Rosie had a wonderful pheasant hunt on Sunday.
Occasionally, she allowed me to join her.
Not in any planned sort of way, mind you. It wasn’t like she was looking back regularly to make sure that I was close behind. That would have been a sign that she was acknowledging, in the ineffable way that dogs acknowledge things, that there is no “i” in team — in this case the team of a hunter and his dog. Or a dog and her hunter.
Oh, sure, there was some of “no i” hunting early on, before Rosie hit an amalgamation of fresh pheasant scent, which hot-wired her brain and, amazingly enough, her legs and lungs, too.
After that, our meetings were mostly occasions of happenstance, when her circuitous route through the thick stuff on the trail of one running pheasant or another brought us both, by chance, into what we might call the same outdoor area code.
In other words, an area where she was close enough that I could actually try to give her a call.
There was one problem with that: She can’t hear much, that old girl. Not much at all.
For certain she doesn’t have enough hearing left to receive my initial pleas — which were dissipated by the gusty northwest wind — for her to put a throttle on her forward charge until I could hustle up to within shotgun range.
So she rambled on through the bluestem and switchgrass and crested wheat, having a positively delightful time and occasionally flushing a pheasant beyond the effective range of my 12 gauge. And a few at the very edge of my vision.
The miracle effect of pheasant scent on an old dog
And all that from an almost-13-year-old springer spaniel that, back in the pheasant-less confines of our backyard, sometimes struggles to get up the back steps. Go figure.
What sort of miracle was that? Simply the kind that a good infusion of pheasant-generated adrenaline can produce in an old hunting dog — an old hunting dog with bad arthritis and even worse hearing.
Oh, and also without a shock, or, um, I mean “static stimulation” collar. But more on that in a minute.
A year ago I didn’t expect to see Rosie hunt like that again. Her arthritis was getting so bad that she could barely walk some days. And she was only good for an hour or so of stiff-legged hunting, with her front legs splayed outward at the knees and her hips tight and contracted.
But her nose still worked its magic and she seemed to enjoy each brief hunt immensely.
Because she moved so slowly in the field, I stopped using the “static stimulation” collar, which is actually — let’s be honest here — a shock collar. It is so named because it applies a very mild shock when you push a button on the control that you carry with you in the field.
Be advised here that you rarely need to use the “static stimulation” function on the collar. Once dogs are trained — and it doesn’t take long — a warning beep or a vibration will suffice. And most well-bred hunting dogs aren’t stupid. Just wearing the collar tends to improve their behavior.
The whistles, calls and the hand signals weren’t enough
I’d never used an electric collar with my previous springers, Pogo and Stormy, relying instead of a whistle and hand and verbal commands. Those dogs sometimes strayed too far and flushed birds out of range. But mostly they followed the rules and we did OK.
But Rosie was different. She has been the strongest, most athletic hunting dog I’ve had. And also the most stubborn. I started hunting her when she was 6 months old, and she was a quick study that produced a good number of birds that first season.
By the next season, however, she had figured out that she didn’t need me to flush pheasants. She is, after all, a “flushing” breed. And when she got on hot bird scent, she ignored the whistle and the commands, running wildly ahead and scattering birds out of range.
Which is, well, not exactly the idea.
With the addition of the shock or E collar, however, she became an exceptional hunting dog. And for a decade we shared some of the best hunting experiences I’ve ever had. Then the various injuries she had sustained over the years of hunting and an early-in-life encounter with the bumper of a moving vehicle came back in arthritic joints.
By the time she was 10 years old, she couldn’t jump onto the lowered tailgate of my pickup. By the time she was 11, she couldn’t jump up onto the floor of the back seat of my pickup. Since then, I’ve had to lift her up onto the floor and let her down carefully so she doesn’t jam a joint jumping out.
In 2021, I had some health issues that limited my time outdoors. And we missed the entire hunting season that fall. That seemed to accelerate her decline. I felt up to hunting in 2022, but our hours afield were limited by Rosie’s bad joints, and perhaps by faulty thinking on my part.
Why I might have been making her arthritis worse
After the 2022 season, I started wondering about Rosie’s arthritis and her sharp decline in movement. It seemed like every step was painful, although movement checks of her joints by veterinarians didn’t indicate that she was in all that much pain most of the time.
I had cut back on taking her for walks because she seemed to be in pain. And also, to be honest, because she moved so slowly she wasn’t any fun to walk with.
So for most of two years, if she wasn’t playing with the grandkids or taking very short walks with me, Rosie spent most of her time lying around on the various pads we bought to ease her aching joints.
But was helping her avoid movement and possible pain actually making the arthritis worse? Maybe. Exercise is considered essential to help most people with arthritis. Why wouldn’t the same be true for dogs with arthritis?
So last spring and summer I started walking her more frequently again. They were slow walks, especially at first. She dawdled. She limped around. Sometimes I thought I’d have to carry her home. But I never did. And she seemed to enjoy the increased activity.
I started taking her back to Rapid Creek to a familiar trail and a couple of swimming spots. She loved that, and soon got comfortable swimming again, which I think was very good for her.
At first, she would be all stove-up for a day or two after any extended exercise. But that slowly improved. And she was in better shape when this pheasant season began. She showed it with improved movement during each hunt and quicker recovery afterward.
It helps that I only hunt her a couple of times a week. And I try to hunt in half-hour increments with breaks in-between. I also avoid the tough stuff she used to love to attack, like dense stands of cattails or kochia weeds.
With a little Rimadyl and rest, she’s ready to go again
I give her the anti-inflammatory drug Rimadyl the morning before the hunt and the evening after — and the next day if she looks like she needs it. Even with the meds, she barely moves on that day after the hunt from her pad on the back deck or the one in the mud room inside.
But she’s ready to go the next time I start putting hunting gear in the pickup, rarely getting more than a few feet from my heels during the loading process.
So it turns out that the dog I thought was done with hunting can still hunt, and still love it, on a limited basis. And most of the time she moves slowly enough for a guy in his early ‘70s to keep up, even without the help of a E collar.
Speaking of which, I dragged out the old collar last year and checked it. It didn’t work. Which was OK. I didn’t seem to need it anymore — until Sunday. Then an increasingly active springer spaniel got into some hot pheasant scent and reverted to her youthful ways — at a slower rate of speed, of course, but faster than I cared to move.
Which is how we ended up having two pheasant hunts: Rosie as a full participant in hers and me as an engaged observer in mine.
Pheasant numbers are down on and around Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge near Martin where we often go to hunt. So most of the time we don’t run across enough scent to drive Rosie berserk. But Sunday we got into a 25-acre-or-so patch of fairly dense mixed grasses , where there was enough bird scent to raise Rosie’s interest to the frantic level.
And off she went, scouring the near cover first, but then following the trail of departing pheasants farther away. Then farther. And farther.
I called her. She either couldn’t hear me or simply ignored me. Or a bit of both. I called again. Same result. Again and again. And then I gave up and walked along behind, and watched.
The problem with not believing your dog
Rosie ended up flushing eight or 10 pheasants, four of them roosters. Two of the hens flushed close up (which is often the case with hens). One of the roosters flushed well ahead of Rosie, who was well ahead of me. And Rosie flushed two other roosters just out of shotgun range.
And that fourth rooster? I made the mistake of not believing my dog. I thought she was backtracking the trail of one of the birds that had already flushed. So I didn’t hustle over to where she was madly vacuuming up scent in a busy figure-eight pattern.
If I had believed Rosie and her nose and picked up my pace a bit, I could have had a shot at the big, brassy rooster that busted up out of the cover. After the flush, Rosie nosed around for a while and gave me that inquisitive look that indicated I did something that didn’t make sense.
Like not shooting at a big rooster pheasant.
That one was on me. And the rest? Well, I suppose I could have felt bad or mad about the other birds that Rosie flushed out of range. But by then, I had reached the point I usually reach in my pheasant hunts these days where I thought: “How badly do I really want to shoot a pheasant and have to clean it tonight after the 2 1/2-hour drive home?”
Not badly enough, I decided.
After all, I had already had the fun of watching my old springer spaniel — a pheasant-hunting breed that Minnesota outdoor writer Steve Grooms once called “merry little savages” — looking younger than her years as she snuffled through a beautiful stand of mixed grasses to flush one wily, hard-flying, wild pheasant after another.
And when she came back to me, finally, looking appropriately sheepish for all that unsanctioned solo hunting, I surprised her with a head pat and a warm “Nice work, old girl,” followed by “Say, next time, do you think you could stay a little closer to me?”
I won’t get her answer until our next hunt.
