Two years ago, I was living in an apartment in the basement of a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I was working in private practice as a psychiatric nurse practitioner and spending most of my weekends driving two hours both ways to upstate New York to do something in the outdoors. I was tired and burnt out and when a relationship I had been in ended, I needed a change. Little did I know that the catalyst for that change would be my seven-year-old black Labrador, Goose.
In October of that year, I had just finished reading my father’s most recent book, Absolutely Positively Gundog Training, and I called him on the phone. I told him I did not believe that it was really as easy to train a gundog as he made it sound in the book. He assured me it was. Like any spirited father-daughter relationship we decided to make it interesting and made a bet. If I trained Goose to be a gundog and brought her home for a duck hunt the last weekend of the season in January my father would buy me a shotgun. I told him we had a deal. When I hung up the phone and thought a bit more about what I had agreed to I wasn’t so sure I would win that bet.
Goose had been raised in the city, had never seen a bird other than pigeons on the sidewalk, was somewhat gun shy, would not deliver to hand, and had no idea in general what hunting was. I had gotten this dog for her ability to snuggle, not for her ability to retrieve a duck in freezing water. Like I said, I wasn’t so sure I would win that bet. But when you’re recovering from a breakup you need a plan, and I had a plan.
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