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Bird Dogs Are
Full of Surprises
By Capt. Tony Petrella It’s funny how dogs will surprise you. Like the time we were going to hunt pheasant in Montana and Ghost more or less politely informed me that I should pull off to the side of the road now so that she could, well…you know.
When I let her out of the truck and she started investigating the environment, I noticed this herd of sheep that had started “baaaaaaing”, and running toward us, kicking at each other like groupies at a rock concert.
Meanwhile, Ghost was nosing around in four inches of snow that wasn’t supposed to be on the ground yet. Sorta snuffling, and scraping it around so that she wouldn’t freeze her delicate, well, you know…and then the whole herd had somehow pressed itself up against the fence, screaming for autographs or something.
Ghost was regally oblivious to all of those smelly, bleating, homely-looking creatures until the one, the only, the proverbial black sheep in the herd shouldered its way through the madding crowd and planted itself next to the fence. Opposite Ghost. Staring intently.
Now, on many occasions before and since I’ve heard Ghost bark through a situation like a Drill Instructor dressing down a terrified Buck who was missing a button or had muddy shoes or gollyforbid a dirty weapon. So I was plumb dumbfounded when she never said so much as a word to that Big Black Sheep.
Nope. She just stood up straight and tall, real rigid-like, with her knees locked tight like a vise. Then she squinted her eyes like Clint Eastwood in a big-money Texas Hold-Em, and did a Don King thingy with the hair on the back of her neck. Her upper lip curled up and her lower jaw dropped down and I’ll be danged if old Lon Chaney wouldn’t have wept in joy at finding Dracula’s Dog right there on the edge of Montana Highway 200.
About that time all those sheep stopped stomping and clapping and whistling for lunch or autographs or maybe just a little recognition. What they did was to take a few real slow steps backward. Then a few more. And then they sorta fanned out off to the side like you see in those old western movies when there’s gonna be a gunfight in the middle of Main Street and the citizens don’t want to get any of that on themselves.
And justlikethat Blackie was all alone at the OK Corral, eyeball to eyeball with Dracula’s Dog, who by now had a stringy glob of drool hanging off her lower jaw and big, sharp, white teeth glinting like icicles in the November sun.
Now, I was a sportswriter for a lot of years and I watched Mercury Morris live up to his name. Bobby Hull was a blur going down the ice. And nobody was faster than King Richard when he busted loose and left the rest of those ole moonshiners wondering whereinhell that boy done got to soooo fast. But let me tell you they didn’t hold a candle to that Baa Baa Blacksheep when it plumb vaporized toward Someplace Else Montana.
Ghost licked her lips, winked at me conspiratorially, squatted for a nanosecond, then told me it was time to hie on toward camp so we could rustle up some grub and catch a good night’s sleep before showing these Montana pheasants a thing or two.
I found Skip’s ranch a bit north of Great Falls without too much trouble, then headed back toward town for a license and some of the basic food groups. Not long after I’d thawed some spaghetti sauce, Gospo pulled in trailing his future brother-in-law, Mark, and a big blockheaded Gordon setter named Rye, who promptly fell in love with Ghost.
“Oh, Dad—she’s so pretty,” Rye wailed. Alas, his lust went unrequited and they promptly had a non-lover’s spat over the food dish. Afterward, Ghost strode over to my sleeping bag, did the obligatory three-times-in-a-circle, and fell asleep. Rye huffed a couple of times and flopped down under the table at Gospo’s feet.
It was overcast the next morning when Ghost almost died.
We’d only been hunting a half hour, but Ghost has two speeds: Off and Firewall. As a result, she heats up pretty quickly, and likes to jump into any available water source. Which, in this case, was Muddy Creek. Except it was partially frozen over in the middle, with shelf ice along each bank.
So when she blithely trotted through the snow and belly-flopped into the water, it came as a puzzling surprise when she couldn’t pull herself out on the other side.
One glance at the big patches of ice just downstream turned my blood as cold as that water. I yelled “Right Here!” and Ghost paddled back to the near bank with a curious expression on her face. Of course, she couldn’t pull herself up onto the ice on this side, either, so I immediately set down my Beretta, stretched out flat on the ice, grabbed her collar, and gave a serious yank.
She flopped and shook like a beached snook. Then I’ll be danged if she didn’t flip me that big grin with her tongue lolling out the side of her mouth and yell “that was GREAT Dad, now let’s go find those birds!” Which is precisely what she did within moments.
It was one of those football-shaped thickets about the size of your average living room where she once and forever made believers out of John Gospodarek and Mark Johnson. Rye was off looking for birds somewhere around Billings, but Ghost stuck her nose into that patch of shrubs and spindly little trees and announced that we’d best get our trigger fingers ready for some fast pullin’.
Mark went over to the far side, and I went into the middle. “I’ll handle the flush, and you guys take the birds,” I said, and asked Ghost if she’d mind showing me exactly where they were. She looked up rather crossly, I thought, and just poked her chin higher into the air. “Okay,” I told her, “be like that.” At which point she twitched her nose a couple of times and started taking verrrrrry sloooooow steps deeper into the thicket.
We got almost to the end and there was a flurry of wings. But there weren’t any cackles and there weren’t any gunshots, either. Hens. Three of them that took off like kids who just got caught stealing hubcaps. Ghost looked at each of us in turn and shook her head disgustedly. Then she turned around and locked up on point again. So, I told the boys to get ready and then started kicking the clumps of snowy switchgrass. I kicked. And I kicked. And I kicked some more.
Finally, I told Ghost that she was pointing old scent from those three hens. She sorta spat out some snow and something I couldn’t quite hear. When I told her “Let’s go find some birds” she glared back and rather rudely told me she already HAD found a bird and that it was right here in front of her.
Being a boy of little faith at that moment, I impatiently reached down and grabbed her collar. “No, No, No,” she screamed as I pulled her away, even as she was digging her four paws into the snow. She finally gave up and trotted off, but she wasn’t happy about it.
An hour later we were on our way back to the bunkhouse. As we neared Three Hen Thicket, Ghost glanced at me and nodded her head in that direction. “Will you please come on over here and shoot that bird?” she said, and promptly locked up solid in exactly the spot where I’d dragged her away.
I looked at John. He looked at Mark. Mark looked at Ghost quivering like a feathery statue, took three steps forward and stepped on a rooster that thundered out of there like the Cannonball Express. All three of us stood there staring at Ghost, who reached up with her right hind foot and scratched a cocklebur from her ear with an “I told you so” expression on her face.
From then on, when Ghost went on point, it was like the old E.F. Hutton television commercial. Everybody simply stopped and waited in a frozen tableau. “I believe her,” John said, time after time. And time after time a rooster would cackle. Most of the time, it was their last cackle.
The following morning brought a brilliant blue sky. Sunlight sparkled off six inches of snow. The temperature hovered at four degrees and the feathers on Ghost’s legs and tail were frozen solid.
It didn’t seem to matter, though. We worked along the draws, and up over the rises where the rye stubble attracted those pheasants by the hundreds, especially about three in the afternoon. Of course you couldn’t walk within shooting distance of those wide open birds, but it was fun to sit in the truck and marvel at how many there were.
The best hunting was down in the draws, and in the thick stuff alongside Muddy Creek. So we hunted those hard for the next two days and filled our legal limits and ate and drank and laughed. And not once did Ghost decide to take another plunge into the icy water of Muddy Creek. I even asked her once if she wanted to go swimming. I didn’t quite catch her response. But I don’t think it was very nice.
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Capt. Tony Petrella is a former sportswriter for the Atlanta Constitution. He’s also a United States Coast Guard licensed Captain who guides tarpon, snook, and redfish anglers in southwest Florida half the year, and trout anglers and grouse and woodcock hunters in Michigan the other half.
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