Gary Greene’s Memories from an Old Hunter……..#29
For most of my life, I have been fortunate that I have lived with dogs. Some of my earliest memories consist of me playing with Bassett Hound puppies in our kennel. I remember cuddling with our old Bassett, Daisy Lazy Mae, and then attempting to pull her in my wagon. When she was not in the kennel, I was instructed to always keep an eye on her, but that wasn’t always the case. Moments later, I would hear Daisy hollowing on some rabbit trail a quarter mile away with no thoughts of coming home. Bassett Hounds have very little desire to please their owners, and will leave you without a care.
My dad’s dog of choice was always the Chesapeake Bay retriever. His chessy, King was a great hunting dog in the field and the wetlands. I vividly remember his thick, curly coat and over a hundred pounds of muscle. He was a quiet dog, I rarely remember him barking, except on Saturday nights.
My grandparents lived with us and on Saturday nights, for the dogs, my butcher grandfather would bring home his meat scraps. Saturdays, as soon as my grandpa got out of his car, the dogs in the kennel would start their greeting of barking that progressed into an in unison howling. I have read that dogs have no sense of time and as ex-Vice President Biden would say: "That’s malarkey.” It appeared to me that those dogs, somehow, always knew when it was Saturday.
My father brought home a $2.00 black and white, English Springer Spaniel, and he immediately became Gary’s dog. Being twelve, I had no dog training skills, nor interest or time to learn. Because he was so silly, I named him Barney after the Don Knott’s Barney Fife TV character. He was not blessed with great intelligence and seemed to always run in a sideways manner. He learned whatever hunting skills he had despite me. We hunted squirrels and pheasants and he was best at squirreling. He naturally would go to the opposite side of the tree and bark, moving the target to my side for an open shot. He tracked just ok, would flush pheasants, and had very little interest in retrieving, but we both grew up hunting together.
I have previously written about Libby, but here is a summary. Finally, after too many years, as an adult, I got my first hunting dog. Libby was a yellow, Labrador Retriever. I worked hard training her, and she had all the required skills and intelligence. I have had five Labradors since, all have been quality dogs, but for pheasants, Libby had the best nose. For six years, as I attempted to keep her in excellent shape, she would join me with my summer morning, inline skating workouts. Then at age seven, physically, she just crashed. She still hunted well, but a painfully slow pace. She lived to be fourteen, but after that seventh season, we never hunted together again. I feel I might have over worked her and she just burned out. I have trained my dogs differently ever since.
Hershey, my matriarch of my dog line, is almost eleven and after two litters, her face became grayer than mine. The last several years, she would hunt with me most every other day. I gave her a day of recovery and that seemed to work well for her. When I realized that she was a real nice dog with great home and field attributes, I wanted to continue her blood line. Hershey (obviously a chocolate) is the mother of my blacks, Nyjer and Elsie and the grandmother of Elsie’s son Schmiddy.
My yellow lab Brooke, her name has evolved over time to Dookie. She will be twelve on Ground Hog’s day and she is not from our blood line. She was selected as a pup by my first wife. She is a very loving dog and has a great nose, but always had the mobility of a semi-trailer and the speed of farm machinery on a country road. After bad double hip dysplasia, a torn ACL surgery and badly advancing arthritis, she only got out a couple of short times this year. Our friend Jordon, gave my son Nate and I a Mid-April, fifteen bird, game farm, pheasant hunt. That hunt, from the near asphalt like beaten down fields, Dookie easily flushed and found nine birds. Old Dookie was reliving her past. Her nose still was on the money, but her body was slow as she went on each retrieve, but once she had that bird in her mouth she just stood happily in pain. I would walk over and take the bird from her and we moved on. The same scenario played on with each of the nine birds she flushed. She was in the field for maybe 30 minutes and she and I could not have been happier or more proud with each bird she found. That day, to us, each bird represented all the birds that she had flushed and retrieved for me during her lifetime.
With all that joy, also came sadness. Even though I was three, I can still visualize two dead Bassett puppies lying on a newspaper covered table. I was told they were stillborn. I remember my dad finding Daisy motionless in her dog house. I remember me finding King face down in the creek with his stomach bloated. We lost Barney to cancer and I now believe Libby probably was kept alive too long.
My dogs have made my life so much more complete and they still do to this day. I stretched the old Shakespeare quote to fit my needs: “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” Even though dogs live a relatively short life, and I have lost many dogs, I am more fulfilled to have shared my love with each of my dogs and to have been loved by them. My wife Chris and I currently have six dogs in our home.
We have a plague in our home that reads: “Heaven is the place, where all the dogs you’ve ever loved, come to greet you!”