Toughest hunt of my life cont..
But that's not what this weekend was all about. I had a goal in mind. My 6 year old black lab female Suzie, had some unfinished business. She needed to get her last birds. She has an auto-immune disease that has crippled her. The only reason she is alive is because of a high dose of prednisone every day. She has lost 40% of her hair and both of her cruciate ligaments are torn and she can barely walk. It’s kinda like a bow legged waddle. Her legs shake 24/7 because she is so weak and she is barely 45 lbs. Two years ago she was in her prime. Upland, or waterfowl, it didn't matter she was a great dog. She had retrieved more birds in her 6 seasons than most dogs would in two lifetimes. But she loved her Roosters. It was her favorite adversary in the uplands. She deserved her chance to “Get a Roosty”.
The rest of the crew was walking some long ditches, and my pregnant wife was posted up at the end as a blocker for them. That left me alone with the chance to walk the short ditch with Suzie. I wasn’t sure she could do it, but with no snow and mild temperatures it was my only chance to put her on the ground for a hunt. I parked the truck and let her out. It wasn’t her first time on the ground this weekend but the other hunts for her hadn’t produced much action and she didn’t get any retrieves. She had flushed a covey of Huns and we collected two, but she was beat to the birds by other dogs. This hunt it was just me and her. Anything we got was her trophy, her legacy. She was my trusty sidekick since 2006 when I took on a rescue lab pup that needed a home. Then I took her on my great adventure that same year when I moved to Montana to pursue my outdoor pursuits. She was my first hunting dog and we both learned a lot together through many days in the field.
As we started working forward to intersect the short ditch we were to work, I immediately recognized this was going be a good hunt. She was already birdy, and rapidly flagging her little almost hairless rat looking tail. I just held back and let her do her thing. She worked the CRP strip slowly and methodically, just like she had done so many times before. I see her stick her nose in a clump of grass and out comes a hen. Her eyes are glowing with excitement. She is so happy to be flushing birds. We move up the ditch a couple hundred yards and she gets red hot, scrambling in and out of the ditch, working the grassy edges like a champion. I know there’s a bird here by reading her familiar signals. I raise my O/U 12 gauge to port arms, ready for the flush. She moves ahead in the ditch, snorting as she goes. The flush is imminent at this point. Then it happens, a beautiful wild Montana rooster blasts off her nose, I swing to my right, and fire my modified choked barrel. The rooster explodes in a cloud of feathers as the 1 ½ oz of 6 shot knocks him from the air. Suzie marks him in the barley stubble and proceeds to waddle out to him. I couldn’t believe it. We got her last bird. The bird is flopping a little but as soon as she gets to him and opens her mouth to pounce, he runs. She is too slow and can’t keep up. He runs into the ditch and escapes. She tries desperately for 20 minutes to find him. She is a pro at this and I just hang back and let her work. The bird had a lot of leg under him but had a broken wing. He was too much for an old crippled dog. We had to let him go. I was sick. I had let her down on a bird she had worked up so well and made a marginal shot on what should have been an easy bird.
I called her back from the dead bird search, and I could tell she wanted more. She immediately moved up the ditch into the wind hunting again. She was still into it, and I was happy to oblige. I wasn’t expecting much more, as the spot is usually good for one rooster. We made it another 100 yards and she was hot for rooster. I was ready and when that cackling long tail blew out of the grass off her nose he didn’t stand a chance. I let him get out a little and sent some sixes his way and with a puff of feathers in the air and a dull thud as he hit the ground, she marked him and went for the retrieve. She picked up her rooster , and I immediately started to cry. She had given me so much over the years and she was just doing what she was put here to do. She brought him right to hand and I put him in my game bag. She was so happy. “Good Girl Suzie” I barely got out of my mouth.
We kept working up the ditch with Suzie slowing down. I worked at her pace. This was her last hunt, no need to rush her. She worked out into the barley stubble and I called her back over. She went out there again, and I remembered to trust her. She knows what she is doing. I was still choked up and thinking of how she taught me to trust her nose made me well up again with heavy tears. When it comes to finding birds she was always right. Somehow in my blurry visioned state I recognized it was a rooster that she flushed in the stubble just 15 yards away, I swung to my left and dumped him. He was dead in the air, no worries on him. As Suzie went out for the retrieve I broke my gun and slid in another load of sixes. She was working her way back with the rooster and I closed my breech. At the sound another rooster blew out. I was crying too hard to react cleanly and I missed him twice. Well Suzie didn’t mind. She had a rooster in her mouth and was proud. I bagged that bird and we finished out the ditch. We didn’t get any more flushes and when we got to the end Suzie laid in a snow bank she found. She always loved playing in the snow, and she loved her roosters. On her last hunt, she got them both.
