I had to say goodbye to my best friend today. After almost 12 years together, I had to be unselfish and give her the peace that she couldn’t get in life anymore. She held out until she got through this last duck season, but when she went downhill, she went quickly. Her brother from the same litter, that lived with my best friend from childhood, had to be put down just the other day as well. Instead of focusing on how she left, I figured I’d tell yall about how she lived.
I purchased her from a backyard breeder in Lake City, without having a clue what I was really getting into. I just knew that I wanted a dog, and I wanted it to pick up my ducks. I did no research, and just picked it from the Carolina Trader, probably by price alone. I was set on a black female, and had one in my arms about to leave, when the only yellow out of the litter came and flopped down on my feet. I knew right then that she was the one. She rode in my lap the whole way home, just sitting and staring at me.
She was a terror as a puppy, like most labs. She’d steal any dirty sock she could find find, and hide it under her bed. In my single years, if whatever girl I had over didn’t pay her enough attention, she’d chew just one of her heels. The only thing she ever chewed that she wasn’t supposed to. I took her everywhere then, including tailgating for football games. If you weren’t actually holding her, she’d run off to the first group of girls she could find, always rolling on the feet of the blonde ones. This infuriated my then girlfriend, who swore I’d taught her that. It was a godsend when we broke up, what better wingman than a lab puppy with great taste?
She developed into quite the duck dog, despite my best attempts to ruin her with poor training. She loved a dove shoot, but never did get the hang of marking a bird that crossed several rows of corn. She excelled at finding cripples, and many times she’d sit and wait while five or six of us would shoot a wood duck hole, then be sent on blind retrieve after blind retrieve, making a sweep of the hole at the end to find what cripples had wandered off. She bailed out of the boat while I was leaving catfish creek one morning, bounding into the grass and coming up with a crippled drake Woodie, putting me one over the limit when I pulled up to the ramp.
One of the most enjoyable parts of owning a good dog, is hearing other people tell stories of her retrieves. I’ve sent her on crippled geese so far down river we couldn’t see her, just to have her come back 30 min later with the bird (or at least one that looked like it). I watched her track a wounded wood duck about 80 yards into a field, after I sent her blind to where we thought it fell, just a couple years back. Just this last week of the season, I took her to a shallow pond for a wood duck shoot. After shooting my woodies and one ringneck, I sent her out to clean them up. One wood duck popped back to life, and she took off after it, despite my attempts to call her back. She couldn’t hear me anyways, like most old gun dogs, she was getting pretty deaf. She chased it across the 10 acre pond, and into the grass. About 15 min later she comes back, with the still very much alive drake gently held in her mouth. No real feat in her younger years, but this was a dog who didn’t have the hips to get up more than 5 steps anymore. The picture below is from her last trip to Arkansas a month ago. We only had one dog blind and two dogs. We agreed to hunt her first, and when she looked like she was slowing down too much, to switch dogs. We killed two on that pass, and she only had the energy for one so my buddy helped her out a bit. I was surprised she made it through the 6 or so retrieves before that.
She was with me my last years of college, my first real career and even escorted my wife down the aisle when we got married. I’m gonna miss the hell out of you Momma dog.
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