Hunting Dog Article in Arkansas Life
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I did a non-flyfishing piece for my friend Katie Bridges’s magazine, and the photographers she hired were incredible.
IT IS 5:58 A.M., AND THE BIRDS begin to fly. First, a solitary drake, cutting across the deep cobalt of the predawn sky, its shadow black as it flits between the skeleton tree trunks reaching up, always up. Soon, his flock mates join him, moving from cover to forage. Their wingbeats are audible, squeaky-creaky like an aural dotted line traced across the sky. From the other end of the blind, a shotgun flares, sparks flying from the muzzle into the darkness, the smoke not yet visible. One of the shadows high in the air folds its silken wings and drops, elegantly but with finality, toward the water.
“Scoop,” comes a deep-voiced command, and a jet-black male Labrador, responding to the word that is both his name and his signal, surges into the water. He has already marked the downed bird and swims inerrantly toward it. He disappears into the reeds, then returns, striking back for the boat without pausing. More shotguns blare as the dog clambers aboard, dropping the duck at his master’s feet before he spins, readying himself for the next run. He does not even bother to shake off. He is a working dog, as well as a prized pet, running the table on a series of ducks brought down for him by his flint-eyed master and the other hunters who’ve joined them this morning. Five hundred years and more of breeding have brought the dog—and his owner—to this point. It is an old game, one they have never lost.
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