Story by C.H. Daniels
It wasn’t easy having a bird dog and living in New Jersey. That statement is not likely to be a shock given pop culture depictions of Jersey’s urban industrial sites and the New Jersey Turnpike. As the most densely populated state in the nation, it is surprising there is any open space at all. Being home to an abundance of people—roughly nine million human residents—the place is unfortunately devoid of game birds but for the ones planted by the state’s stocking program. Of course, my dog Sam didn’t realize that. Those birds smelled just as wonderful to him as some strong-flying, wild cockbird that spent the past year of its life somewhere out west eluding coyotes, foxes, hawks and myriad other predators, and could run circles around most dogs. Sometimes Sam has even caught those pen-raised, East Coast versions of the wild bird himself. He considered that a bonus.
That first time I ventured into the New Jersey wilds in search of upland birds was an eye-opening experience. Wave after wave of orange-clad skirmish lines washed over the fields in pursuit of ring-necked pheasants. I just wasn’t ready for that kind of adjustment after years of hunting in the Midwest and western U.S. So, I swore it off.
However, these past few months I have been troubled by guilt every time I walk past Sam curled up on the floor. I haven’t been taking him out as often on my runs, resigning him to become the spaniel equivalent of a couch potato. Sometime during the course of the day, he will walk over and lay his head on my leg, tail slowly wagging and roll those brown eyes up at me questioningly. The guilt has been killing me. Growing up in a Catholic family, I thought guilt was the exclusive property of Catholic mothers. They could take some lessons from Sam.
Still, there comes a point when excuses wear thin. One morning the guilt proved stronger than the warmth of the bed.
The insistent bleating of the alarm cut through the patter of falling rain. It was early, my head ached, and I was very, very close to crawling back into my warm bed until a vision of Sam’s pleading eyes haunted me. Guilt is a powerful motivator. So, I packed everything up and set off, expecting little. The things you will do for your dog …
A full parking lot greeted us, and I could see various orange platoons fading into the clinging mist on their assault upon the fields in front of us. Sam’s eager panting urged me on, his halting steps impatient to get into the fields. We set off in the opposite direction of the crowds, hoping for some space to work. A patchwork of brambles and the occasional planted grain or sorghum, broken by tangled hedgerows, stretched out before me with, thankfully, no sign of skirmishers. Sam was already at work. His tail wagged furiously as he quartered ahead, nose buried in the undergrowth searching for that sweet scent of a bird. We might have been surrounded by the encroaching sprawl of the northeastern suburbs, but in this small gold, brown and russet oasis, he was in his element. And, I suppose, so was I.
For a short while, it felt as though this section of the fields belonged only to us. But that illusion didn’t last.
It was Sam who first noticed him—a solitary figure walking slowly along a path that would soon intersect ours. The man carried himself with an air of resignation, his shoulders slightly stooped and a forlorn countenance. Against my better judgment, I waited on him. The figure stopped at the intersection looking like a relic misplaced by time, a man who seemed to have wandered out of an old photograph, sepia-toned and slightly crumpled at the edges. A vintage hunting jacket, Filson if I were to guess, hung loosely on his wiry frame. The shell holders were loose and stretched, cotton well-worn, edges and seams frayed. His jacket was patched in at least one spot, and in his front right pocket was something that looked suspiciously like a harmonica. His boots were scuffed, but cleaned and oiled, as though he had prepared for this outing with the same care one might reserve for Sunday church. An old, well-used, but meticulously cared for Merkel over-under shotgun was cradled in the crook of his left arm. Beneath his faded orange cap, tufts of gray hair curled rebelliously, framing a face etched with lines—a patchwork of love and loss creasing his weathered skin.
Ignoring the voice in my head, I spoke. “Good morning,” I offered as he approached, his gait deliberate but unhurried. “Care to join us?” I didn’t know if he had ever hunted over a dog or how safe he was—there was a long litany of reasons to just move on rather than invite a stranger to share our morning. He hesitated for a moment, his eyes scanning the dog, as Sam impatiently paced and snorted, ready to dispense with the pleasantries and get back to work. Sam is a much more open and less suspicious companion than I, his only real qualification being that you are willing to get going and hunt. “I wouldn’t want to intrude,” he demurred.
“Are you sure?” I pressed. “Do you have a dog?”
“Well, no,” he admitted. “Are there more people with you?”
There were not, and against all reason I reiterated that he was welcome to join us.
“Well, two people could cover the field better than one,” he mused. Then he smiled and said almost to himself, “I think I will.”
The man introduced himself as Arthur.
Arthur wasn’t a man you could pin down easily. He was a widower who still wore his wedding ring as if it anchored him to something solid in a world that had grown perhaps less and less certain. He was no stranger to bird dogs, and a German shorthaired pointer named Leni had been his companion for more than a decade before she also had succumbed to time’s relentless march. “She was a good dog,” he said simply when I asked about her. “Better company than most folks.”
When he spoke, his voice was deliberate, unhurried and tinged with a rasp that brought to mind Bob Seger. Arthur watched Sam work with an intensity that at times bordered on a dissection, muttering observations under his breath like a tenured professor grading a thesis.
“Look at him, right on the bird. Always pressing, digging.” Sam busted a hen pheasant from the cover. “That’s a textbook flusher right there!” he exclaimed. Sam continued on with us in tow. Quartering close, tail beating arcs through the air like a furry metronome keeping time with the rhythm of the hunt and proximity of the quarry. “You’ve got yourself a fine dog there,” he said admiringly. His eyes were glued to Sam bulldogging his way through the cover, the cadence of the metronome now clearly indicating he was hot on the trail of a bird. The next pheasant was a cock bird, and it launched from the cover, presenting Arthur a clear shot. Arthur took advantage of the opportunity with the fluid precision of a practiced wing shot. Sam executed an impeccable retrieve and returned the bird to me. “He is a fine dog,” Arthur repeated, softly. I handed him the bird. “That’s something special,” he said quietly, eyes bright. “You don’t see work like that every day.”
He suggested Sam go down into the profusion of vines and briers blanketing a moist furrow running between the fields. “The birds like to hunker down in there, especially during rains.” Over three decades experience hunting these particular fields allowed Arthur to steer us around the crowds and to the best holding areas. After three more flushes and roosters now in both our game bags, his demeanor had transformed. He pointed out subtle traces of the past in the landscape that many would overlook, an old stone wall hidden beneath brambles, the faint outline of what had once been a farm road. Arthur’s memories and words painted vivid pictures of these fields as they had been decades ago: sprawling and untamed, alive with rabbits, pheasant, woodcock and the rare covey of quail. For me these fields were another curated patch of shrinking wildness beset by scarcity and suburban growth, a substitute for the real thing. But for Arthur they were echoes of a bygone era when such places were rather unremarkable in their ubiquity. When there was plenty. When there would always be plenty.
We paused at a jumble of logs at the edge of a boggy bottom offering a relatively comfortable place to sit and share a lunch. The distant bark of neighborhood dogs carried faintly through the autumn air. “This used to be prime habitat for woodcock,” Arthur recalled, wistfully peering into the cover. “I’d come here every October with my Leni. She’d work these edges like she was born for it. Which, I suppose, she was.” He reached out to give Sam a pat and a scratch. Sam paused for just a moment, but ever impatient to get going again, he moved off, nose down, greedily hoarding any scent he could find. Always searching. “He really doesn’t stop, does he?” A statement framed as a question.
“One-track mind,” I responded in an offhand manner as I pulled out my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“Hmm, I have been watching you two. You are selling it short, the way you work and move together.” His lunch was neatly wrapped in wax paper. A tin of Spanish mackerel and paprika, a couple saltines, plastic fork, napkins, small thermos and finally, a carefully wrapped, ornate silver teacup.
“He’s taught me more than I’ve taught him,” I admitted. “It’s a partnership.”
Arthur smiled faintly but did not respond immediately.
“You’re a tea drinker,” I said, stating the obvious, nodding at the cup.
“No. Coffee. The cup is my wife’s. She was the only person who ever understood why I’d rather spend my mornings chasing birds than reading the newspaper. Well, her and Leni, if you can count a dog as a person. This was her favorite teacup.” He never drank from it but said he liked to bring it with him—“just to keep her close.”
I finally made Sam lay down so we could finish our lunch. Arthur raised an eyebrow.
“Will he stay there?”
“As long as we don’t stay very long, yes.”
“We best get moving then,” he said, standing slowly with a low groan. The teacup was already tidily wrapped in a paper towel and the rest folded up neatly in the wax paper. “Let’s not keep him waiting.”
As we gathered our things, I found myself thinking about how quickly Arthur felt familiar—as though the hours had unspooled into years.
It is interesting that sometimes you can feel like you know strangers better than the friends or family you may have known for years. It may simply be because of a shared interest or fewer pre-conceived notions. Unlike the relation you have known since the day of your birth, the “stranger” is unencumbered by the weight of accumulated experiences or the expectations that go along with those experiences. Burdens needlessly weighing upon the revelations gained from being with and simply listening to another traveler on the same journey as you are from cradle to grave. Same journey, different paths.
As we walked together through the fields, Arthur continued to reveal himself in bits and pieces. At one point, he paused to delight in a flock of snow geese that had settled on the far shore of the lake we were hunting along, savoring the scene. A dusting of white dots scattered along the shore, and a noisy chorus of hoarse honks, odd quacks and whistles carried clearly across the open water mingled with Arthur’s raspy chuckles. Arthur was in the moment and that made me happy as well.
As the afternoon waned, we approached an impossibly thick tangle of roses, blackberries and brush at the end of the last hedgerow. As Sam circled downwind, he pivoted as if pulled on a wire and darted into the thicket, his powerful back legs churning to propel a canine wedge into the seemingly impenetrable wall of thorns. The thicket erupted with rattling wings and a hail of twigs and autumn leaves as a lone rooster disgorged from the chaos in front of Arthur. Upon the retort of Arthur’s well-worn Merkel, Sam emerged from the storm of debris as if it was no big deal and made another textbook retrieve. Which meant, of course, he trotted right past Arthur and delivered the bird cleanly to my hand. I handed the bird to a beaming Arthur. “Maybe I should get another dog,” he said quietly, almost to himself. I glanced at him but said nothing—there was no need to fill the silence that followed.
We parted ways at the edge of the parking area. Arthur cut a different figure now than he had when he emerged like some forlorn wraith from the mist this morning. His posture seemed straighter, his step lighter. He thanked me for inviting him along but insisted it was Sam who deserved most of the credit. “He reminded me why I loved this so much,” he said before turning back toward the path from which he’d come.
I watched him disappear into the distance as I shed my vest and gear and packed it away. Our chance encounter transformed what I had expected to be an uneventful morning into something far richer. I don’t know why his journey happened to intersect with mine, and I still can’t say what drove my uncharacteristic impulsive invite. I shook my head and picked up Sam’s water bowl. Sam abruptly sat and looked up at me expectantly. “Ok, kennel up!” and he launched up into the kennel in the back seat. “You are a fine dog,” I added softly, smiling.
On the drive home, the truck smelled faintly of wet dog courtesy of a tired but happy Sam lying in his kennel, methodically picking burrs from his shaggy fur. I remembered my father talking about the places where he had spent time in the field that are now airports, strip malls and developments. Now inside city limits, no longer “the country.” I considered whether this small patch of country that Arthur so clearly enjoyed will also be swallowed up in time. Maybe. But not today. Sam’s contented grunts slowed, easing into heavy breathing, almost a snore. I shared Sam’s contentment.
C. H. Daniels is an outdoorsman and storyteller who has been fortunate to have had a very fine dog show him our connection to the natural world—and to one another—with humility and, often, a laugh. Raised in southwest Pennsylvania, after more than 20 moves, he and his very understanding spouse have settled in north Georgia. You can learn more about his work at www.chdaniels.com.
