Dennis Anderson: Appreciating the dogs of fall

Recently a man and I were talking on the man's patio at his home, which sits beside a creek full of trout. The man is older and failing somewhat in health, and not far away was buried one of his dogs. The dog's gravesite had a headstone with her name engraved on it and the number of retrieves she had made in her lifetime. The number was an estimate, but the man thought if anything it was low, as he had traveled with the dog many times to Argentina for big shoots of ducks and geese and doves.

"Fifteen thousand retrieves," the headstone said.

"She was a great dog," the man said.

As he spoke, a Labrador sat by his side. This was a good dog and handsome and visitors to the man's house variously petted the animal and tossed a ball for him into the creek. Back and forth the dog went, bounding from the stream bank into the creek and returning soaking wet with the ball. The man loved the dog. But the dog was getting older, and the man worried that the dog might die before he did, in which case he would bury him alongside his other dog, near the creek full of trout.

The man looked around. We were drinking lemonade and the sun shone high in the sky. Waving a hand, he talked about the economy and politics, the grand sweep of things.

Then he said: "I don't want that to happen. I don't want to die without a hunting dog by my bed."

• • •

This was at the turn of the last century through, say, the 1950s, and the Mississippi corridor held a lot of ducks then, too -- nesters and particularly migrators, including vast flights of bluebills and canvasbacks, the latter drawn there by the wild celery that grew flush in the river's backwaters.

Around these ducks arose a rich waterfowling legacy. Minnesotans built specialized duck hunting boats as unique and useful as any found in Chesapeake Bay or coastal Louisiana. Minnesota call-makers and decoy carvers were on the mark also, and their paraphernalia bore an artisan's touch. But perhaps nothing set Minnesota duck hunters apart more in the early days of duck hunting, or continues to set them apart today, than the high quality of their retrieving dogs and retriever trainers.

In the early days, Billy Wunderlich, who won two national championships, in 1951 and 1958, was among these good trainers, beginning his career as a young man in Winona. Tony Berger of St. Cloud was another gifted trainer who in 1955 won a national championship with Cork of Oakwood Lane, a Labrador whom the judge, Gene Starkloff, once described as "the most spectacularly stylish dog I have ever seen."

Notable retriever owners have lived in Minnesota also, including, among the early ones, the physician L.M. Evans of Sauk Rapids, who owned the female golden retriever Sheltercove Beauty and the male golden Beautywood Tamarack, both of whom were handled by the tireless Charles Morgan to national championships, one in 1944, the second in 1950.

And while duck hunting here isn't what it once was, Minnesota retrievers are perhaps better than ever.

Similarly, Dave Rorem (International Falls), Charlie and Yvonne Hays (Princeton), Darrell Frisbie (Montrose) and Joe DeLoia (Duluth) are but a sample of a phone book full of successful trainers who in recent times have fed and loved and worked their dogs with the dedication usually reserved for first-born children.

• • •

My favorite dog when I was a kid was a big black Labrador named Boze. In October and November he slept not in his kennel but in our house, on a rug near the back door, where he waited for Dad to wake my brother and me to go hunting.

This was in North Dakota, and in those autumn months on the plains near Rugby the wind often cascaded upon us in vast, frigid cyclones, beginning, we imagined, as far northwest as Edmonton, Alberta, then freezing entire legions of Canadians in places such as Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, before exacting atonement, collectively, from everyone in North Dakota for sins we couldn't quite remember committing but without complaint accepted responsibility for nonetheless. Back then, wiper blades were made of cheap rubber and hardened quickly in the cold, and on those still-dark mornings my dad barely had us out of town before the windshield was caked with ice.

You can't get enough of this when you're a kid. The sensation is euphoric, the morning so cold and the prospects so good of big greenheads materializing, wings cupped, backpedaling, over cut corn. Shots would ring out, the sound muffled by the strong wind, and the old Remington would buck against Dad's shoulder. Mallards cartwheeled from the sky, and soon Boze angled sleekly into the corn for the big ducks that now lay wildly askew on the frozen ground.

Friday morning I tossed a couple of dummies for the old dog, Teal. In his prime Teal cleaned up in the field. Now he sleeps a lot and hugs and pretty much enchants everyone he encounters.

Then I freed the youngest dog, Chance, just 15 months old and electric with possibility.

Or so in these situations you want to believe.

At 9 a.m. Saturday the Minnesota duck season will open to little fanfare, birdwise. But hunters will nonetheless flood the hinterlands with their retrievers or perhaps other sporting breeds, maybe setters or pointers or spaniels, and in these last cases quest not for mallards or teal or wood ducks but for grouse, rails or snipe.

In the end, the exact type of dog a hunter owns and trains and shoots over doesn't matter.