The Pup Who Flushed the First Rooster

So I made the sandwiches. Nine years of ham on white bread, a crockpot of chili, two pans of bars. And somewhere in the ninth year, watching old Duke stand in the grass with his nose doing nothing, I decided I was done waiting for words.

I would bring him something he could not argue with.

The breeder was an older couple near Mitchell who had run field-bred Labs for thirty years. I found them through a man at the farm credit office where I work as an ag lender’s assistant. He had one of their dogs and swore it was the best bird dog in Davison County.

I called them in January. The female was due in February. I put down a $300 deposit from my own savings account, the one I had kept since high school, and paid the other $600 the day I picked her up. Nine hundred dollars, all mine.

Tanner knew. I was not sneaking around on my husband. I sat him down at the kitchen table with the breeder’s papers and told him exactly what I meant to do.

He read the papers twice. Then he looked at me for a long time and smiled, slow, the way he had the night I said yes to him.

“Dad’s going to have a fit,” he said.

“Your dad,” I said, “is not going to have a fit. Your dad is going to have a dog on the line for the first time in three years.”

The pups came the second week of February, nine of them. I drove down in April when they were eight weeks old. The breeder’s wife put a little yellow female in my lap, and she chewed the button off my coat cuff and fell asleep with her chin on my wrist.

I named her Penny, after the penny my dad used to put in my boot every opener for luck. He said it was an old Norwegian thing. I have never been able to find anybody else who has heard of it.

The first night home she cried in her crate until two in the morning. I lay on the kitchen floor with my fingers through the wire, and Tanner came out at midnight and lay down on the floor next to me, and we both fell asleep there like a couple of kids.

I started her the way Dad taught me. Sit first. Then here. Then sit again. Short lessons, three times a day, never when I was tired or short-tempered. A pup reads you better than you read yourself.

By May she would sit at my knee for a full minute with a biscuit balanced on the floor in front of her. By June she would come on one whistle from fifty yards.

Then I took her to the ditches.

Every weekday morning that summer, I was up at five. I put Penny in the back seat of my car and drove the gravel roads north of our place while the sun came up over the beans. I parked on the approaches and worked her in the ditch grass for forty minutes before my shift.

The meadowlarks were up by then, and the red-winged blackbirds were scolding off every cattail. The grass was wet to my knees. I came into the office most mornings with my jeans soaked to the thigh, and the girls up front gave up asking why.