Mulak Reader - Winter

If you spend enough time around dogs, sooner or later you write one from this point of view. This one was a favorite of Sports Afield, and appeared in Brown Feathers.

Winter

                 "Bless the beasts and the children,

                  For in this world they have no voice:

                  They have no choice.

                  Bless the beasts and the children,

                  For the world can never be

                  The world they see."

                                       B. DeVorzen & P. Botkin Jr.

          Her back legs hurt.

          She sat on the floor of the truck in the early darkness, her head resting on the seat between the two men. Her master's hand idly scratched her ears and he drove and talked with the other man. She felt the stiffness in her muscles, but with each breath her whole being thrilled to the smells in her nostrils; both men wore jackets redolent with the odors of countless birds that had found their way into the game pockets, and her master's hands smelled of gun oil and the waterproofing he had used on his boots. She even liked the bitter smell of the coffee the men drank. She hardly noticed the ache. They were going hunting.

          "...and when I mentioned Buddy's Brit to him, all he wanted to know was how big the dog was—Never mind if he's any damn good, just if he was big. The guy is out to breed giant Brittanies. What a chowderhead." Her master was speaking. He did most of the talking, usually. After 11 years with him, she had concluded that it was some form of communication between people, but she could never fathom the endless stream of words. She lay still, feeling his hand on her head and listening to his meaningless talk. Her eyes were half closed. She didn't know where they were heading, nor did she care. It was enough to know that they were going hunting. She was content.

          When she felt the gravel road beneath the truck, she knew they were almost there. Not knowing why, she sat up. She waited for her master to say "Take it easy, Suzie." The truck lurched around a corner. She whined impatiently.

          "Take it easy, Suzie."

          It was true, then. They were almost there.

          She felt the truck slow, then stop, and then there was the always eerie silence when the engine was shut off. Both men opened their doors, but her master looked at her and said, "Stay." She listened to the sounds of the men outside, shivering as she forced herself to remain where she had been told. When she heard the tinkle of her own bell from outside she could contain her excitement no longer and found herself at her master's feet. The other man laughed, and her master said, "I thought I told you to stay in the truck." But there was no sternness in his voice, so she sat smiling her open-mouthed dog's smile up at him. He slipped the bell onto her collar. "Now stay right here."

          The men leaned against the truck, and the stream of talk continued. The sky grew brighter. She nosed along the edge of the field, smelling the mice and rabbits that had passed during the night. There was some days-old scent left by a male dog she didn't know. She smelled it closely.

          The metallic sound of her master's gun closing brought her automatically to his side. The trembling started again.

          "Is it time, Dad?"

          "Close enough..." The other man answered.

          Her master pointed forward and softly whistled his 'go ahead' signal. She charged into the short grass. Running, she crossed the breadth of the small field, doubled back, and saw him wave her ahead. She was propelled in these first minutes of the hunt by the pent-up excitement within her, and she knew only the pure joy of release. The music that was the sound of her bell filled her ears, and for the moment she felt neither the heavy frost underfoot nor the soreness in her legs. She kept running.

          She made her turn at the field margin and was accelerating when she struck it.  Her body spun around as she fought to stop against her forward momentum. The scent hung just above the frost: Mixed in with the poultry smell of feathers and the odor of dust and feces was the dark liquid scent of fear, and she sorted through the mixed multitude of signals in her nostrils to read that and that alone. She moved two steps closer, then a third before she sensed that the bird was in balance—Trapped just enough so that it wouldn't run, yet not frightened enough to fly.

          Behind her now she distantly heard the men's voices.

          "Point, Bill!"

          "Okay... You go ahead, Dad." Then, closer, her master's quiet tones. "Easy, girl... Steady now..."

          As always, she was surprised when the bird took wing. It came out of the grass much farther away than she had thought it to be. There was a clatter of wings and a single shot, then the bird fell not far from where it had taken flight. Now she listened to the babble of talk around her, waiting for her command:

          "Good shot!"

          "Naw... I should have let him get out farther."

          "It looked pretty good from here."

          "Hey, the old girl really did a good job on him. She jacked up like a champion."

          "Yeah, that was nice. Good girl... Fetch dead, Suzabelle."

          There it was. She went to the bird and carried it by its rump. The pheasant was dead, its odor fading and hardly discernible any longer over the strong, salty smell of blood. Her master was kneeling, and she was able to look into his eyes rather than up at the bottom of his chin.

          "Good girl... Thank you." He rubbed her head as he took the bird from her.  "Suzanna, you are one mighty fine bird dog." Suzanna. One in a long list of names she answered to, each with its own connotation; Suzabelle and Suzanna when she was being praised, Nit-Bit, Babe, and Suziski when they were having fun, and Bird-Brain when she had done something wrong. She couldn't understand names, and didn't try.  The man with her master was "Dad", yet at home the children called her master by the same name.

          He whistled her ahead again. Beyond the sumac at the field's edge she could smell water. The brook ran at the bottom of a little gully. She paused to wet her mouth, then leaped lightly to the other side. She could smell the fox before she climbed the far bank. He had passed an hour before, but his scent was strong. She loved the smell. For 50 feet she followed his tracks along the brook. She remembered a warm fall afternoon from years before when her master had stopped the truck and put her and her kennelmate into a cornfield. Instead of "bird", he had said "fox" over and over, using all the same words he used when they were looking for a cripple. When she saw the fox she realized the scent she had so often found in the past didn't belong to another dog, but to this small animal that outran her so effortlessly. Now she heard her master's whistle from across the brook, and without thinking her legs turned and re-crossed the gully, leaving the fox tracks and her memories on the other side.

          Her pace gradually slowed to her normal trot. She was crossing the field, feeling the cold of the melting frost on her pads, when she heard the rumble of wings behind her. She looked back to see a pheasant in the air immediately in front of her master. "Hen... Hen, Dad." No shot was fired. For a reason she didn't understand, some pheasants were not taken. She watched the bird fly away.

          "Suzie!" There was anger in his voice. In the stream of words that followed, the anger was all she heard. "What's the matter with you? The bird was right here."  He pointed into the grass at his feet. She went to see where the bird had been because she knew he wanted her to, but she could never figure what was to be gained by it. There was no scent in the air, and it wasn't until she actually stuck her nose beneath the matted weeds where the bird had roosted for the night that she found the pocket of scent.

          "You walked right by her, Bird-Brain."

          She looked at him. There were no two ways about it—that's where the bird had been. Is that what he wanted? He waved his arm in an underhand motion and said "Okay now... Find 'em up." That one she knew. She turned and cast back into the field again.

          Men couldn't smell. She had long suspected it, and that realization had changed the way she hunted. At the end of the field she smelled where two men and a dog had passed the same way just 20 minutes earlier, crossing into the cut-over corn beyond. She looked back and her master waved her ahead into the same cornfield. Maybe he knew something she didn't.

          They passed a fruitless half hour in the stubble following in the footsteps of the previous hunters. In her own way, she had known they would find nothing. At the end of the rows her master whistled her in. The other man sat on the fallen branch of a dead tree, and her master sat down beside him as she approached.

          "Just a few minutes, Bill." The other man was saying. "I'm not the man I used to be. Hell, I'm not so sure I ever was."

          Both men laughed. That was another thing that they did that she didn't understand. There had been a time when she had wondered about such things, but now she was just glad for a chance to lay at her master's feet and rest for a moment. They had been afield for two hours.

          "Yeah, Suzie and I are getting old together..."

          She looked up at the mention of her name, but closed her eyes again when she realized the other man had not been talking to her.

          "A dog's life is short no matter how you measure it." Her master said. "But at least she's not going deaf, the way Duffy did near the end..."

          Duffy. The word caused an image of her old kennel-mate to appear in her mind.  She wondered where he had gone. For six years their lives had been intertwined, and she still emulated his technique for handling cripples, although she couldn't know she had originally learned the tactic from him. The last time she had seen him was nearly four years before, when her master had carried him a half-mile back to the truck.

          "Starting a new puppy in the spring isn't something I've really looking forward to, Dad."

          "You don't figure you can get another year out of her?"

          Her master shook his head. "She's on borrowed time now. Her legs are really shot. She'll be hobbling around by noontime."

          "It's too bad. She's been a good one for you, Bill."

          "That she has..." He reached down and scratched her behind the ears as she lay at his feet. "It's too bad that puppies only come from breeding dogs—I'd sure like to clone this old girl."

          Old Girl. She had lately come to realize that that had become another of her many names. She got to her feet when the men did. Her legs were stiff, and she walked gingerly until the tightness in her muscles eased. The men continued to talk as she trotted out into the next field. Her master's whistle called her back—They were turning to the left along the edge of the harvested corn. Her legs started to run in answer to his command, but she abruptly slowed to a trot when the pain stung her.

          In the next field, she worked the edge of the cut corn in front of the men, casting from the stubble into the brush at the field's edge. At the far turn of one cast she caught just a whiff of bird scent. She worked farther into the field, searching the air. Behind her, her master whistled to her: They were crossing through the brushline, heading down toward the river. Her legs responded, but there were birds out in the field somewhere behind her. She stopped in indecision. He whistled for her again. This time her legs only took a single step before she stopped them. She waited for him.

          After a moment he came back out of the thick brush, looking for her. "Suzie... This way." He pointed behind him.

          She stood still.

          "Dad..."  He turned and called back into the under-growth. "Out here... She's got birds."

          When she saw that both men were returning, she continued her search out into the stubble. The scent grew stronger, but it was scattered on the breeze across the open field. She worked the air, weaving back and forth, but she could isolate none of the several different scents being carried to her. Suddenly she recalled a situation from years before—She and Duffy were hunting stubble then, too. They had been unable to unravel the unclear combination of scents that became weaker when they tried to follow them. There had been many pheasants in the stubble that day, and those that had run out escaped in the confusion of scents. Remembering, she realized there must be several pheasants now running away from her toward the far brushline. She circled to the right, urging her sore legs to run.

          She turned back into the field when she reached the brush along the edge. In the distance she saw her master and the other man crossing toward her. The birds had to be between them and her. The wind came over her tail as she cast through the rows, but she was certain the pheasants were here.

          Fear. The scent hit her as abruptly as if she had run into a wire fence. She knew she was too close to the bird and dared not move.

          "Point!" Her master's voice carried faintly across the distance. She heard the men coming, but she couldn't shift even her eyes. In front of her something shifted in the weeds. She didn't move.

          The men drew closer, and the fear smell grew more intense. Then, the clatter of wings and the sound of voices: "Hen...! There's another...!  And a third one...!"  No shots were fired. "Hold up, Dad. She's got a whole flock corralled—There's got to be a rooster in here somewhere." She couldn't move. The scent in her nostrils was stronger than ever.

          The men moved closer to her, then stopped, and for a long moment there was utter silence. Then suddenly the pheasant was in the air, springing straight up in an extravaganza of color and flailing wings, screaming a call she sometimes heard in her sleep. Still crowing, the bird leveled off and started into the wind, then turned toward the brushline, picking up speed. She heard the gun's report. The pheasant faltered and fell into the blackberry bushes at the field's edge.

          "Go fetch, Suzie." There was excitement in her master's voice. She started off, but found her legs would not run. She and thorns had never been on the best of terms, and she picked her way through, crawling on her belly as she followed the strong smell of the crippled bird. The pheasant retreated from her to the far edge of the thicket, but now could go no farther and crouched facing her, hackles raised. She pawed at it, then snapped quickly when the cock struck at her foot, flipping the bird over to grab it by the back. It was Duffy's old trick. The pheasant's spurs slashed harmlessly away from her. When she squeezed the bird to stop its struggling one of its wings covered her eyes. The sound of her master's whistle guided her back to him, but the briars were difficult enough even when she could see them, and it seemed she had traveled much farther than she had thought.

          She emerged from the blackberries. Close by she heard the other man shout, "Here she is, Bill."

          "Fetch him here, Suzie." Her master's voice came from far away. She started towards the sound with the bird held high.

          "Good girl..." He said as he took the pheasant from her. Then, as he sometimes did when he was especially pleased, he lifted her in his arms.

          The other man reached out and scratched her head. "That's the best piece of bird work I've ever seen." He said. "Ever."

          "Bird sense." Her master stated. "You've heard me say it a hundred times, Dad: Any dog can smell a bird, but bird sense makes bird dogs. And you, Suzabelle, are one mighty fine bird dog, aren't 'cha, Babe." He reached to pet her, but as he did her weight shifted in his arms and he squeezed her slightly. She yelped in pain. He eased her back to the ground.

          The other man shook his head.

          They retraced their steps and crossed through the brushline into the next field. It was still early in the day, and although they were hunting familiar ground she couldn't recall this place being so taxing. She was tired. The pain in her legs seemed worse. There was a giant oak tree in the center of the field they were hunting.  Several seasons before she had found a pheasant beneath that tree, but today it seemed just too far away.

          She slowed to a walk as the morning waned toward noon. Her master urged her ahead, but fatigue dragged on her. They rested again, this time by the edge of the river. She waded in the murkey water and for a little while felt refreshed. It didn't last. They hunted into some familiar overgrown asparagus beds where they had often found birds in the past. She recalled a time when she would race through this thick stuff all day, but today she couldn't imagine how. She was quite suddenly exhausted, and knew that if she could just sit down for a while she'd be full of energy once again and would work this asparagus like she knew she should.

          When her bell stopped he waved to the other man and they approached with guns at port arms. She was sitting in a small opening in the cover, looking back at him with what he imagined to be apology in her eyes. He handed his gun to the other man and lifted her again in his arms. He didn't speak, but turned and started back towards where the truck was parked.

          Cradled against her master's chest, she breathed in the wonderful smells of his canvas hunting coat; bird stench, gunpowder, and the strong scent of him. She could feel his breathing as he carried her. She thought again of Duffy, and the last time she had seen him. Her legs hurt, but with her master, as always, she knew that soon things would be better. She closed her eyes.

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