The Wonder Dogs

The dog doesn’t make it.) So why do we do it? Why do we intentionally introduce heartache into our life when we introduce a puppy into our home?

The easy answer is that the rewards—in companionship and hunting success with a canine partner—far outweigh the regret. Besides, if you are a dog person, not having a dog in your life is unthinkable, even though you have a pretty good idea of what will happen 12 to 14 years into the relationship.

I suppose I knew how Willow’s time with me and my family would end when she joined us as a pup. But those early days seemed blissfully endless. My kids were young, and they grew up with a puppy who was polite, obedient, intense in the field, and alternately frolicky and floppy in the house.Once, my young son asked why Willow was so well-behaved. “Because she has a black mouth,” I answered blithely, without thinking about the implications. “All good dogs have black mouths.”

Then, as he spent the next months inspecting the mouth of every strange dog he encountered, I had to back off my pronouncement lest he get bit by a bad dog with a black mouth.

Willow grew into our family, becoming a talented bird hunter and a gentle presence in our lives. She would happily hunt with anyone, and did—accompanying my kids and scores of my friends to their first roosters and honkers. She hunted with senators and neighbors, pointers and setters, and plenty of fellow retrievers. She started to slow down a couple of years ago, but she responded by hunting smarter. She knew where birds would hold, and she’d dismiss marginal cover in favor of spending her time in these prime spots. And more often than not, her efforts produced a bird, or three.

For the past year, I’ve been wondering how Willow’s end would come. I expected it would arrive at the end of a veterinarian’s needle, and I dreaded the decision that would be mine to make: When is it finally time? What if I wait too long? Our final hunt (see “The Slough,” below) decided the matter for me, and as hard as it was, it was a relief, too. She died doing what she was meant to do. How many of us have wished for the same mercy?

Months on, I still wake up expecting Willow to be there by my bed, staring at my closed eyes and waiting for me to rouse. But we have a new puppy in the house. She’s a yellow Lab—just like Willow—and she’s birdy, mischievous, promising, impulsive. Her name is Nellie. And her mouth is pink. —Andrew McKean, August 2017The Underdog

The runtiest of runts makes a heroic big-water retrieve / Tom Dokken, as told to Tony Peterson

There was only one female chocolate Lab in the small litter of six pups, and she was a runt. But not just any runt. She was the weakest runt I’ve ever seen. Not only was she about three-quarters the size of the other pups, she also had an underdeveloped back leg. But my wife, Tina, wanted her anyway. I was sure that even if the little runt survived, she wasn’t going to be a hunting dog. The decision, however, wasn’t mine to make. We named her Sage.

The other puppies bullied Sage, so we pulled her from the litter and bottle-fed her. With special care and attention, Sage survived, and soon it was time to start training.

Training any puppy is a gentle process. With Sage, it required all of the patience we could muster. It took her a year to get through the training that most of our dogs accomplish in months. But slowly her leg healed, and we coaxed her out of her shell.

Against all odds, Sage went from being the weakest puppy I’d handled in decades of dog training to an all-out bird-hunting machine. I have a lot of good memories of Sage, but one stands out as the greatest big-water retrieve I’ve ever witnessed.

Tina and I were hunting a 2,000-acre lake in South Dakota during the late season. It was chilly (probably in the mid-30s), and the wind was whipping at 35 mph from the north. The main part of the lake was rolling with 3-foot whitecaps, so we set up in a small bay.

Before long, Tina shot a drake wigeon and she sent Sage out for what we thought would be a routine retrieve. But when Sage was just about to reach the duck, the drake sprang to life. Sage was too close for us to swat the duck, so we just watched as the drake swam out and then dove. He popped up farther away, and then he dove again. And again. The crippled drake led Sage out of the bay and into the big rollers on the main lake. We could see Sage for a second through the whitecaps and then she’d disappear behind the crest of another wave.

At that point Sage was a few hundred yards out, with the wind blowing her and the duck even farther to the middle of the lake. She couldn’t hear our whistles over the wind, and our concern switched from losing the duck to possibly losing our dog. I took off running in my chest waders for our boat, which was a few hundred yards away. But when I reached the boat, I heard Tina yelling and saw her waving wildly at me from back in the blind. I looked way out into that gray, rolling water to see the white belly of a wigeon in Sage’s mouth as she paddled back toward us against the chop. Somehow I had underestimated Sage yet again.

A blood tracking dog recovering a deer.

Cold Case

A veteran blood-tracking hound goes to work / By Alex Robinson

By the time Sean Timmens got his Bavarian mountain hound, Kieler, to the hit site, it had been 41 hours since the bowhunter had put an arrow in the buck.

At six years old, the hound was a veteran tracker who had successfully recovered more than 100 deer, but everything was working against him in this case. The shooter, Wisconsin bowhunter Justin Peak, had arrowed a nice buck during the afternoon of November 8. Peak tried to blood-trail the deer that evening but called it off later that night. The next morning, he went back with buddies and they searched for seven hours, running extensive grids across the property. Then they called Timmens, who runs Kieler after mortally wounded deer for $100 a pop.

This was a worst-case scenario for a blood-tracking dog. Generally, 48 hours is the maximum amount of time in which a dog can pick up a scent trail, Timmens says. And the hunters had tromped all over the property, unknowingly spreading tiny blood spores and scent from the deer’s trail to the vegetation around it.

But if there was any dog in the area that could find the buck, it was Kieler. Timmens, a veteran bird dog trainer, got the hound from Poland as a puppy, specifically to be a blood-tracker. Right away he was amazed by Kieler’s combination of easy-going personality and impressive athletic ability.

“He’s the most laid-back people dog I’ve ever had,” Timmens says. “But, he’s also 52 pounds of pure muscle and surprisingly agile. Out in the yard, he outruns my shorthairs.”

Kieler wears a harness that attaches to a 30-foot lead that Timmens holds as they work through the woods. When Timmens gets to a hit site, he gives Kieler a single command: “Let’s go to work.”

When he’s hot on a track, Kieler keeps hard, steady pressure on the lead, his nose vacuums the ground, and he snorts the whole way like a pig.

So when Kieler pulled Timmens from the hit site down a steep ridge, through a mixed hardwoods, and then toward a big draw, keeping his nose to the ground the entire time, Timmens knew his dog was nailing the track. Instead of going up the draw, Kieler veered right and headed into a thicket of chest-high briars and honeysuckle. The hound disappeared into the tangle, and seconds later Timmens could hear him thrashing around and chewing the dead buck’s hind legs.

They had traveled 600 yards and found the buck in just 15 minutes.

“I called back to the hunter, who was about 20 yards behind us: ‘You want to see your buck?’ ” Timmens says. “And he was just in total awe.”

A yellow Lab leaps toward a flushing pheasant.