The Pup Who Flushed the First Rooster

I used a canvas dummy with a pheasant wing tied on with baling twine. I would have Penny sit, toss it into the grass where she could not see it land, and send her with one word. “Dead.”

The first week, she found it maybe one time in four. By the Fourth of July, she found it every time, and she found it fast.

Tanner held the long check cord for me on Saturday mornings. He had never trained a dog himself. Duane did all of that, the way Duane did everything, and the boys just hunted behind whatever he brought.

“You’re good at this,” Tanner said one morning, watching Penny swing back with the dummy and sit square at my feet.

“I’m not,” I said. “My dad was. I just remember what he said.”

“Give,” I told Penny, and put out my hand. She opened her mouth and laid the dummy in my palm, wet and soft, and not one tooth mark on it.

In August a man named Todd who raised pen birds for a hunting preserve west of us sold me six live roosters for twelve dollars apiece. Tanner and I planted them one at a time in the tall grass on a quarter Todd leased, and I let Penny find her first real scent.

I will never forget her face. She hit that scent and her whole body changed. Her tail went from a wag to a blur. Her nose went down into the grass and her ears came up, and she went in after it like the world had just been explained to her.

The rooster came up cackling and I did not shoot. I just wanted her to see one fly. She watched it all the way out across the grass, trembling, and then she looked back at me.

“Yeah,” I said, and I was crying a little, out there in somebody else’s grass at seven in the morning. “Yeah, baby. That’s what it’s for.”

Tanner never said a word to his father all summer. That was my idea, not his. I did not want it to be a fight before it was a fact.

But Duane saw her. Of course he did. At Sunday dinner in September, after church, Penny was asleep on a blanket in the back of my car with the windows down, and Duane walked out to look at her before he went to check his cows.

He stood there a long time with his hands in his coat pockets. Penny woke up and sat up and looked at him, and he looked at her.

“Lab,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Field-bred?”

“Out of a pair from down by Mitchell.”

He nodded. He walked around to the other side of the car and looked at her from there. Then he went off to his cows without another word, and I let out a breath I did not know I had been holding.

Freda had watched all of it from the kitchen window. When I came back in to help with the dishes, she handed me a towel and said, very quietly, “He hasn’t looked at a dog like that since Duke was a pup.”

I did not answer. I did not know what to say.

Duke was failing badly that fall. Tanner told me about it on the phone from his folks’ place one evening. The old dog could not get up the porch steps anymore, so Duane carried him, forty pounds of gray Lab, every night and every morning, and set him down on his rug by the wood stove.