby Dick. In a month he had Frank introduced to real birds, and excited about them, and he was used to the sound of gunfire and knew it meant birds. That’s enough for a six-month-old dog. Then he turned Frank over to me, and told me to take him hunting a lot, and let him chase birds and have fun. Which I did, and Frank had a great first season. He fetched ducks out of a lake, and he hunted pheasants in Nebraska. He didn’t bring the birds straight to me, but I let him run around with them al little and eventually he would get them to me. I finally got him some geese on the frozen lake the last day of the season, and he wouldn’t pick them up. I had to walk out and get them. I didn’t like that as the last retrieve of the season, but overall I thought he did pretty well.

I made financial arrangements to get Frank back to Bo the next spring. I planned on sending him up for six weeks, and finish him. When I took him up to Bo, he asked me what I wanted him to do with Frank this time. I told him my main concern was Frank not bringing birds straight back to me. He suggested that force training and getting Frank on an electronic training collar were probably the best solution.

I had been dubious about both of these for a long time, but I had faith in Bo, so I said go ahead. Again, I watched carefully during the whole process, and I quickly became a convert. Frank’s progress was so fast that after two weeks Bo suggested I take him home, as I could run him through the necessary drills to maintain what Bo had already done. It all went well, and Frank made steady progress through the summer. I ran him in our first field trial at the end of August, and he did great. He is not yet two years old, and I have more work I can do to steady and polish him, but he is already by far one of the better dogs I have hunted with, and I think he will impress the folks I hunt with.

The other day I was talking with a young friend of mine who is also hunting dog crazy. She wants a good dog very badly, and she asked me about how I found Frank. I told her about the kennel where I got him, and about Bo, and it became apparent that a twenty-year-old college student can’t afford to get a dog the way I got Frank. She has her eye on a dog that she saw when she was out hunting, a dog that lives on a farm and is ignored by its farmer owner. I started to tell her that the initial cost of a pup is far less that what she will spend on food and vet bills, but then I realized that she and that dog need each other. It’s better I have Frank now than when I was younger. Where would I be without all the bargain dogs who trained me? I wouldn’t be worthy of Frank if I hadn’t learned from the dogs in my past.