Intro to dog training video series.

Just An Old Leather Coat

Just An Old Leather Coat

             There was nothing strange about where I got it.  The old man that lived up the road died and since he went to my dad’s church and had no family, it fell to Mom and Dad to go through his things and distribute the good things to the needy in the area, including the hobos up under the trestle.  There were two piles, one for the good stuff and one for the dump or burn pile.  There it was right on top of the burn pile.  I asked Dad if I could have it and he said, “Sure, what did I want with it?”  I told him the truth.  I planned to cut out the sections that weren’t worn thin and cut them up for hinges on my rabbit pens.

            Somehow I know it would have been different if I had just carried the coat home but it seemed easier to wear it.  In spite of the obvious miles on it, the leather wasn’t really all that worn but the lining was translucent thin at all the wear points and had been carefully repaired several times by a loving woman’s hand.  The coat itself had obviously been rubbed many times with bear-grease and bees-wax.   It was way too big for me but it seemed to wrap me in more than material.  It immersed me in a feeling; an aura of condensed forests and mountain streams distilled in ageless wisdom.  It moved me.

            The next day I was home alone, as was usually the case, and on the way out the door instead of grabbing my usual play coat I put on the old leather one.  I went down back and fed my menagerie, as my Dad called it, and let Duke, my six month old setter, out of his kennel.  My plan was to head up back and see if I could get Duke on a grouse but something drew me in another direction.  It pulled me back to the old man’s house a mile or so up the dirt road and into the back yard.  There under an apple tree with the ground strewn with small apples and some grouse droppings I could see what looked like a fairly fresh dog sized grave.

            I remembered what Mom and Dad had said that after his wife died the only thing keeping him going was that little dog and once she died he just threw the switch and checked out.  He waited; he didn’t want her to die on her own without him.

            Standing there by that tiny grave I had a reverent feeling come over me.  And then I noticed that Duke wasn’t tearing around like his usual crazy self but was sitting calmly beside me.  I don’t remember ever hearing the dog’s name but suddenly I knew it was Molly.  “Molly” I said “I don’t know much about how these things work but I reckon’ you guys are all together now and maybe all things considered that’s a good thing”.

            On the way home I thought about the old man.  I didn’t really know anything about him.  I would see him and his wife at church every Sunday.  They would walk across the back of the sanctuary and up the far aisle to the third row from the front and sit reverently waiting for the service to start.  Sometimes as we sang some old hymn or another, tears would move slowly down his suntanned cheeks and he would wipe them away with knarred hands.

            He was always friendly to me but I didn’t think much of it as everyone was always friendly to the preacher’s kids.  When he heard I got a bird dog pup he would always ask about him.  If I knew then, what I know now, I would have taken Duke up to see him.  Why is wisdom always wasted on the old?

            On the way home that day, I felt something in an inside pocket of that old coat that I hadn’t noticed before and discovered a small brass bell with a tone you could hear a long way off.  But more importantly, over time, I discovered that when I wore that coat I had more fun.  I had more patients with people and the dogs I trained.  In fact, the shenanigans a dog would pull didn’t upset me anymore.  I actually got a charge out of them.  When I wore that coat I just seemed to know things I didn’t know I knew.  I was a better fisherman; I enjoyed mountain mornings when no one else was awake yet.  I could name stars after only looking them up once.  I can’t really describe it but life just felt richer when I wore it.

            In a couple of years I had grown into it and mom stopped bugging me to wear a coat that fit me.  I mostly only wore it in the woods so it never really was an issue.  I wore it off and on for twelve years.  Then one day I drove my old pick up to the abandoned house the old man left behind.  I put that brass bell back in that inside pocket.  I dug a hole next to where I remembered Molly being.  Then I wrapped Duke in that old leather coat and laid him in that hole and covered him with damp dark earth.  I was never so sad before or since but in spite of that I felt that old coat would help Duke find his way to a man no longer old that would know how to take care of a good dog until I got there.  

Bread upon the water

Bread upon the water

            It was Christmas Eve in the year of our lord 1999.  Loneliness had settled in like a cold winter fog and lay heavy on my sole.  I lived a great life; a life to be envied.  I was the shooting sports manager on a huge ranch in the high desert of north western Colorado.  I had a brand new log house all to myself high up in the mouth of a coulee behind the strawberry creek.  I was constantly surrounded by all manner of wild life.  I had a weasel that ran back and forth on the railings of my back porch; I had seen both bears and lions as close as the back paddock, the last time my son flew out we counted seventy two mule deer between the house and the main lodge.  All this against a back drop of unbelievable majestic splendor.  But it was Christmas and spending it alone hurt deep in my bones.

             When I awoke on Christmas morning the absence of sounds was deafening.   No sound of coffee drip, drip, drizzling into the pot.  No sound of young voices calling “Dad is it time yet”.  No sound of the gentle breathing of a good woman sleeping worn out from weeks of making so much out of so little.  I had no strength to push the button and fill the house with Christmas Music.  Even the sound of my own footsteps fell dead on the Hickory-wood floor.  Outside there were no heavenly hosts proclaiming good tidings of great joy. I dressed for the chill of the morning, heated up a cup of yesterday’s coffee and headed outside to split and stack some wood.  I figured to stay busy and keep the blues from totally taking over the day.  Mother Teresa said the United States is the most impoverished nation in the world because we have the poverty of loneliness.     Although I had never seriously considered it for myself I could understand why the suicide rate spikes this time of year.

            I had worked about an hour when I noticed a red F350 tuning off the main road and coming up my driveway.  To put this in perspective my drive way hit the main road just after it turned to dirt.  My drive was just under a mile long and consisted of rock blasted from a nearby rock ledge and was a bit rough to say the least.  In short no one just happened to be passing by; you had to get there from somewhere else. 

            Western ranchers come in all shapes and sizes but you can always tell one when you see it and this man fit the bill to a tee.  He hadn’t sent the hired hand he had come himself.  He took a few steps in my direction and said “merry Christmas, are you Doug”?  I acknowledged that I was.  “What are you doing for Christmas dinner”?  I told him I was planning to heat up some chili.  He told me that that just wasn’t going to work and I would be eating at his house.  He gave me directions and said to come around twelve and come hungry and that we would probably eat around two.

            It took me about twenty minutes to get to his place so he hadn’t come from just around the corner.  I had mixed feeling about eating Christmas dinner with strangers but figured it couldn’t be any worse than my own company.  The house was a western ranch house; not to be mistaken for the plastic version we have here in the east.  There were something over twenty people inside laughing and joking like my family always did before my parents sold the homestead.  Children of all sizes ran around filled with the excitement of the season.  And the air in the house smelled wonderful.  This year will be sixty seven Christmases for me and that one ranks in the top five.  This will be the thirteenth Christmas Pat and I have spent together and you can’t be around pat at Christmas time without catching the fever and I thank God for her and my many other blessings but sometimes even I forget that there are others all around us that do not have the joy of the season.

            I am not trying to preach here but this year can we remember the reason for the season?   When we take our own on a holiday hunt can we invite some boy or girl who has no one to take them?  Can we share the abundance God has trusted us with?  Can we not spend so lavishly on our own and maybe slip a little cash in an envelope to share with a needy stranger?  Too all my friends who spend time surrounded with God’s creation can we take time to reflect on who he is and let that be reflected in how we approach this wondrous time of year?        

            

Magpies Packrats and Writers

Magpies Packrats and Writers

             They were on the deck overlooking the valley.  The air between them was electric.  She took off her earrings and laid them on the table beside her and let her hair down.  Without a word they went inside.  The magpie came out of nowhere, picked up an earring and headed into the scrub oak.  He already had a hiding place picked out in the crotch of a tree and he hid it quickly and flew away hoping his actions had not drawn the attentions of another thief.  He would come back later and take his treasure out of hiding to admire the way it twinkled in the sun.  He had many such treasures hidden here and there.

             When I first went out west I met a historian whose job was to find packrat nests and search them for trinkets of historical value.  He had found many such items, brass buttons from Cavalry uniforms, trade beads carried west to entice Indians, jewelry, shards of pottery, and on and on.  When he died he left behind hundreds of tiny boxes whose labels corresponded with the numbers on a huge map.  He also left behind a mountain of notes that no one would read and hundreds of packrats feeling violated.

            As a writer I am like a magpie or a packrat collecting the shiny experiences of life and storing them away.  For some I keep notes, most are stored in my memory, but some can only be hidden in the heart.   I could label these under people, places, and things but they are almost always a combination.  There are thousands of them and I bring them out as needed to complete an article or start a story.  And then there are those I don’t expose to the public because they are to personal but they are there anyway shaping how I feel and how I write.

            Some are just trinkets of humor or beauty.  Some are lessons learned.  Some are the unique characters I’ve met in the backwaters of life.  It’s funny what may bring them out of hiding and onto paper.  We shine them up, change the names to protect the guilty and string them together with poetic license.   In thinking about this article I remembered three totally unrelated gems I picked up in the out of the way places I love.

            The house had stood well over a hundred years of miserable mountain weather and  just enough spirit filling mountain mornings and summer sunsets.   It had been built by her granddaddy as far up in the hollow as you could go before you ran into the ledges.  She stood tall and strait on the boot worn front porch.  A typical mountain women, a flower sack dress hanging strait on her gaunt frame, her coal black hair streaked with gray up in a bun and her green eyes bright as a sparrows looking down on the valley floor far below.  It’s as if she had forgotten I was there.  I had stopped in after fishing to say hi and we had spent some time catching up and we had drifted into a peaceful silence.  Her work hardened hands cradled a hot cup of coffee bringing heat to her arthritic joints.  The deep creases in her face spoke of life.  She had lost her oldest when the brakes went out of a logging truck, and her youngest daughter to the neon lights and drugs of the big city.  Her grandchildren brought her joy beyond measure.   She seldom complained but she did tell me once that those Ritis boys were no dam good and that Arthur was the worst of the lot.  She kept an eye on the strait- away before the first push up the mountain and when her husband’s old truck appeared briefly though the trees she went inside to start dinner and I got in my truck and headed back to town.

            Jean had his shirt off and you could see a half dozen zipper scars of various shapes and sizes on his upper torso and I knew he had a couple of doosies on his legs.   He had one huge scar that started at the belt line on his right side and ended just under his ribs on the left where an unknown bull named Bad Moonshine ended his bull riding career.  The reason he had his shirt off was because he was freaking out over a hornet that wouldn’t leave him alone and he was using it to swat it away.  Fear is fear and most of the time the size of the critter or the circumstance isn’t necessarily proportional.

            In the desert several miles west of the little town of Maricopa stands a beautiful little Spanish style church.   I was invited there to preach.  They told me to come early as they always got together and made breakfast at the church on Sunday.  Out here miles from nowhere the parking lot was full.  In the nooks and crannies of the desert live a very unique conglomeration of people from all walks of life and the congregation was made up of a wonderful patchwork of humanity.   By the time it was time for me to speak I had learned that the land the church stood on belonged to a tiny Mexican woman in her mid-fifties.   Her and her husband lived in a tiny house in the back of the property.  Several people insisted that she tell me how she built the church.  She told me in simple humble terms how she and her husband had no work and no money for food when God told her to go into the desert and build a church.  By the time her story was finished I wondered why I was there.  What could I tell these people about faith or obedience or love?

            I heard a preacher the other day say when we get to the other side we won’t remember anything from earth.  I hope that’s not true because I have been blessed with the best of memories and the magpie in me would like to keep them and bring them out every once in a while for the joy of it.

           

        

Sycamore Trees

Sycamore Trees

            Our old pickup rattled and clanked its way down the log road the headlights bouncing ahead in the late fall air.  The leaves were pretty much off the trees and the coons would have on their winter coats.  The hounds had been kenneled all summer and they were whining in the home made box in the back; ready to rock and roll.

            We saw the eyes first reflecting our lights and then a large buck coon rippled his way across the road in front of us.  We bailed out of the truck with the rusted fenders still flapping from the sudden stop and cut the dogs loose.  They hadn’t forgotten the drill since last season and were in full frenzy casting for scent.  As usual Bell struck first and her clear voice filled the woods like a pipe organ in church.  Then the rest clambered on and they were off and running.

            We waited there in the road, three bare foot boys with our pants rolled up half way to our knees, shivering as we smoked forbidden cigarettes. It couldn’t have been ten minutes later Dan started barking treed and we were off at a dead run; full of our selves, full of the clear fall night, full of the joy of life.

            Dan was still chopping strong when we got to him his front paws against a massive sycamore tree his head thrown back and his voice strong on the cold night air.

             Not that anyone cares but my favorite tree is the Sycamore.  The largest of the American hard woods it can reach fifteen feet in diameter and one hundred feet tall but gets little credit.  It’s sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of trees.  The mountain people call it a sacamore, boxwood, button ball or a snake wood.  It feeds and houses a variety wild life and adds an odd beauty to the forests along the streams. 

            When I was about ten or eleven years old two of my friends and I spent the night sleeping in the hollow base of a huge Sycamore tree beside the Lenard’s creek.  I can’t say we slept much and I don’t recall doing it more than once.  It was pretty close quarters, the earthen floor smelled of rotten wood and porcupine scat, and even though none of us would admit it we were a little worried about what nocturnal creature might be lurking high above us in the cavity of the tree to descend on us as we slept.  About a year later on a stormy night like a great nation the tree succumbed to internal rot and crashed to the earth.  The good news was it fell across the creek and for several years we used it as a bridge.

             Little by little storms would bring high water and the high water would tumble rocks and gravel from upstream and lodge them behind this giant log until they formed a dam and water fall.  I later caught an eighteen inch brown trout out of what we called the sycamore tree hole.  A very nice fish for this small stream.

             The other three hounds were going crazy around the tree.  The bark of the sycamore reflects the lite as we searched the huge branches, probing for the reflection of eyes, and then we saw him hugging the trunk and staring down at us.  Harvey and Carl George took control of the dogs as best they could and I shot the coon with my Dads old single shot twenty-two loaded with long rifle hollow points.  I slipped the coon in a burlap bag and threw him over my shoulder and we headed back to the truck.

            I don’t know how long it will be before the cancer gets me, I’m doing great now and only the good die young, but knowing time is short raises some questions.  One of those questions is what to do with my ashes.  It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me because I won’t be there.  My old friend Ned Hawley and I will be walking the dark damp earth beneath the poplars behind a pair of well-mannered setters.  But Pat will want to know.  Some days I think I’ll have her mail them to a friend and have him sail them on the wind in the Rocky Mountains.  Then again I think I’ll have a friend dump them over the side of his drift boat on the West Branch of the Delaware. But I would not be at all offended if someone were to spread them in the shade of an old Sycamore tree beside a mountain stream were eager hounds could trample them in the damp earth as they wait for another generation of youngsters to get to a treed coon.

Writing Pains and Labor Pains

Writing Pains and Labor Pains

            A bunch of writers on a Face Book site I belong to were chatting about what hard work writing can be at times and how  they will chop wood, take out the garbage or most any excuse to put off actually sitting down and pounding out their next article.  They got me thinking about this thing that some of us do; this writing thing and how we do it.

            I had two dreams career wise as a kid; to train dogs and to write.  I wish I had started writing sooner but learned early on that it wasn't about drinking coffee and smoking a pipe it was about extracting things from deep inside yourself and exposing them to the public.  It was about trying to describe in a man-made language the wonders of God’s creation. It’s hard for me this thing I love to do.

            With me it’s sort of like an old hound dog having puppies.  There is a gestation period after the seed of a story starts to form.  With dogs it’s sixty three days, with me it can be anything from days to years.  The Idea is always there growing inside me.  I feed it with the things I have experienced, the people I meet, the joys and sorrows of everyday life.  As with dogs genetics play a huge role.  My favorite picture of my dad is of him as a young man lying on the grass surrounded by a litter of bird dog puppies.  My second favorite is of him standing high in the mountains with gun in hand looking down on the valley below.  As an old time bird dog man said to me about genetics “blood will always out.” My Grandfather on my mom’s side was a preacher who died in his early forties of a burst appendix.  My Dad was a country preacher who practiced what he preached.  So it is only natural that my writings reflect these genes.

            When it comes to actually writing a story I’m sort of like that old hound dog that crawls up under the porch to give birth.  It’s painful at times and there’s a lot of pushing and groaning.  I just can’t find a place that’s comfortable and I have to move around every once in a while.  I do everything short of digging a hole in the soft dirt.  But then the birthing is over and I’m left with the cleanup to make sure this puppy is ready to meet the public. Once again I’m nervous like that tired old hound as she presents these things she’s given birth to for public scrutiny.

            We recognize good writing when we see it and I make no claim here but good writing touches us.  Good writing stirs emotion and touches memories.  It encourages or even inspires us.  It is often an escape to a place of solace.  But no matter how good it is it always falls short of the authors goals.  And as good as it may be it doesn’t have puppy breath.      

Mountain Miracle

Mountain Miracle

I am looking down from high on the mountain.  The frost lies like a royal garment of silk and silver dropped casually on the valley floor below.  I am surrounded by the same fall colors that have defied the description of poets, writers and lyricists for thousands of years.  I stand frozen in that moment of time between the youthful joy of discovery and an old man’s regrets of time lost.  Here in this timeless place I get a glimpse of what it will be like to live without the dogged footsteps of lost opportunity; to live without the constraints of time.

I see the dogs about a third of the time, the rest of the time I know where they are by the sounds of the bells.  Two dogs, the sound of two bells working back and forth in the mountain mist.  I don’t know if I sensed I was not alone or had caught some movement in my peripheral but off to my left, crouching tight to a large rock was a large cat.  I’m far enough north that bobcats are often as big as a linx and this could be either.  

I’m close enough to see the cat working his claws in and out and sort of stepping in place anticipating the sprint.  And then I see the target; a large hair half brown, half white, frozen with me between two seasons.  The dogs must have moved him from the comfort of his bed and exposed him to the beauty and the dangers of the morning.  The cats first leap was an amazing thing and I stepped it off latter at about thirty two feet.  Even aided by the mountain slope and the height of the rock it was still a joy to behold.

The hair feeling vulnerable in the open was on high alert and was in motion with the leap.  The hair ran full out with his ears laid back tight to his shoulders and the cat was close very close as they went out of sight below me.   I waited for that terrible bone chilling scream of a captured rabbit and when it didn't come I was relieved and it set a tone to the morning.

When I was stepping off the cats leap the dogs came back to check on me and I took a minute to love on them a little and just enjoy.  I could sense the presence of the creator and didn't want to rush that moment.  I have been blessed with many moments like this.  I know what makes a sunset or a waterfall and you could say that is no miracle just the way the world has evolved.  I was not there when Missy was born as I didn’t meet her mom until after she was born but when I held Tracy for the first time and later Erich I was overwhelmed.  In my youth I masked those feelings with foolish humor but when alone I still tear up with the memory.  You can explain all these moments away in the cycle of life but no thinking person can dismiss the feelings of awe and joy they bring as anything but a miracle.

I follow the music of the harmonizing bells down, down, down towards the valley floor.  I can see Ruby when she locks on point and Thicket backs the silence of the bell.  I move in with gun ready and two grouse flush going straight away.  My gun comes up as it has so often before and I know that this is as good a chance as I’ll ever get to add a third double on Ruffed Grouse to my lifelong score but I pull high and fire once in the air for the dog’s sake. 

If you are a true hunter you know there are no words to explain this age old paradox of killing what we love.  I know that given the chance this afternoon I will shoot with no apology but this morning I will not be the one to introduce death into this life giving moment.