When my dog Riley was less than a year old, I lost him on one of those ill-advised, mass dog "walkings" there at Bremen Farm. The fog was crazy thick, the dogs had been too long in kennel pent (as our training accomplice John Rogers was wont to say). I was having trouble keeping them organized and away from the highway that runs along the farm's north border. When I got back to the house, the mostly black pointer I had put so much store in was missing.
His dam was of the Blackfield pointer strain from Lady Auckland's shooting kennels in Great Britain. His sire was royalty of another sort, Elhew Snakefoot, a dog I'd seen as a six month old puppy during a visit to Robert Wehle's plantation in Alabama. As we walked down the row of kennels that day, I had stopped dead in my tracks. "Who," I asked, is THAT?"
Wehle laughed. "That's Snakefoot, my latest brag dog." Snakefoot was worthy of a bit of prideful crowing. He would go on to win a National Shooting Dog Championship, along with many other titles. But in my life, the most impressive thing he did was sire a precocious pointer puppy that was currently nowhere to be found.
I drove the countryside all that Saturday into the evening. It was the next morning when the call came in. Riley had been hit by a car and was lying in a yard about two miles from where he'd gone missing. He'd been hit the evening before in the company of two strays that I'd seen in our cornfield several days before. They would not let the caller near Riley that night, but were gone when she'd looked out in the morning. Riley was in shock, nearly dead, when she retrieved the phone number from his collar and finally reached me.
My vet, Lee Guinan, himself a bird dog fancier, met me at his clinic. He got Riley on the table and gave him a thorough going over before taking him back for x-rays. He showed me the pictures.
"He's got a cracked pelvis," Lee said, "and he's really bruised up."
"Will he live?" I asked.
Guinan, a setter chauvinist to the core, didn't even look up from the pain prescription he was writing.
"Will he live?," he snorted. "He's a pointer. He's too damned dumb to even know he's hurt. Hell, he might even hunt in the same county with you now! Take him home, keep him quiet. He'll be up and around in six weeks.
Six weeks to the day, Riley managed to get on his feet and take himself out for relief. For the next ten years, he would prove to be the steadiest, most versatile dog I've owned to date.
His hips bothered him some. But that didn't stop him a year later when I dropped an Iowa rooster pheasant over a deep section of a dredged out farm creek. I was standing on the bank, watching the bird float into the deepest, widest part of the stream, when I heard a splash. It was Riley, locked on to that pheasant, pulling hard.
He made the retrieve and just sort of hung there, paddling as if to say, "Now I've got it. Now what the hell do I do with it?" I was halfway down the bank before he began swimming to shore.
His back legs wouldn't push him up out of the water, and I had to reach down and latch on to his collar to boost him up the bank. But he still had that pheasant on board when we both made it out to level ground.
I have two good retrievers now. One of them is an extraordinary marker. We keep a big dove patch here on the farm, and they both get lots of work in thick cover under steamy conditions. I'm sure that my memory for that little pointer makes me unfit to judge, but I believe Riley might have been better than both of them. He had an uncanny knack for judging a fall, and his nose wasn't just good. It was phenomenal.
He not only proved it on doves, but on grouse, woodcock, and, of course, pheasant. Unfortunately, he had to split reps or hunt in tandem with another good one, Elhew Fancy Dancer. Given his gimp, Fancy was faster, wider, and almost as good a bird finder. Riley spent a great deal of time backing his kennel mate with a smoldering intensity that I projected into, "You're lucky, Fancy. If I could run like you, you'd never get a sniff!"
Riley was named for a character in a John Barsness story I admire very much, one called, "Riley's Birds." Ironically, after his injury, I often thought Riley's stoic acceptance of his circumstances matched that of the old rancher in John's tale.
Toward the end of his life, crippled with arthritis, the dog would come and stand, asking to be lifted on to the couch. Once he was settled in just right, Riley would lay his finely chiseled head across my lap. I would stroke those black silky ears and be humbled all over again, knowing I could never be a match for his resilience, his talent, or his great, generous heart.
We would sit quietly as the evening fell softly down around us, and I would wonder if he dreamed of the woodcock he'd found across the Lake states and down into Appalachia; the ruffed grouse he pointed more staunchly and at greater distances than any dog I've owned; the Huns he'd pointed as a guide on the preserve in Ohio; how for almost two years, he'd served as a school dog, standing like stone as God knows how many client dogs were maneuvered in to back his points.
Did he remember the porcupine he'd pointed, then pounced on in a thick tangle, diving in only after I, unable to flush a bird in front of him, heedlessly whistled him his release? Could he recall another vet clinic, this one within sight of the Vermont- Canadian border? I'd carried him into that hospital as well, this time with quills laced across his muzzle, pincushioned to the roof of his mouth, even stuck in his eyes. As the doctor and her assistant wheeled Riley back into surgery, the receptionist handed me a bill. She said it was a precaution against skipping out on services rendered.
"But you've got my dog!" I said, pulling the checkbook out of a coat pocket.
"That doesn't cut it with some people who come here," she said wearily, and I felt my face growing hot as I filled out the check, as if she'd accused me of abandoning Riley to strangers.
I suppose it's a silly conceit to think that dogs dream. But whenever Riley dozed in my lap, I couldn't help but hope good things came back to him that way, the droves of September doves we enjoyed together, him standing next to me, shivering even in the late summer swelter, whining when birds bored in to feed. I thought of the wild pheasants he seemed to almost will into holding, the roosters he ferried in on the retrieve, his head tilted back, eyes shining.
Sometimes it would occur to me, holding him against the night, even as sleep claimed me - All of them, every one, were Riley's birds.