The Pup Who Flushed the First Rooster

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Roger watching her. Then Conrad. Then, finally, Duane, way down at the end, turned his head and watched her too.

Duke tried to go with her once. He made it about ten yards into the grass and stopped and stood there, and then he turned around and came back to Duane’s heel.

We were forty yards in when Penny’s tail changed.

I knew that tail. I had watched it change in August on Todd’s quarter. It went from a wag to a blur, and her whole back end started to swing with it, and her head went down in the grass like someone had pulled a string.

“Bird,” I said, not loud. Tanner heard me. He brought his gun up to port arms.

Penny went in nose first, fast, low, straight into a thick clump of grass in front of Roger and me.

The rooster came up cackling. He was close, maybe fifteen yards, climbing hard and swinging out toward the far end of the line, his long tail streaming behind him against all that blue.

“Rooster!” Tanner hollered.

I did not think. I did not have to. Dad’s gun came up to my cheek the way he had put it there a thousand times, and I swung through the bird the way he taught me, and I touched off the right barrel.

One shot.

The rooster folded clean and dropped into the grass maybe thirty yards out, right out in front of Duane.

Penny was already gone. She had marked it falling. She went through that grass like a yellow streak, and then she disappeared into it, and the grass closed over her.

I held my breath. Everybody on that line held their breath. She was eight months old. She had never in her life carried a wild bird, and a wild rooster that has been hit is a hard thing to carry, heavy and slick and still kicking sometimes.

The grass shook. It shook harder. Then it was still.

Then Penny came up out of it with that rooster in her mouth, head high, holding it by the middle just exactly right, prancing a little, proud as anything I have ever seen.

She did not come to me.

She turned, looked at the line, and trotted straight to Duane, who was the nearest person to her. She sat down square at his boots, the rooster’s tail hanging out of the side of her mouth, and looked up at him.

Nobody on that line moved.

Duane looked down at my dog for a long time. His face did not change. But his hands did. I saw them shift on his gun, and then he broke it open and laid it in the crook of his arm, the way you do when you mean to take your hands off it for a while.

Then he went down on one knee in the grass, slow, the way a man his age goes down.

He held out his hand. “Give,” he said, very quietly, the same word I used.

Penny gave him the bird, soft as an egg.

He held that rooster in both of his hands. He turned it over and looked at it. There was not a tooth mark on it. He ran his thumb along the copper feathers on its breast, and then he looked at Penny, and then he looked up the line at me.