Calculated in dog years, Rosie just caught me in age. We’re both 69.
But she has passed me in arthritis.
Some of that just happens. But much of it is her own fault. She doesn’t take care of herself. She never has. And if you’ve ever tried to talk sense about pacing to a hunting-bred springer spaniel, you understand the meaning of “futile.”
And now, at not-quite-10-years-old, Rosie has some joints that are behaving like they’re 14.
She is paying a physical price for her reckless-abandon lifestyle, which she displays not just while hunting pheasants but also when she’s on the trail of bunnies or squirrels or even grasshoppers (yes, grasshoppers), or simply charging around the backyard chasing passing bird shadows.
That’s right, bird shadows. Given nothing better to do in a nice backyard that can be great for dog snoozing, she’ll chase birds’ shadows, for hours, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. When it’s hot in the summer I sometimes have to lock her up in the kennel, just to protect her from heatstroke.
To protect her, you might say, from herself.
But even in the kennel, she indulges her shadowy obsessions. She’ll back up against the chain link, on guard for the shadow of a passing bird or maybe of a squirrel in the maple tree above — her tail wagging, her eyes alert, her muscles tensed cat-like and ready to pounce.
My first springer spaniel, Pogo, was a neurotic-but-cerebral dog who somehow, despite her hair-on-fire genetics, understood the need for occasional restraint. Particularly as she aged, she grew more conservation-minded with her energy, eventually slowing down to a pace about equal to your average Labrador retriever.
And throughout her life, Pogo had little interest in anything but pheasants; she regarded dogs who did with some disdain.
Had Pogo witnessed Rosie’s injudicious shadow pouncing and deranged pursuit of all creatures great and small, I suspect she might have snorted in disgust.
Rosie wouldn’t have noticed. Because while pheasants are clearly her favorite, she’s always focused on hunting. Hunting something. Anything. Wherever she is. Whatever it is. Always.
Wait, let me qualify that. Now her physical realities are putting some limit on “always.” As I write this, for example, she’s fed and watered and deep in slumber on the dining room floor, perhaps dreaming about our pheasant hunt yesterday at Lacreek.
It’s a 4 1/2-hour roundtrip to the areas on Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge that are open to upland bird hunting. It’s an easier ride for me, now that I have a bigger, better pickup with more room and a better ride.
It’s pretty much the same ride it has always been for Rosie. Even in the new-used pickup, she still rides in her insulated portable kennel in the pickup bed, although since arthritis set in with a vengeance, I give her a pad to lie on.
We make 10 or 12 trips to Lacreek from Rapid City each hunting season. And yesterday, the 4 1/2 hours on the road and two hours on foot produced two rooster flushes, one in range, and a beautiful hen flush.
Rosie pushed the second rooster up out of thick cattails along the edge of watery marsh muck. I dropped it 20 yards ahead of her, where she dug around for a couple of minutes before struggling out of the thick stuff with the bird in her mouth.
There. There it was. The reason for all this. A great piece of landscape. A great bird. Great dog work. One shot. One rooster. Supper this evening, savored and celebrated as the gift it is.
You can shoot pheasants without a dog. On a preserve, you can shoot as many as you want to pay for. On good private ground outside of preserves, you might shoot a three-bird limit regularly.
Throughout most of pheasant country, you can jump out of your vehicle on a country road and blast a rooster rising from the ditch. You can even surprise one now and then on foot without a dog on public-hunting land.
And in my life over 59 years of carrying a shotgun in the field, I’ve done a little or a lot of all those types of pheasant hunting. But none of them compares to following a dog you know and love — in the way human beings can love dogs — through thick cover in tangled places on the trail of an elusive creature bred and born to escape.
There’s a unique way of becoming in that collective pursuit, a mix of conscious design and instinct and olfactory brilliance that shapes itself into a shared focus, a singleness of purpose, and a deeper connection to wild places and wild things.
She leads. I follow. We explore and learn together. And we get our bird, or not. But we always succeed. Because we hunt. Together, we hunt.
Yesterday, we succeeded, and we also got our bird. A single bird. A single shot, stuffed inside a couple of hours of hard hunting on foot, wrapped up in a 270-mile round-trip drive.
All that work for one bird? Oh my, yes.
That marsh-muck rooster was gorgeous. But the no-shot hen was lovely in her own way. Rosie trailed it with a quickening pace along a winding, stopping, starting route of attempted escape for more than 200 yards. Then she stopped, collected herself, peered into the cover a couple of feet beyond her nose, and pounced — the reason a springer is called a “springer” — to force the hidden hen up out of switchgrass five or six yards away.
“No shot, Rosie, no shot,” I called, never raising my gun as Rosie watched, with that quizzical, accepting expression she saves for hens, the bird fly off. “Good girl, Rosie, good girl!”
And she is a good girl. A good old girl, age 69 now in dog years, the same as I in human time. And she’s even older in arthritis years. Still spry and un-hobbled in the field, she’s a consistent limper now between hunts, walking with one degree of lameness or another, depending on the day and, I think, her mood.
Every day, I give her glucosamine-chondroitin, fish oil, and green tea extract, and I add Rimadyl anti-inflammatories on the day of and after a hunt. They help. So does a lot of rest. Two or three hunts a week is about all she can handle these days, and just two or three hours each.
She can’t jump into the pickup bed without help anymore, especially the higher bed in the new-used F-150. So, this year, I started lifting her up and helping her down. But I hurt my back on one of those lifts a couple of weeks ago when she shifted weight at the wrong time.
Fifty-eight pounds moving one way and my aging muscle group and joints moving the other didn’t work. I’ve got a little arthritis myself, after all, and other realities of age.
So I’ll need to buy her a ramp. To buy us a ramp, I guess. And meanwhile, I back the pickup up to mounds or slopes, to even the angles and give Rosie a jump in and out of the bed that she can handle. That’s what I did yesterday in the grass parking area at Pelican Islands at Lacreek, the starting point for our ringneck pursuit.
When you hunt for pheasants at Lacreek, you find other creatures: raptors and swans and gadwalls and mallards, bitterns and cranes, coyotes and badgers and — yes, as the name suggests — even a few white pelicans, still vibrant in southwest South Dakota pretty late in the fall.
And you find even more than all that, something quite special. It’s difficult to explain and probably impossible to fully understand unless you’ve followed a snuffling dog into wild places toward a great becoming beyond yourself.
And when you and the dog are fully engaged in that, you’re both arthritis free.
For a while, at least.
