Hunter

About a month ago I took my dog—a German shorthaired pointer—to the vet, which is not unusual. He has spent more time than not there, in his brief life, with various bumps and cuts and one traumatic incident that involved a stick and the roof of his mouth. We were there for an array of shots, something routine, but he was feral with anxiety. I tried to make a joke about the amount of foam he was emitting from his mouth. “We may be too late for the rabies vaccine!” I said, forcing a laugh. The vet tech, who currently had him in a headlock while I restrained his hind end, frowned at me.

Right before we left, she said, noticing his breed, “Does he go hunting?”

“Yes,” I said immediately, proudly. “He’s great, he’s learning. We get out as much as we can.”

“Oh?” she swiveled on her stool with a speed that took me aback. “You hunt too?”

I thought about the vet tech as I crouched at the edge of a cornfield, my hand on the back of Cedar’s neck. Even a month later, it stung, that expression of surprise. It doesn’t often occur to me that the expectations of my own ability are limited, that the way someone sees me is not the way I see myself. There are a few reasons she might not have expected me to hunt—maybe the work clothes I was wearing threw her off, or something in my manner—but it felt obvious: she was surprised because I was a girl. I wonder who else she imagined my dog would go hunting with. A boyfriend? My dad? Or by himself? Cedar is always hunting, pointing the crows on our walks to the college, letting me know there’s a field of geese up ahead. But he’s not doing much killing.

Without the other we’re useless. My nose doesn’t find birds. My very presence forces them away, even when I’m not carrying a gun. His senses are sharp and sure, though, and when he hits a certain smell—the fluttery, heady scent of wild game—he locks up, every nerve and cell in his being concentrated, telling me the bird is right there. He is a keen hunter, able to find even the wiliest of winged beasts, but he could never bring them down without a shot from me. I hold the power over his point. When he tries to pounce on them, after showing me where they are, the bird inevitably goes airborne.

Gun dogs are born with the instinct to point, to stiffen into stone at the mere hint of a bird. It’s the urge to pounce that you have to train out of them. You do it by getting them on birds, letting that most glorious of all smells hit their noses over and over again, and then you reward their patience by shooting the bird and letting them see that you’ve got them. They’re smart dogs, and quickly learn about the need to partner—that you are out there together, there isn’t one without the other. Cedar is learning this with me, but we have a ways to go.

I bought Cedar when I was just out of college, during my second winter back in Oregon after years in the swampy heat of Louisiana. I had to leave town to realize how much of me was made of the West, how deeply the rivers of the valley ran through my veins. When I came home, I wanted a bird dog with an intensity that lit up my bones, marked everything with an urgency that I’d never known from myself before. I’d barely had a full bird season under my belt when I started trying to find him, calling breeders all over the tri-state area asking about puppies. I’d been hunting that first season behind my Dad’s dog, Dexter—a legendary hunter, a beautiful animal—but he didn’t respond to me, wouldn’t look back to see if...