Dennis Anderson: A dog's motto: let no bird be left behind

Friday when autumn's chill finally arrived the dogs carried themselves with the carelessness of children. This was early. The morning was still dark and the kennel lights threw their beams faintly onto the pasture beyond. Through these, visible at first, then not, the dogs, Labradors each, black and yellow, scampered, their legs using up the tired grass in bounds. A new day.

Changing seasons are the province first of birds, which know precisely when to move on. Deer and other wildlife get the word in advance, too, as do horses, their hair growing longer with the shorter days. Maybe at summer's end all dogs also get an early wake-up. But among these, certainly, are dogs whose unique charge in fall is to bridge the wild with the domestic: to hunt.

My dad once had a black Labrador named Boze who was aware precisely when autumn arrived. A gathering of decoys in the garage or a canvas jacket arranged with a pair of boots near the back door might have been tipoffs. Sensing the cooler weather, accompanied so often by low pillows of gray clouds, Boze would see the decoys, boots and jacket, and whine and pace. Through him, for our family, other worlds took shape.

One morning Dad woke me up early and we piled Boze into the trunk of the company car. This was a Dodge with a push-button transmission, the equivalent, back then, of Detroit swinging for the fences. At the time, the croplands and plains near our North Dakota home appeared forever vacant, not far removed, by appearances, from the cruel winters of sod houses and horse-drawn plows. Into these lands that morning we tunneled, darkness on the margins of the car's headlights, snow slanting. Also we had our wooden decoys and dad's old Remington.

Carried in bags, the decoys were heavy. These were wooden models that dad had fashioned with a band saw over the past winter. The bodies of the fake birds were connected to their stakes, or "feet," with bolts and wing nuts, and when we arrived at our hunting ground, I spilled the decoys onto the ground, straightened the stakes and tightened the nuts. Then, in small stacks, I handed the decoys to Dad, who arranged them as he wanted in a cut cornfield not far from a refuge.

When the decoys were set we positioned ourselves downwind of them, lying in furrows, covering ourselves with waste cornstalks. Dad wore his canvas jacket with the collar turned up; I had on my school parka, boots and snow pants. I was too young to hunt, but I was along.

"The geese will fly early," Dad said. "On a morning like this, they'll be hungry."

The Dodge, parked on a distant gravel road, was covered by snow. Boze sat on his haunches alongside me, blocking the wind. I lay as low as I could, and buried my hands deeply into his heavy coat.

I said, "What happens if you shoot a goose and it falls back into the refuge?"Hunters aren't allowed in the refuge. We leave it there."

Daylight came grudgingly, as if being coaxed. Instead of a sun rise, a steely ambiance overtook us. I was cold. But when the birds started flying, advanced by their noisy calls and heavy wing beats, they drew my eyes toward the refuge, my heart pounding.

In time, a loose phalanx of geese struggled into the wind toward us, flying low. Dad blew his call. These were birds that had nested in the Arctic and, drawn now by the siren call of migration, were bound through the Dakotas, into Nebraska and Missouri and farther south still.

When Dad rose to shoot the first time, I barely heard the gunshot, muffled as it was by the wind. Squinting, I saw one bird catapult and fall, then another, each cartwheeling in evermore acute arcs before disappearing into the rough ground beyond.

Dad reloaded, looked for more geese and, seeing none, cast Boze for the downed birds, one by one.

Here, then, was the heart of the matter.

As if intuiting primordially his responsibilities, Boze had watched the advancing birds, heard Dad's calling, understood our need for stillness and camouflage, and made the connection between Dad's rising from the cut corn, the pop, pop, pop of his old Remington, and the slumping of the geese toward the plowed field.

Now, into the wind and snow, his focus was keen beyond measure. He, too, answered a call, dating to times when Newfoundland fishermen emptied their nets and occasionally lost fish overboard. The cur dogs they kept and bred, the first retrievers, would then jump into the frigid water to retrieve the lost bounty.

Covered in mud and ice, Boze retrieved the two geese and two more still. Dad wanted one final bird, and we waited and waited. Finally a specimen angled toward us and Dad rose to shoot. As he did, the goose caught an updraft and banked steeply back toward the refuge.

Dad fired once, then again and again. The last shot caught a wing, and the bird descended briefly before regaining altitude and struggling to a hard landing well inside the refuge.

Dad didn't like losing birds but what had happened had happened. We picked up the decoys. I collected the geese, two in each hand, and Dad threw the decoy bags over his shoulders. We leaned into the wind toward the car.

Boze walked with us a short distance. Then he sat down. When we finally noticed he wasn't alongside us, we were nearly to the car. Turning and seeing the dog now a hundred or more yards from us, Dad figured it wasn't worth the fight.

He raised his hand, giving Boze permission to pivot toward the refuge for the lost goose.

We were already in the car, the heater on, when Boze returned, the big bird in his mouth.

Dad spread a blanket over the backseat and allowed Boze to ride there on the way home, a rare treat.

That day so many years ago had been precluded weeks earlier by the chilly weather that signaled autumn's onset.

Just as Friday, two days ago, signaled the onset of the coming autumn.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@ startribune.com