The grouse hunters are long gone; the deer hunters are done; the out-of-towners have left from the cold and for the holidays down state.
So we are free into the woods, with no worries of my pups bothering anyone, or anyone bothering us.
Yesterday was with the 20-gauge and shock collars on Daphne and Foxy, who quarter and range too far out of range in the big woods.
We go deep into the woods off the tracks and trails and along deer trails. Over the icy creek. My right boot leaks when I break through. It is windy so we go into the thick balsams after the partridge hiding from the wind. I move slowly, deliberately, like a stalker or still hunter, letting the dogs work in front of and around me. Foxy is fast and focused; Daphne is fast with her nose to the ground like a bloodhound; Peppy dancing along near me. Me, listening, looking for my next step.
Then there’s a flush! A pounding of wings: a partridge, from the ground alighting, flying into the next copse of fir.
“Good girl, Daphne!”
I approach the copse, then circle it, then it flushes again out of a fir and it rises over a small ridge.
“Good girl, Foxy!”
Out of the balsam fir we’re in a wide clearing cut by beaver and with a series of step-ponds. The ice is on and the pups deal with the ice like Bambi in that first freeze. We’ve lost that partridge – my holiday meal – so I smoke and turn around.
And there it is silhouetted up in a small spruce.
I whistle and the pups stop. I point the shotgun and they look up.
When it falls the three pups rush to it, and sniff it, and I say “Fetch!” earnestly. And Foxy picks it up first and runs away with it. I call her back more earnestly and she comes back and runs by me with it. I call her back, and she swings round, and I command: “Leave it!” And she leaves it. So I have my holiday bird. Which my pups helped me to get.
It’s early winter so then we go into the alders, the soft mahogany alders with succulent buds, the maze and morass of alder brush and bush and limbs and twigs growing every which way.
Here is an annual deer scrape.
Forty-five yards back behind and to the left Daphne flushes a bird ever so softly and shortly. A grouse in a tree or on the ground up into a tree. I turn and stalk down the ridge into the thick balsams, and eventually Peppy looks up, and gets onto a big fir on her forepaws, and looks up and wines. She has the wrong tree, and I find the geometric profile of the partridge in the next tree over. So there’s my second holiday meal.
Here is a deer rub from this year.
There’s another flapping of wings, which I take to mean a roosting partridge scared from its roost.
“Good girl, Daphne!”
It flew down, low, into the alder run ahead.
We go slowly ahead, and Peppy is under a big spruce looking up and whining. She barks. Her greatest talent is finding things in trees: usually chipmunks and red squirrels, but also partridge.
I circle the spruce twice, but there’s nothing up there. “[She] has been known to be wrong. From time to time.” – C3PO.
We continue on and find an artifact you don’t often find. The old (50 years or more) remnants of a barbed-wire fence. I cross it.
There’s another flurry of wings way up ahead across the meadow where the pups are working, and the roosting partridge is flushing out of range further and further. Anyway, I say louder, “Good girl, Peppy!” Because Lord knows she – and they – and even me – are doing the damn best we can here. Given the brains, and bodies, the training and education, we have been blessed and cursed with.
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