Stuck in SF due to a flight delayed elsewhere. This is a dog story and has nothing to do with working out so just skip it if you want.
Lucy was a mighty Lab, a true force. She was 85 lbs of pure muscle and desire in her prime. Walking a closed logging road with a creek below us, I mean about 12 feet below us, straight down, she flushed a ruffed grouse out of the ferns. I connected and the grouse tumbled into the creek... in slow motion, she lept off that cliff, with me doing a slo-mo "nooooooooo!" ..... because that's what Labs do. All heart. Luckily she stuck the landing.
But that's not the story. The story is her first grouse.
I was driving my old Nissan 4wd pickup with her next to me. At that time I was working two jobs and had two small kids in the house. One of the jobs was my own biz, so I had SOME control, and I carved Wednesday's out in stone as MY DAY. Gas was still cheap and the truck was a 4-banger. I'd put $20 in the tank and head out fishing, hunting, exploring... usually up in the Cascades. It was awesome and I still hunt some secret spots I found in that era.
Lucy was a pup about 9 months old at the time. I'd taken her out and conditioned her to gunfire- not that she seemed to GAF- and it was time to show her what a game bird smelled like. I was new to upland, particularly with a dog, but I had heard that the way you killed grouse in western Oregon was to drive the logging roads and catch them getting grit from the road beds. See, most of western Oregon is covered in duff (organic matter) so a gravel road is a bird magnet. On top of that, birds are sparse. On top of that, most hunters in Oregon are pretty lazy, sad but true, so... lots of road hunting. However, for my purposes, I decided to go with the flow on this one and just try to get her a grouse to smell.
We'd already had one soul-sapping adventure that day that she was wholly unaware of. I'd ventured out along an obscure road on a north-facing slope. It had snowed early that year. The further I went, the more freaking terrifying it got. No way to turn around. Ice. The drop off to the left was sheer death and they might not even find a guy for a while.... I got us back out of there but I was rattled pretty good.
After extracting us from that bit of stupidity I headed up to high, bare, south facing ridges. I was just below a ridge top running parallel to it when, how about THAT, there's a grouse on the road ahead. It flew, and landed way up in a big fir. It failed to account for the slope. We were basically right next it, and not far either!
I would not normally shoot an upland bird out of a tree, and haven't since, but these were extenuating circumstances. I got out, and, well, aiming the shotgun (Citori Upland FW) like a rifle, blew that poor bird right off the branch. The slope was very steep so it took a while to get down to where it was. I REALLY wanted Lucy to find the bird. I was telling her, Find the bird! Find the bird! She had no idea WTF I was talking about. Later, those words became electric to her. In fact I whispered those words in her ear as I held her in my arms when we put her down. She stiffened, ears forward, as she saw the bird, before the chemicals reached her heart and she died. She loved to find the bird.
But THAT day, the poor pup was clueless. I finally spotted it; it had fallen right in the middle of an open mossy patch, like it was a presentation. Perfect! So I took her closer and closer... find the bird! Find the bird! Clearly, in hindsight, this was not the way to accomplish this because even as we got closer, she got more and more exasperated. What the hell you TALKING about, maaan?! Do what now? What fresh hell IS this? Why you all up in my bidness? Etc. Until finally, we reached a nexus of her exasperation just as we actually got to the dang bird. But by now, she's just looking up at me, like what the HELL, dude.
And then, upon my grandmothers grave, SHE SAT ON IT. And not just that, she sat on it and looked up at me in complete surrender like, I don't know WTF you are talking about and I give up.
It was a delicious moment and I'll never forget it. The universe doesn't give you many of these; you gotta take them when offered. An eternity went by... a second? Two? Then I reached down and tugged it and said Find the bird! and she LEAPT up was like look at THAT shït! and grabbed it, then, and I still chuckle to remember, was like, no way dude, I found this thing, you can't have it!
We hunted many many miles together after that and scores of grouse and quail and pheasant. She never forgot about "the bird" after that. She was awesome. She was hooked to her very genes.
And that's the story of Lucy's first grouse.
She's buried over where we bury our pets. Lucy, Cholla, Harper, Alice, Honeypie.... wonderful family members all. But Lucy was special. She found the bird.
