Chapters, Part One

November, 1988

My eyes snap open, and I stare at the ceiling for a moment as I try to get my bearings. It doesn’t take long. A chorus of gentle snoring reverberates in each ear, accompanied by warm breath on my neck. I turn my head to the left, and the warm breath is replaced by a cold, wet nose prodding gently. I’m home in bed, and it’s…

4:27 am. Damn, time to wake up.

I don’t bother to turn my head away. There will only be another cold wet nose over there, and that one licks, too. Instead, I roll out of bed and pad over to my stereo, and turn it off. After years of sleeping through alarm clocks, I have finally discovered something that works: put my stereo on an appliance timer, and turn the volume to ten. After a week of being rudely yanked from my slumber by the local rock station, and not a few angry complaints from my neighbors at the marina, I find myself waking several minutes before my alarm goes off. It’s a powerful thing, conditioning.

I turn back to the bed. Sprite is already up, sitting inquisitively on the edge of the bed, head cocked, regarding me intently. For her part, Jazz lifts a lazy head from the pillow, blinks balefully at both of us, and plops her head back onto the pillow. She grumbles, deep in her throat, in what any dog person would recognize as disgust.

“Morning people,” is the human translation, and I know that she’s grumbling about Sprite, not me. Were it not for the puppy, and the day it is, Jazz and I would still be in bed, safely ensconced beneath the covers until well after daybreak.

“What’s with the innocent look?” I grunt at Sprite, mockingly stern. “You chew another gun stock while I was asleep?” Her ears droop, and her head lowers.

“It’s okay, Sprite,” I chuckle, leaning over with my hands on my knees. “I’m not mad any more. Nor am I mad about my belt, my boots, the couch leg, the rug by the door…”

By way of reply, Sprite launches herself from the bed like a released spring, landing on the back of my head and shoulders. Her momentum carries her over my back and onto the counter behind me, where she scrabbles madly for footing before tumbling in an ungainly heap on the floor.

“Dog,” I laugh aloud, shaking my head in consternation, “either you’re going to learn some house manners soon, or we’re both going to need sedatives.”

Sprite ignores me, madly dashing around my studio apartment in a headlong, adrenaline-fueled pinball circuit of destruction. Her path takes her to the back door, turning over her food bowl as she goes, across my desk chair, a kamikaze leap to the couch, off the arm of the couch to the front door, pausing just long enough to growl fiercely and bark at my waders and blind bag, around behind my knees, whacking the open door to the stereo cabinet, and then to the back door again… the loop gets ever faster, and ever more haphazard, finally culminating with a leap onto the bed, skidding in a tangle of bedcovers right into…

… Jazz, who with a flash of teeth and a menacing snarl, calms the puppy down as well as I could ever hope. Cowed, Sprite hops from the bed and bounds over to me, hoping to find a more willing playmate.

“Don’t look at me,” I laugh. “I’m barely awake myself.” I can’t fault the pup for being rambunctious. After all, she comes from a long line of forebears carefully bred for generations to be all gas, no brakes. That’s the way I like ‘em.

Tail wagging furiously, Sprite crouches in front of me, hind legs coiled, the muscles bulging under her glossy black coat. Even at four months old, she’s got the body of a conditioned athlete. Long and lean, hugely muscled haunches, face narrower and more refined than the classic block head of the show-bred Labs, her lines bespeak generations of careful breeding for desirable physical traits and temperament. She is built for function, not looks.

Her pedigree is littered with all the iconic names in field trialing; Choice, Cadillac Mack, Cody, Honcho… heck, if you go back far enough, even Super Chief. Whether she’ll ever realize her potential is another story. She’ll have a long way to go just to equal Jazz…

… who, come to think of it, never realized her potential, either. I watch as she slowly crawls out of bed, creeping forward until she can put her front feet on the floor, then dragging her withered hindquarters off the bed behind her, almost as an afterthought.

It was a training accident, right before her fourth birthday. They said she’d never walk again, but they didn’t know Jazz. As it was, we had to retire her from active competition, but that didn’t stop her from being the hottest retriever in any man’s duck blind. Even at half-speed, she was faster than most.

I grimace as I watch her hobble to the door. The hitch in her stride was less painful to watch back when I knew it didn’t cause her pain. Now, I’m not so sure. Sprite, seeing Jazz up and about, takes it as an invitation to play, and focuses her disgustingly fresh, early-morning puppy energy on the older dog. Jazz growls warningly, but Sprite pays no heed. Her pinball circuit starts anew, with Jazz as its epicenter.

I let her romp for a bit, willing to put up with a little rambunctiousness, until she collides with Jazz, knocking her over.

All right, enough.

“SIT!” I bellow fiercely, my anger surprising us both. Sprite screeches to a halt and plants her ass on the tile with an audible thump. Jazz, smart enough to know I’m not angry with her, just scrambles laboriously to her feet and hobbles to the door. I open the door and let her outside, watching her squat in the grass, just off the flagstones.

Barely made it outside this time. Damn.

Behind me, Sprite is still sitting, frozen in the same position. Her ears are laid flat against her skull, her head lowered in submission. She briefly looks at me, and then glances away, nervously licking her chops.

“It’s okay, Sprite,” I sigh, adopting a gentler tone. I kneel in front of her, taking her head in my hands and pressing my forehead to hers. I scratch her roughly behind the ears and cuff her on the head gently. She responds by licking my face and gently nipping at my hand.

“All right, dog,” I chuckle, getting up and pointing to the open door. “Go do your business.”

Happily, she bounds outside after Jazz, skidding around the privacy fence and disappearing from sight. Shaking my head, I shut the door behind her and go through my gear one last time. Hip boots, blind bag, gun, duck calls, honey buns, plenty of shells…everything is as it should be.

Well, almost everything.

On second thought, I remove one box of shells from my bag and put them back in my gear locker. I’m not going to be shooting that much this morning, anyway. I dig through the assorted detritus on the bottom shelf of the locker, finally find what I was looking for, and stash it in the side pocket of my blind bag.

Ten minutes later, I’m dressed, and I quickly fill my Thermos with hot water from my coffeemaker and dump in double the recommended number of packets of instant cocoa. I’m the only guy I know who has a coffeemaker, who doesn’t drink coffee. Works great for heating water for hot chocolate, though. A chorus of barking dogs tells me that Jazz and Sprite have woken the others, and I quickly step out the back door to silence the racket.

When my brother owned this place, he did it with one whistling crack of a bullwhip. Me, I prefer to let the tone and volume of my voice do the same thing. If he were here, he might say that it’s easier to quiet six dogs than twenty, but I have my own way of doing things.

And soon enough, my own way of doing things will have all these kennels filled again, and I still won’t need a bullwhip to quiet the barking, because I’m better than Terry was. At least, that’s what I tell myself. My brother may disagree, but more likely he’d say that the comparison is pointless. I’m supposed to be taking the MCAT and applying to medical schools right now, not playing Peter Pan trying to revive a failed business with a has-been dog and a never-was puppy.

My career choice isn’t a popular one with my family right now, but that’s okay with me. My family hasn’t been popular with me for years. The only thing that hurts is the distance between me and my brother. I’m used to being the arrogant brother to my sisters, or the cold and distant son my parents thought they had.

What I’m not used to is being a disappointment to my brother. He practically raised me. I would have thought he knew me better.

But that’s okay too, I tell myself. Today is the opening day of duck season, 1988, and for the first time since I was thirteen, I’m at peace with my life. I’m going duck hunting this morning, and all is right with the world.

Well, almost everything.

Because today, also for the first time since I was thirteen, I’m going hunting without Jazz.

**********

She was more than just a showcase dog. She was a family pet, like Roxy and Velvet before her, but Jazz was the first one with the potential to win championships. She was supposed to be the one that made Terry’s career, that one that brought him recognition as a top trainer.

All those hopes ended in a leap off a tall bank in Escalon, California, in the summer of ‘85. When she came home, she wasn’t the same dog, and Terry wasn’t the same man.

Or perhaps he was, and I had never really known him, either. One way or the other, his dreams of a career withered along with Jazz’s legs, having given up on dog training long before he officially closed the doors of this place.

He enrolled in college, discovering his talent for prose, taking the same joy from shaping words into ideas that he’d once taken from molding a raw puppy into a polished hunter. He’d be a writer one day, and perhaps after the publication of his third or fourth novel, he’d take a faculty position at the university as a writer in residence. Or write more novels. He had the talent.

For a brief time, we were both students at the same university; he majoring in English literature, me in biology. We were never closer, and I had no doubt that he was proud of his little brother.

All that ended when I dropped out of school.

I started working Jazz again, entered her in a few hunting retriever tests, and re-opened this place. Six months later, I bought Sprite, having realized that if I was going to make a name for myself in this sport, it wasn’t going to be with a dog someone else had trained – even if everything I knew about dog training I had absorbed while watching her develop. You might even say we went to school together, Jazz and I.

One day, perhaps I’ll go back to school. I’ll finish up my junior year, take the MCAT, find a medical school somewhere. I’ll be a doctor, and perhaps then my brother the writer will speak to me again.

Then again, maybe he won’t. Maybe I won’t speak to him, because, well… fuck him. I’m good at this, and if he can’t be proud of me for that, then I don’t need his love or his approval. I’ve got the love of his dog, and that’s all I need. Her loyalty is not fickle.

Jazz has been there for every hunt, every field trial, every training session, and she’s never let me down – even when she’s embarrassed me in public. You can’t blame the Ferrari when you’re not enough driver to handle her properly, after all.

Outside, she’s romping in the yard with her successor. They’ve found a training bumper somewhere, and Jazz is playing keep away from Sprite, keeping her at bay with guile and, when necessary, sheer intimidation. Jazz is still the Alpha bitch at this kennel, and every dog here knows it.

I briefly toy with the notion of bringing her along again. Looking at her now, it’s obvious she still has plenty of steam, and God knows I’d rather not bring a green puppy, barely obedience trained and not yet even steady to wing and shot, to the blind on opening day…

… but it’s not now that I’m thinking of, but later. Later, after a full day of hunting, even in weather as mild as late November, when the day will end with me carrying my dog to the truck because she’s too weak to climb in by herself, having left everything she had in the duck blind. Later, when she’ll lie on the couch like a dead thing, too tired to even get down to eat. Later, when every move will bring a painful yelp, made all the more wrenching for me knowing that, if I asked, she’d be back in the blind the next morning.

As much as I love my dog, I’ll not ask that of her again, even if it means facing my betrayal in her eyes as I leave her behind.

And so I paw through my blind bag yet one more time, taking longer to hose down the kennels than it should, schlepping my gear to the truck with all the enthusiasm of a misbehaving child sent to the hedge to pick his own switch.

When I open the truck door, Sprite leaps in effortlessly, skidding across the seat into the passenger door with a thump. Jazz aims lower, for the floorboards, and still manages to drag her legs on the sill as she gets in.

“Not today, Jazz,” I say softly, hating myself for the catch in my voice. “Come on girl, let’s go back inside.” I snap my fingers and turn to go, but she doesn’t follow. She’s still sitting in the floor of my truck, looking at me with confusion.

Don’t make me do it this way, Jazz. Please.

“Jazz. Heel,” I command more firmly, taking her collar and dragging her gently out of the truck. With leaden heart I lead her back to the office and lock her inside, assiduously avoiding the look in her eyes as the door closes in her face.

Sprite tentatively nuzzles my face as I climb back into the truck, licking at the salty tears gathering at the corner of my eyes. “Little one,“ I sigh warningly as I start the truck, “you better be frickin’ spectacular today.”

**********

In duck hunting parlance, I’m a mudpuppy, one of those guys that spends the majority of his time hunting flooded rice fields. I hunt in far northeast Louisiana, close enough to the state line that a heart-shot cripple can, and often does, lock his wings and sail into Arkansas. The fields I hunt belong to a training client, the owner of Sprite’s littermate, in fact. This early in the season, he and his buddies will be hunting other fields, proven blinds that produce a lot of birds. This blind is brand new, and I have the entire place to myself.

It’s a bit different than I’m used to, this being a mudpuppy. There are no flooded river bottoms, no rafts of acorns carpeting the water beneath a quiet cathedral of pin oaks, no pre-dawn runs up the river into the teeth of a north wind, navigating the fog-shrouded channel by the dim glow of a bow light. Compared to carefully wading the cypress sloughs, where every submerged root threatens to make you float your hat, sitting in a dry pit blind seems almost like cheating.

On the other hand, I have an unfettered view of the horizon, where the plum-colored bruise of night sky fades slowly to pink, and God whispers words of healing hidden in the whistling of wings overhead. There is a moment – just a brief one, but nonetheless profound for all its brevity – in the pre-dawn stillness where the stars and the sun coexist in the same sky, where the stars wink their goodbyes over one shoulder while the sun bids me good morning with a kiss of warmth on the other.

You don’t get that view in the flooded timber. Dawn in the river bottoms comes like turning up a rheostat, where the darkness fades from all directions, showing you at first the spectral image of the canopy above you, slowly bringing the trees into stark relief, and then suddenly it’s just… daylight. It’s almost as if, instead of a gentle wash from starlight to sunrise, God instead calls reveille, His bugle the thunder of guns in the distance and the screech of wood ducks through the timber.

Either way, if I don’t hurry, I’m going to miss it.

I park my truck in front of the camp, hustle my gear over to the four-wheeler, and fire it up. Sprite noses around the yard, investigating new smells, and I call her over and pat the rear cargo rack. “Kennel,” I command, and obediently she loads up, installing herself in Jazz’s customary position, standing on the rack behind me, chest pressed against my back and head resting on my shoulder as we hurtle down the farm roads toward my blind, dust clouds billowing in our wake. Give it another six weeks, and those dust clouds will be replaced by rooster tails of mud from beneath my tires, and the trip will seem twice as long. Biting January winds tend to do that to boat runs and ATV rides.

An abandoned tractor tire overgrown with weeds looms out of the darkness, and a rabbit bolts down the road, just at the edge of my headlights. Sprite shifts her weight behind me, and, too late, I hit the brakes. She bails off the ATV in one fluid leap, in hot pursuit of the darting cottontail.

“NO, HERE!” I bellow, and reluctantly she abandons the chase, casting a longing glance over her shoulder as if to say, “Aww, you’re no fun.”

“Ducks, not rabbits,” I tell her sternly, patting the cargo rack behind me. “Now load up.”

Obediently, she jumps up behind me, but I can tell from her body language that she’d rather run than ride. Her muscles are corded with tension, and she’s teetering on the fine edge of balance, ready to jump at the first cue from me that such a leap will be tolerated.

Oh, what the hell. Let her run alongside. Sprinting the rest of the way to the blind might take some of the edge off anyway.

“Fine,” I sigh resignedly as I slow down yet again. I lean to my right, out of her way, and wave at the darkness around us. “Go play!”

I barely have “play” past my lips before she launches herself off the ATV, snuffling around in the tall weeds on the edge of the dusty road. I pull away, slowly at first until I know she’s following, then picking up speed. She keeps pace with me all the way to the blind, muscles rippling beneath her glossy coat, not even breathing hard. Her stride is long, fluid, effortless. The damned dog can probably run thirty miles an hour for another couple of miles.

But the blind is right here, not three hundred yards down the side levee. I stop the Honda in the weeds alongside the road, and quickly begin unloading gear. Legal shooting time is only minutes away, and we’re running behind. Sprite finally notices that she’s in a race by herself, and circles back, running circles around me as I hustle to the blind.

I drop my gear in the weeds at the water’s edge, clamber down into the pit, and pull my 870 in after me. Blind bag comes in next, stowed on the bench seat beside me, and finally I call to Sprite. She’s been investigating the decoy spread while my attention was diverted, and favors me with a muddy rice field shower as she shakes the water from her coat. Grimacing and wiping my face with one hand, I snap the D ring in her collar to the chain welded to the front wall of her dog box.

I hastily load my shotgun and sit the rest of the box of steel shot on the shelf that runs the length of the blind. My 870’s barrel fits into one of the notches cut into the front lip of that shelf, and my Thermos cup of hot chocolate goes right next to my shells. I dig a honey bun out of my blind bag, take a couple of bites, and hold the rest out for Sprite. She regards the treat impassively for a few moments, and then, like a striking snake, snaps the rest of the honey bun out of my hand and inhales it in one gulp. No matter how many times I’ve seen her do it, I still can’t get used to seeing a dog move so fast.

As the horizon starts to pinken over my right shoulder, I pull the blind flaps closed, and dig through my blind bag for the item I stashed in there as an afterthought this morning. I sit it carefully on the shelf in front of me, taking care not to spill its contents, and reach up to scratch Sprite’s ears as we both listen to the world awaken around us.

“Birds oughta be coming soon, little one,” I whisper. “I hope you’re ready for this.”

Sprite answers with a shudder and a soft whine, and rests her muzzle on my left shoulder as we face East, watching God paint the sky though a curtain of dewy spider webs and switch cane.

The only thing missing is Jazz.

**********

The first duck of the morning takes us by surprise, the whistling of wings overhead the only warning of his approach. He glides over the blind from right to left, almost close enough to touch, swinging past the edge of my decoy spread and hooking back sharply into the wind before I can even raise the call to my lips. A few flat, atonal quacks identify him as a drake gadwall, and his feet barely touch water before I throw the flaps and shoulder my 870.

There is an infinitesimal moment of recognition between us as he realizes his mistake, knows the black, shadowy square on the levee for what it is. It may be opening day of duck season in Louisiana, but these ducks have been shot at, and called to, all the way from the prairies of Manitoba. By the time they get to the mouth of the Mississippi flyway, there are few stupid ones left.

The moment runs by in slow motion as his wings flare and beat downward in one powerful thrust, the gray primary feathers seemingly pushing the water away in twin depressions, one on either side, launching him from the surface of the water as if spring-loaded, trailing droplets of silver behind him as he claws for altitude, a second wing beat, then a third and a fourth…

… until he rises above the skyline, secondary feathers glowing like angel wings in the waxing dawn. I pick him up with the barrel, the front bead a hazy afterthought as I swing through and pull…

… and just like that he crumples, my slide runs back and forward again, spitting out the empty hull in a brilliant green arc and bringing another 1 ¼ ounces of steel #4 shot back into battery. My ears report the hollow clatter of the empty brass against the steel wall of the blind a full second before gravity reclaims the drake in a mighty splash. I stand there with my gun at port arms, replaying the moment in my mind as I watch the first duck of the season bob belly-up in the decoys, waiting for my dog to…

… Shit, I forgot to tell Sprite to mark. Did she even see that?

A glance to my left tells me I needn’t have worried. Sprite is locked in, ears cocked forward, staring intently at the dead gadwall on the water. She shifts her weight forward slightly, rising off her haunches until the chain fastened to her collar reminds her that, no, it is not time to go. She whines softly and sits back down.

“Sit,” I say softly, more reminder than command, simply taking advantage of another opportunity to associate the word with the action. Smiling, I watch her for a few moments, then unclip the snap from the D ring on her collar. She remains motionless, a glossy black statue in profile, cocked and waiting for release.

“Sprite,” I say softly, and before the sibilant “esss” passes my lips, she is in the air, launching herself up and out of the sunken dog box, her own miniature pit blind welded onto the side of mine. One more bound, and she’s in the water and swimming, paddling so hard her front shoulders rise a couple inches out of the water. She lets out an exuberant little yip a split second before she reaches the dead gadwall.

Twenty seconds later and she’s back, and the sky is filling with birds. If I were hunting with Jazz, I’d stay in the blind and keep calling, trusting her to step back down into the dog box on her own and deliver the bird to hand. There have been many occasions when Jazz marked the fall of more ducks while still holding the bird from the last retrieve in her mouth.

But she ain’t Jazz, and she’s not even force-fetched yet. Better get out there and get the bird from her, Kelly.

But I barely have my foot on the first rung welded onto the side of the blind before Sprite is there. She steps into the dog box, sits down, and cranes her head over the inner wall of the blind, whining softly around the bird in her mouth.

“Good girl,” I croon approvingly as I take the gadwall from her.  I try to scratch her ears, but she snatches her head back impatiently, facing forward and scanning the sky eagerly as if to say, “Let’s dispense with the praise and the petting, mmmkay? There’s birds out there!”

Chuckling, I scan the sky and pick out a group of eight mallards to my right, squinting to pick them out against the rising sun. I put my call to my lips and blow a highball; eight loud, raspy and, hopefully, inviting notes.

The group seems to stagger in midair, and then, the back five peel off and circle around behind the blind, sliding along the levee a hundred yards behind the blind before swinging downwind to my left. I call again, just a few plaintive, insistent notes, the mallard hen equivalent of “Helloooo, sailor!”

I watch them turn, 200 yards out, working their way upwind inexorably back to my decoys, when an unexpected shadow flashes overhead and I hear the distinctive “Zzzzzrrreeeep,” of a drake mallard.

I freeze and cast my eyes upwards, right, left, desperately searching for the birds that just buzzed the blind. Were anyone else there to see it, they might say I look like a demented Jack Nicholson, with a major crick in his neck.

Well looky here, it’s the other three from that bunch! Welcome back!

The drake I heard calling is out front, over the decoys, heading swiveling this way and that as he searches for that tart little hen he heard calling to him so seductively just a few moments ago. If I wanted, I could toy with them a bit more, probably light the whole bunch in the decoys. Were it any other day, with my other dog, I’d probably do it.

But today it’s just me and Sprite, and she needs easy single retrieves, not the temptation of a dozen live birds swimming in the decoys thirty feet away. I throw the flaps, shoulder my 870 and swing on the drake, who at that moment had decided to light in the decoys and had his wings cupped and feet extended in preparation to do just that.

The sudden movement in front of him changes his mind, however, and I wait for him to climb out of my decoys before I put the bead on his breast and pull, sending him tumbling over backward in a cascade of white feathers. He lands at the outside edge of my decoy spread, thirty-nine yards away. I know it’s thirty-nine yards exactly, because he’s currently flapping around right next to the snow goose decoy I placed there as a range marker.

I do a lot of shooting during duck season, and I hold to the belief that magnum shells and heavier shot charges are not as effective as consistently putting the shot string into the same patch of sky as the duck. I shoot 2 ¾ inch shells, and I don’t take any shots beyond forty yards, period. Usually, the ranges are not even half that.

I cast a glance at Sprite to find her locked on, watching the drake intently. I reach to unclip the snap from her collar and…

… damn, she’s not even latched in. And yet she’s rock steady. Little one, you are certainly full of surprises.

“Sprite!” I bark sharply, and just like the first retrieve, her release command has barely passed my lips before she’s in the water and swimming strongly. I watch her close on the drake, only to see the duck flip over in the last ten feet and dive beneath the surface.

Sprite pulls up in confusion, swimming in circles where she had last seen the drake. She whines and yips in frustration. I start to get out of the blind, but change my mind.

No, let’s see how she handles it. Unless he grabs hold of a root and stays down, he’ll pop up close by. Let’s see if she can find him.

Sprite mills around uncertainly, whining softly, when the duck pops up in the open water, twenty feet away. She sees him come up, and takes off after him, kicking her swimming into a gear I didn’t know she had. When she’s barely three feet away, the duck dives again.

Sprite yips in frustration.

Okay Kelly, you’re expecting too much of a four-month-old puppy. Get your ass out of the blind and help your dog.

I sigh and grab a handful of marbles from the pouch I had stashed in my blind bag before I left the office; a contingency plan I had hoped I’d never use. By the time I’ve climbed out of the blind and fetched my 870, Sprite is back in the decoys, swimming in confused circles. She mouths a teal decoy, eager to bring something, anything, back to the blind.

NO, drop!” I call out, and she releases the teal block and resumes her frustrated yipping. The drake pops up twenty yards behind her, still in open water. On her second circle, she sees it and takes off in pursuit. Again, the bird teases her by diving when she’s barely three feet away.

I’ll just shoot the damned thing again the next time it pops up.

Before I get the chance, the drake pops up just a few feet from Sprite’s left shoulder. She’s turning right, her predator’s eyes focused forward, but something must have alerted her to its presence, because she immediately reverses course and lunges like a striking snake. The hapless drake has no more chance to escape than the honey bun she inhaled this morning.

She emerges from the water growling fiercely, holding the drake at the base of one wing as he furiously wing-whips her with the other. I chuckle as I gently pry the bird from her jaws, and for the first time, she acts like the inexperienced puppy she is. As I pull the bird away, she grabs the drake again, eager to play tug o’ war.

“Drop it,” I command firmly, pinching her mouth, just above her molars. Surprised, she spits the bird out and sits down, looking at me intently. This is delicate ground I tread, hunting with a puppy not yet force-fetched. I have precious little control over her, like trying to drive a Porsche with no brakes. Downshifting will slow you down only so much.

I turn my back to Sprite, carefully wring the drake’s neck, and holding it along with my 870 in my right hand, take Sprite’s collar in my left hand and point her toward the dog box.

“Kennel,” I command.

She does.

“Sit.”

She does.

I reach down and snap her collar to the chain in the dog box before I climb back into the blind. She’s too young and too inexperienced to be trusted. And on top of that, she ain’t Jazz.

“You ain’t Jazz,” I tell her loudly, surprising both of us with the spiteful accusation in my tone.

**********

More birds come, and more birds are felled, and Sprite picks them up with all the aplomb of a seasoned hunter. I take singles only, taking only the shots that would result in an easy fall, our front in the decoys. In between, I call to plenty of birds, even lighting a couple big groups of mallards in the decoys for minutes at a time. Sprite watches them with laser-like focus, yet sits so still, so placidly, that she may as well be carved from obsidian.

In the same situation, Jazz would have remained steady, but she’d have quivered and shook and whined, her desire to retrieve a barely caged thing, threatening to erupt at any second like steam from a pressure cooker. In contrast, Sprite’s line manners are impeccable. She never even rattles the chain snapped to her collar. She just waits, like a cocked hammer. There is no sense of the power she holds in reserve.

That is, until you trip the sear.

The last bird of the day is a lone pintail drake, a big bull sprig warily scoping out the decoys as if he suspects something is amiss. As pintails are wont to do, his first pass is the lowest, with each successive swing over the decoys progressively higher, until he’s on the ragged edge of shooting range.

Still, he turns every time I call. As long as he keeps looking, there may yet arise a chance to scratch him out of the sky. Every time he’s overhead, every time I’m looking at anything but his tail growing ever smaller, I will myself to remain perfectly still, tracking his flight only by moving my eyes. I track him as he swings downwind until he leaves my field of vision, then tuck my chin into my right shoulder and wait to pick him up in my peripheral vision as he swings back around.

On a couple of those passes, I notice Sprite doing the same thing. You can’t teach a dog such things, and I highly doubt she’s mimicking me. It’s just something a dog either knows, or doesn’t.

Apparently, Sprite just knows.

After five minutes of interminable teasing, I make up my mind to shoot. As the pintail swings from left to right over the outer edge of the decoys, I mount my shotgun and pick him up with my bead. He’s tall… so impossibly tall… sixty yards if he’s an inch. I swing through his streamlined, graceful head, one bird length, then two before I pull the trigger…

… and he staggers in midair, then starts to claw for altitude. I rack the slide, maintain my lead, and pull again. Shoot a third time, and lower the gun to port arms, staring as he wings away.

“Sorry, dog,” I apologize, looking over at Sprite. “It won’t be the last time I let you down with my shooting.” She ignores me, still staring at the departing pintail, then breaks her silence with a soft whine, and her ears raise another notch.

I look over my shoulder to see the pintail over the far edge of the field, wings locked and rapidly losing altitude. I gape, open-mouthed, as he splashes down in the far corner of the field and lies motionless on the surface.

Damn, talk about the Golden BB! And Sprite marked the fall…

I unclip the chain from Sprite’s collar and send her for the bird. Without even a glance to see which way she’s headed, I pack up my shells, screw the cap back on my Thermos, and unload my 870. I toss my blind bag onto the top of the blind, hang the birds on a duck strap and toss into onto the roof as well, and climb out of the blind.

By the time I’ve slung my shotgun and turned around, Sprite is halfway across the field, swimming unerringly toward the downed pintail. It’s over 400 yards to the corner of that field, and the sunlight on the water almost renders the bird invisible at dog’s-eye level. Still, she’s swimming as true as if she were on rails.

I watch her, musingly, for a few more seconds. Then I fish around in my pockets, kneel down and reach into the blind, and with no small amount of satisfaction, put each and every marble back into the pouch and leave them there on the shelf.

Looks like I may not need them after all.

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