ditchparrot19
Member
If I'd been in the market for a house/family dog when I spent $250 to acquire Zeke, I'd have soon considered him a waste of good money that was fairly difficult to come by at the time. But I was after a tough sumbitch that would bust hard-to-find wild pheasants out of nearly impenetrable vegetation on a few occasions per year, and then deliver to me the ones that fell to the gun.
By that measure, he proved to be worth infinitely more than what I paid for him.
Zeke's been gone for 4 months now, and one day in early October I allowed a stiff westerly wind to carry his cremains out onto a flat, brushy patch of land in northeastern Montana that had once been a very shallow lake. A decade earlier, he'd had what I considered the best of his many great days afield there, and it's extremely comforting to me that he'll stay there forever. The hunting in that place isn't worth a tinker's damn anymore -- it's been too long since the ground was inundated by water -- but when I see it, my mind's eye always takes me back to October 2005, when Zeke gave a bunch of Hi-Line roosters hell like they'd surely never seen.
He lived every minute of his 14 years, 1 month and 2 days with a bull-in-a-china-shop mentality. That attitude made him a rough-mannered dog around our home and, despite my protestations, eventually got him banished to sleeping in a room off the garage. But it also provided me with dozens of great memories from fall and winter days in the brush and the sloughs.
From the beginning, he operated as if me and the gun were merely the backup plan when it came to acquiring birds -- he always made a hell of an effort to catch them and kill them on the ground. More than once I had to sneak a dead hen that didn't take flight quite fast enough out of a state wildlife area, and other times we left those places with a rooster in the game pouch even though I never shouldered my Ithaca.
At 71 pounds of rippled muscle, no fear of anything on the planet, phenomenal stamina and a fierce determination to force birds to fly or die, he was truly a wild pheasant's worst nightmare. He was also the "dog of a lifetime" for his fat, half-crippled owner, and I miss him terribly.
Zeke was the son of a master hunter from one of the top kennels in these parts and would've sold for much more than I paid for him had he been born at that facility. However, the breeder had done a favor for a down-on-his-luck high school buddy and allowed him to mate his bitch to that stud and raise some money by selling the pups. Yet another unfortunate circumstance befell the guy, causing him to leave town fairly quickly, and he opted to let the last of a litter of only three go for a discounted price.
Zeke was full of energy from the get-go, head-butting me from behind on the first night home as I lay on a pillow on the living room floor. One night not long after, he attempted to snatch a duck from the mouth of a fellow Lab on a televised hunting show (we still had a TV that sat on the floor at the time and that action occurred at about eye-level for him). Maybe a month later, I sat and watched him dismantle a perfectly good baseball all the way down to the rubber ball in the core. If you've never seen the inside of a baseball, it consists of miles upon miles of fine, tightly wound string, and he just kept ripping out chunks of it and spitting them in a pile next to him. I probably should've put an early halt to that episode, but it was such a spectacle that all I could do was sit back and watch.
The next dozen years were quite eventful, to say the least. He nearly died a couple of times from eating stuff he shouldn't have (one time it was several bees and another it was freshly caught trout from the kitchen sink), he briefly hung himself by his electric collar on the top strand of a barbed-wire fence, and he badly injured a shoulder attempting to scramble underneath that same type of barrier. At age 7, he had the shoulder and a blown-out knee repaired in the same operation, which took him out of any type of action for 10 weeks, but he proved to be a surprisingly good patient.
He made five trips to Montana, where he excelled in the Missouri River bottoms and the smaller creeks that dotted the prairie to the north. Closer to home, the wild pheasants had virtually disappeared by the time he'd reached his prime, but we still got a few more than our measly share, and it was all due to him.
I retired him from wild-bird hunting after his age-12 season. He mopped up a couple of club birds the year after that, showing the same fire he'd always possessed, but his legs could no longer hold up their end of the bargain. Last season, I took him along every time I loaded up the other two dogs (a setter and a pointer), but he couldn't do much more than sniff around in the area near the truck and piss on one of the tires, usually unable to get his back leg off the ground to perform the latter feat.
The end came on the 4th of July, with more than 400 highway miles separating me from that great dog that I loved so much. He was in the care of my animal-worshiping mother-in-law while me, my wife and my daughter were on our annual weeklong summer trip as he took his final breath on that hot summer evening. I'll forever regret not being there, but I've at least halfway come around to believing that he decided to save me from making that horrible trip to the vet's office, where a bunch of people would've been subjected to me crying like a hungry infant with a full diaper.
When Zeke was still young, I came across a passage in a novel about an English setter that I felt summed up our relationship. It reads: "It's different with a gun dog, a thing, of the bond between a hunter and a hunting dog, that carries beyond the heart. Beyond companionship, to life itself. The condition that each can live ... really live ... only through the other."
You're gone now, ol' buddy, but you'll never be forgotten.
By that measure, he proved to be worth infinitely more than what I paid for him.
Zeke's been gone for 4 months now, and one day in early October I allowed a stiff westerly wind to carry his cremains out onto a flat, brushy patch of land in northeastern Montana that had once been a very shallow lake. A decade earlier, he'd had what I considered the best of his many great days afield there, and it's extremely comforting to me that he'll stay there forever. The hunting in that place isn't worth a tinker's damn anymore -- it's been too long since the ground was inundated by water -- but when I see it, my mind's eye always takes me back to October 2005, when Zeke gave a bunch of Hi-Line roosters hell like they'd surely never seen.
He lived every minute of his 14 years, 1 month and 2 days with a bull-in-a-china-shop mentality. That attitude made him a rough-mannered dog around our home and, despite my protestations, eventually got him banished to sleeping in a room off the garage. But it also provided me with dozens of great memories from fall and winter days in the brush and the sloughs.
From the beginning, he operated as if me and the gun were merely the backup plan when it came to acquiring birds -- he always made a hell of an effort to catch them and kill them on the ground. More than once I had to sneak a dead hen that didn't take flight quite fast enough out of a state wildlife area, and other times we left those places with a rooster in the game pouch even though I never shouldered my Ithaca.
At 71 pounds of rippled muscle, no fear of anything on the planet, phenomenal stamina and a fierce determination to force birds to fly or die, he was truly a wild pheasant's worst nightmare. He was also the "dog of a lifetime" for his fat, half-crippled owner, and I miss him terribly.
Zeke was the son of a master hunter from one of the top kennels in these parts and would've sold for much more than I paid for him had he been born at that facility. However, the breeder had done a favor for a down-on-his-luck high school buddy and allowed him to mate his bitch to that stud and raise some money by selling the pups. Yet another unfortunate circumstance befell the guy, causing him to leave town fairly quickly, and he opted to let the last of a litter of only three go for a discounted price.
Zeke was full of energy from the get-go, head-butting me from behind on the first night home as I lay on a pillow on the living room floor. One night not long after, he attempted to snatch a duck from the mouth of a fellow Lab on a televised hunting show (we still had a TV that sat on the floor at the time and that action occurred at about eye-level for him). Maybe a month later, I sat and watched him dismantle a perfectly good baseball all the way down to the rubber ball in the core. If you've never seen the inside of a baseball, it consists of miles upon miles of fine, tightly wound string, and he just kept ripping out chunks of it and spitting them in a pile next to him. I probably should've put an early halt to that episode, but it was such a spectacle that all I could do was sit back and watch.
The next dozen years were quite eventful, to say the least. He nearly died a couple of times from eating stuff he shouldn't have (one time it was several bees and another it was freshly caught trout from the kitchen sink), he briefly hung himself by his electric collar on the top strand of a barbed-wire fence, and he badly injured a shoulder attempting to scramble underneath that same type of barrier. At age 7, he had the shoulder and a blown-out knee repaired in the same operation, which took him out of any type of action for 10 weeks, but he proved to be a surprisingly good patient.
He made five trips to Montana, where he excelled in the Missouri River bottoms and the smaller creeks that dotted the prairie to the north. Closer to home, the wild pheasants had virtually disappeared by the time he'd reached his prime, but we still got a few more than our measly share, and it was all due to him.
I retired him from wild-bird hunting after his age-12 season. He mopped up a couple of club birds the year after that, showing the same fire he'd always possessed, but his legs could no longer hold up their end of the bargain. Last season, I took him along every time I loaded up the other two dogs (a setter and a pointer), but he couldn't do much more than sniff around in the area near the truck and piss on one of the tires, usually unable to get his back leg off the ground to perform the latter feat.
The end came on the 4th of July, with more than 400 highway miles separating me from that great dog that I loved so much. He was in the care of my animal-worshiping mother-in-law while me, my wife and my daughter were on our annual weeklong summer trip as he took his final breath on that hot summer evening. I'll forever regret not being there, but I've at least halfway come around to believing that he decided to save me from making that horrible trip to the vet's office, where a bunch of people would've been subjected to me crying like a hungry infant with a full diaper.
When Zeke was still young, I came across a passage in a novel about an English setter that I felt summed up our relationship. It reads: "It's different with a gun dog, a thing, of the bond between a hunter and a hunting dog, that carries beyond the heart. Beyond companionship, to life itself. The condition that each can live ... really live ... only through the other."
You're gone now, ol' buddy, but you'll never be forgotten.
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