Epilogue

Mulak Reader - Epilogue

Unfortunately, in outdoor writing there is a classification of remembrance known as “the dead dog story.” Everybody, it seems, wants to write about what a great dog Sparkey was before he came to his tragic end. It has become a cliché. Too bad, because bird dog men love their dogs in a way non-dog people cannot imagine. This is my contribution to the genre of dead dog stories. It was never published.

EPILOGUE

If I could right the wrongs I've done

Maybe I could stop your leaving,

But there's much I'm guilty of,

And it's too late to say I'm sorry:

Being sorry 's not enough

"Regrets"
Kenny Rankin

           Sam heard it as he was getting out of the car. There could be no mistake—It was clearly a gunshot. He stood in the cold for a moment, one hand on the open door, listening for a second shot or an echo, but hearing only silence instead.
          "That sounded like a .22 to me, Jill." He spoke to his dog. Others might have thought Sam was talking to himself, but his conversations when alone were always directed at whichever dog was with him.
"At least we know he's not after our birds—Just some guy shooting squirrels, maybe."
          He removed a leather dog collar from the pocket of his shooting coat. "Here, girl." The young setter came to him and stood with both paws on his stomach while Sam buckled the collar around her neck. The small bell that was attached to the collar tinkled softly.
          At his command, the dog sprinted ahead into the field. He walked behind her with his open shotgun in the crook of his arm, feeling the weak December sun on his shoulders. The swamp maples below the field raised only bare branches toward the sky, as did the popples that had sprung up in the overgrown pasture. The first official day of winter was just a week away, but the light breeze was autumn-mild, and the sky had the just-washed look of October. What a day to be alive! he thought to himself, but then an unwelcome memory from that morning crept into his consciousness. Sam shook his head, and muttered under his breath in a much different tone, "What a day."
          At the far side of the field he stepped across what remained of an old barbed wire fence. He could hear his setter's bell as she cast through the brush ahead of him. He stepped over the trunk of a fallen oak tree and passed a familiar laurel tangle, grown tall and spindly in the shadow of a huge hemlock, and glanced to his right. Between the laurel and the evergreen, a man stood with his back to him. The sight was so unexpected that Sam took an involuntary step backward. He could have been looking at himself; The other man seemed to be about his own size, and was wearing a jacket and hat much like his own, but was standing in a hole he was in the process of digging. The man was having a difficult time with the multitude of tree roots he had to chop through.
          In the moment it took for Sam to get over his surprise, he blurted out, "Hello! I didn't see you there."
          The man didn't turn around, but he stopped digging and raised his hand in acknowledgment. Next to the hole a liver-and-white Brittany lay on the ground. It took a moment, but then Sam noticed that the dog was newly dead from a gunshot to the head.
          "Hey! What's going on?" Sam heard a shrillness in his own voice that he hadn't intended.
          The other man still didn't look at him. Only after a long pause did he say, "She was a fine bird dog—My first one, really. I couldn't stand to have a vet put her down. I thought I'd bury her here. She made her first point by that laurel clump there." He spoke haltingly. It was evident that the man was weeping.
          Sam found himself backing away from the grave. "Okay... I'll be moving along..." he muttered. He felt like an uninvited guest, and quickly turned and headed uphill through the oak woods.
          He watched his setter and thought how her obvious joy in hunting seemed in juxtaposition to the chill he felt: He carried the image of the impromptu funeral with him as he walked on, and the disquieting image of the man, the grave, and the dead Brittany dominated his consciousness.
          Years before, when Sam still thought of himself as a kid, he had been stationed in a distant city when he learned of the death of the first dog he himself had trained. Duke had been his father's dog, not his, and a long distance call to his dad had brought him the news: Old Duke had gotten so crippled that he was in pain most of the time, and it just wasn't humane to let a dog suffer like that, so his father had had Duke put to sleep. When he walked away from the phone booth that evening, Sam found that his anger was directed not so much at his father but at the ignobility of the situation. That was before he had dogs of his own—a young time when promises meant something, and Sam had made a promise to himself that night that no dog of his was ever going to die in that manner. No. There were better ways: A final point, a retrieve, and then, at a time when the dog was most proud, a quick and painless end.
          Like that fellow back there had done.
          Ahead of him, the trees ended abruptly at a cut where a power line passed through the woods. There were brushy alders lining the clearing, and during the March woodcock migration this had always been a favorite place of his for training work with his dogs. Sam whistled to his young setter as he changed direction, following the edge of the opening.
          "Birds here, Jill," he said. "Maybe." The dog shortened her range. Sam smiled, watching her work. Dogs can be as good as their masters insist they be, he thought. But unfortunately, the reverse is true more often than not, and dogs are usually as bad as their owners are willing to tolerate. Why, old Patty had... But, no, he didn't want to think about Patty any more today.
          Then, unexpectedly, he heard a shout from the thick and leafless alders and a brown-and-white puppy burst into the opening in hot pursuit of a flitting woodcock. Where in the world the pup had found a woodcock this late in the year Sam couldn't imagine...
          Then, for the second time that afternoon he took an involuntary step backward, this time at the sudden appearance of the puppy's owner. A young man, about a dozen years younger than himself, burst out of the alders intent on catching up with the little Brittany. "That damn dog..." the fellow muttered as he paused to break a switch from a birch tree. The puppy's owner looked at Sam without acknowledgment before deliberately continuing on.
          'Hold on! You can't be too hard-handed with a Brittany puppy, especially one with as much spirit as that one.' Was what Sam wanted to say. He could hear the words more clearly than if he had actually said them. But nobody took advice. He knew that. The young man vanished into the alders, still in pursuit of the puppy.
          As with the man digging the grave ten minutes earlier, Sam thought he had seen this man before, too. For a long moment he stood listening to his own thoughts. It was unusual to see another bird hunter in the woods, especially in this covert, which, as far as gamebirds went, was marginal at best. Sam shrugged, mentally as well as physically.
          There was no sense to hunting out the wire break: It was obvious that the young fellow and his puppy had already been through here, and any grouse that might have been feeding here had already moved elsewhere. Ah, but there was another little corner of the covert where sometimes a bird or two might be found—It was just beyond that little hemlock swamp where Patty had gotten lost at the end of the last season. I shouldn't have been hunting her, deaf as she was... But there, he was thinking about Patty again. Sam turned and whistled to his setter, this time to direct her away from the power line alders and down an old logging road that lead to the hemlock swamp.
          The low December sun slanted through the verticals of the forest and created a pattern of long, sweeping afternoon shadows. It was a winter effect. Sam found himself humming the melody from an old Kenny Rankin song as he walked behind his setter. But, unexpectedly, as he approached the swampy corner he had intended to hunt, an old liver-and-white Brittany emerged from the evergreens. The dog moved slowly, its head drooping as it passed aimlessly in front of him. The resemblance was such that for just a moment Sam thought it was Patty, but then he remembered that it couldn't be.
          "Hey, Brit!", he called. "Here, girl!" But the dog never turned its head. He ran to the spot where the dog had crossed the tote road and called again, then finally fired his gun into the air. The old Brittany disappeared into the brush without ever pausing, and Sam was reminded again of the panic he felt in similar situations when he had hunted with old Duke after that dog had gone deaf, and then, last year, with Patty.
          His young setter had come in and now stood at his feet, confused by his antics. "For a minute I thought that old Brit was Patty, Jill." Sam knelt and scratched the setter's ears. "That poor old deaf dog must be lost, too."
          Absently, Sam continued to rub the dog's head as he stared out into the underbrush, his thoughts on the edge of whatever invisible line his mind had been walking all day. At length he said, "There's one other place we should have a look at today, Jill." Sam got to his feet, and the cramps in his knees told him he had remained kneeling for too long. He waved the setter ahead as he left the road, cutting back again through the woods.
          They came again to the edge of the same field they had crossed barely a half hour before. His setter may have though it strange that they were back here so soon. The recently fallen oak was there, the same oak that had stoically absorbed Sam's shot pattern a dozen years before when the first grouse that Patty had pointed escaped behind the shelter of its trunk. So was the spindly old laurel bush that grew in the shadow of the spreading hemlock. The frozen ground between them was undisturbed.
          Sam opened his gun and sat on the fallen tree. His dog came to him and, when he paid her no heed, wined impatiently until he patted her head. There was a joyless quality to his voice as he spoke. "I hope there are no mistakes, Jill. Only lessons." After a pause, he murmured, "I hope so."
          Sam had come back from the vet's office that morning, and his wife had looked at him for a long moment and suddenly wept in a way he could not bear. "Where does time go?" She had said between sobs. "It seems just yesterday Patty was a tiny brown-and-white puppy, and now she's gone. Where does life go?"
          Now Sam sat in the cold shadows with his back to the laurel tangle and wept, too, because in his heart he knew the answers to her questions.

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This site was last updated 09/20/06