A Grouse Hunter’s Almanac: The Other Kind of Hunting

In Praise of Old Dogs

26 In Praise of Old Dogs Just ten minutes into the hunt, our first of the year, my Weimaraner started to lurch from side to side. Stumbling ahead a few more yards, Gunnar collapsed on his side, legs jerking, eyes wide and staring off into the netherworld for all we knew. We could do nothing but pet him and tell him everything was OK as we waited out the spell wracking his body. This was a big lie because everything was not OK. Gunnar had a bad heart murmur, and when he ran hard he was prone to collapsing. His condition was worsening as he approached thirteen, although none of his spells had been as bad as this one. We kept him lying down for a few moments until he picked up his head and looked around, puzzled. As he had laid there spasming on the trail, I made up my mind—that was it, no more hunting for him. He had had twelve good seasons, and we had shot a lot of birds over him, mostly grouse and woodcock but also pheasant and quail. Most good things do come to an end. I just didn’t expect the end to be looming so close, peering at me through the surrounding screen of trees. 27 Gunnar got up when he could a few minutes later, and we ambled slowly down the trail back toward our cabin. “That’s it, buddy,” I said on the way home as he plodded along ahead of me, mercifully oblivious to his condition. “No more hunting for you.” The grouse and woodcock season, which had been so promising a few short hours ago, looked at that moment dark and dismal. My other dog, Ox, was eleven years old at the time and still fit, but he, too, was clearly slowing down, with cloudy eyes, growing deafness, and an arthritic left front paw that had left him Rimadyl dependent. Grouse were cycling up, and my dogs were both winding down. “When are you going to get a puppy?” Friends and family had been pestering us for some time about getting a puppy and replacing the old guard, but after Gunnar’s episode we heard this with increasing frequency. The question set me thinking, and I stopped at the home of a breeder a few weeks after Gunnar’s collapse to look his dogs over. He had one nine-week-old setter female left. She was cute, came from proven lines, was just what I wanted, but I couldn’t put her in my truck and drive her home. My loyalties lay with my old dogs, and not a new puppy. They’d hunted hard for me for over a decade, and they deserved the chance to get into the field as often as their tired old bodies would allow. We wanted to give them every chance to do so. Besides, they were both a couple of confirmed bachelors, each set in his own ways, wearing ruts in our wood floors as they had worn ruts in our lives. A fresh puppy would have thrown what balance we had in our lives off kilter. A new puppy would signal the beginning of the end of all our good years together—all those hunts, the birds and the places where In Praise of Old Dogs 28 we shot them. Behind all that was the salient fact that I had aged right alongside my dogs, clear enough if I looked into a mirror. I wasn’t so old that I was counting my age by the number of dogs we’d owned, but my odometer wasn’t spinning backward either. Sometimes when I gave the dog his Rimadyl after a hunt, I simultaneously popped a couple of ibuprofen. A few weeks later, in the early part of October, I rethought my decision. Maybe it was the weather, but if I were Gunnar, I thought one day watching him loaf around the backyard, I would want to hunt even if doing so meant my death. Keeping him home safe and sound curled up on the sofa was selfish on our part. I told a friend I was thinking of hunting him again, and he said, “Make sure you bring along a shovel.” My wife thought this comment callous, but it was sound advice. A quick death in the field doing what he loved seemed a more...