When the first white settlers pushed west onto the plains and prairies in the mid-1800s, they were stunned to discover grass so tall and thick that cattle disappeared in it. One moment they were there, the next they were gone. The grass was like a sea that swallowed them up. Looking for them was a risky business, especially if there were no landmarks around to take your bearings from (and there frequently weren’t). A man could go in and never come out.
This is to say nothing of what might befall a child who wandered off, as children have a habit of doing. I have very little doubt that losing a son or daughter in the prairie ocean ranked just below Indian attack in the pioneers’ hierarchy of fears.
The reason for the history lesson is to give you a sense of (A) the kind of cover we were hunting and (B) the difficulty factor involved in locating a wounded rooster pheasant in such heinous stuff – a rooster, I hasten to add, whose legs are still in perfect working order.
There were five of us lined out across a mile-long field of CRP switchgrass near Wolsey, South Dakota, and all I could see of my companions was, for the most part, the tops of their heads. They looked like blaze-orange bobbers drifting in a light chop. It was miserable walking, not only because of the dense switch – imagine an inverted scrub-brush with six-foot bristles – but because every couple hundred yards there was a cattail slough with water just deep enough to pour over the tops of your boots. This water was about a degree on the soft side of frozen, and did I mention that there were several inches of wet, heavy snow on the ground?
The good news, as you’ve probably guessed, is that the place was stiff with pheasants. Pheasants being pheasants, though, they did not lollygag around waiting for us to kill them. Some flushed wild ahead; others, taking advantage of the thick cover and our thin ranks, held tight and exited out the back door after we’d passed. And even when a bird did make a mistake, there was hell to pay unless it thumped down dead. If it hadn’t been for the heroics of Shadow, our bag would have been considerably lighter.
Let me tell you about Shadow. He belongs to my younger brother, Andy, and while he came from a litter advertised as black Labs, there were never any papers to certify his parentage. Shadow also has some peculiarities of appearance – notably a white blaze on his brisket – that suggest what is referred to in polite company as “mixed ancestry.” He is damn near big enough to throw a saddle on and ride – “Shadow the Wonder Pony,” I call him, not without affection – and he has a set of cojones the like of which I’ve never seen. I mean, you can almost hear them clanking when he runs.
He has been known to break out of his kennel and put them to unauthorized use, too. This doesn’t seem to bother Andy quite as much as it should, which leads me to believe that he takes a certain furtive delight in his dog’s roistering ways. I think the psychological term for this is “projection.”
When Shadow was about a year old, Andy was posted to Toronto for several months to oversee the acquisition of a trucking company there. He used this opportunity to have Shadow professionally trained by my friend Bob Olson of River Road Kennels in Lena, Wisconsin. And because he would have had to board him anyway, he successfully stuck his then-employer with the bill.
Although Shadow was not exactly an “A” student – at one point Bob Olson called me to ask, “How much does your brother like this dog?” – he eventually developed into a workman-like hunting companion.
“I’ll say one thing for him,” Bob concluded, “he’s got a hell of a nose.”
Shadow’s size and strength – he’s built along the lines of an Angus bull – have proven their worth over the years as well. He’ll happily crash into places other dogs fear to tread and he’ll keep it up all day long. You can always tell where Shadow is; you just look for the moving hole where things aren’t standing any more.
About the only knock on Shadow, in fact, is that he occasionally displays some confusion as to which end of the chain of command he occupies – or whether he’s attached to it, period. He’s always been a free spirit, but once in a while he crosses the line and turns into a bona fide loose cannon. This has given him a bad rap that is mostly undeserved. If he were an NFL quarterback, he’d be described as “much-maligned.”
But he performed like a champion in that South Dakota switchgrass. It was a flushing dog situation to begin with – pointers would have been worse than useless in that horrible stuff – but even more than that, it was a situation that demanded a big, strong, cover-buster of a flushing dog.
Shadow was squarely in his element, in other words, and he responded with his best game. He put several skulking roosters to wing, birds we probably would have walked right past without his help. Even more impressively, he tracked down a number of cripples that otherwise would have been coyote food.
With the exception of Jim Zumbo, the veteran Outdoor Life staff editor, none of us were really anchoring our birds, and there is no sight that will make a pheasant hunter’s heart sink faster than that of a rooster going down with its head up and its feet braced for impact. You know it’s going to run, and that your chances of feeling its pleasing heft in your gamebag are diminishing with each moment that it remains at large. Thankfully, Shadow’s nose and tenacity compensated for our errant marksmanship. He truly saved the day.
It was deeply gratifying to see Shad do such a fine job. He’s getting a little gray around the muzzle, and whatever his real or imagined faults may be, he’s always been a likable cuss.
Andy was pretty pumped, too – as well he should have been – and I was happy about that. He and I don’t get to hunt together much, so when the invitation to participate in the Huron Ringneck Festival came across my desk, I accepted with the proviso that I could bring him along.
Huron’s a friendly city of 14,000 in east-central South Dakota – you may recognize it as the hometown of Charlie’s Angels actress Cheryl Ladd – a couple hours up the road from Andy’s home in the state’s extreme southeast corner. It also happens to lay smack-dab in the middle of some of the most productive pheasant country on earth.
We’d discovered this a day earlier when, during an “organized” hunt near the burg of Woonsocket (about 25 miles south of Huron), we saw birds in numbers to boggle the mind. There were 20 guns in all (don’t ask me who they were or how they got there), and while half of us “drove” the standing corn, the other half blocked – and got so much shooting that our barrels damn near melted down. In just two drives – about two hours of actual hunting – we had our 60-bird collective limit.
That hunt was the embodiment of what the writer Robert F. Jones eloquently describes as “glorious carnage.” The air was filled with the cries of “Rooster! Rooster! Rooster!” the crackling peal of gunfire, the sight of pheasants flying and pheasants falling. It was savage and bloody and magnificent, and I’ll never forget it.
Now, don’t get me wrong. While this style of hunting is a time-honored tradition in South Dakota, it’s not something I’d go out of my way to do again. Just the opposite, in fact. But I have to admit that it was fun to do once – kind of a guilty pleasure, like a food critic sneaking a Twinkie.
And since Shadow is the star of this story, it should be noted that even under these trying circumstances – the worst possible mix of chaos and temptation for a gundog – he acquitted himself with distinction. The same cannot be said of most of the other dogs whose owners chose to turn them loose. (I wonder if the guy from Minnesota ever found his German shorthair.) He stayed under control, didn’t lose his composure when the cannonade began, and retrieved every bird that fell in his vicinity. What more could you ask?
So here’s to you, Shadow. You’re living proof that unless it’s backed up with hearts, guts and desire, a pedigree is worth no more than the paper it’s printed on.
Note: This article originally appeared in the 2012 Autumn issue of Sporting Classics magazine.