The Worst Dog

She may have been the worst dog I’ve ever owned. 

There’s a delicate balance a truly great bird dog must have: an insatiable drive to find and point birds that exists in tandem with the concomitant desire to be a team player. Hanna had plenty of drive; there were times I could have made the case that she had too much. But the team-player gene was missing. In fact, it wasn’t anywhere within a hundred miles of her lovely, snow white body. 

Time and again, I turned her loose from the back of my truck only to watch the little setter disappear over the nearest hill, deaf to my shouted commands to return, the bell around her neck fading and then disappearing all together. Only a stiff jolt from an electric collar would turn her, and then she did so reluctantly, one eye on me and one eye still set on the horizon she longed to return to. Don’t misunderstand: she found plenty of birds and handled them well. But that was of little use when she was 800 yards away when the birds flushed.

Finally, after years of futile aggravation, I’d had enough. One day, on a hike, she ran away, as she had hundreds of times before. Furious, I left her, then drove home alone. I received a call minutes later from a couple who had found her and brought her to their house. When I picked her up, she was noticeably chastened. But it didn’t last. It couldn’t.

A few years later, on my annual grouse-hunting trip to Wisconsin, she bolted into the forest and I spent the next half hour chasing her blindly through the woods, trying desperately to stay within earshot of her bell. When, by chance, she crossed the trail in front of me, I dropped my shotgun and tackled her. I’d had it. 

She spent the next couple years in comfortable retirement. She gradually became deaf and nearly blind, but her infirmities seemed, oddly, to mellow her, and she was content to sleep in her dog bed in the corner of my office. Perhaps she dreamed of her days in the woods and fields. 

When she was nearly 14 I decided to put her down. I’d put off the decision for way too long, since she did not seem to be suffering. But what kind of existence could it be, to be trapped in a dark, silent room, when your entire life has been spent outdoors running into the wind?

I suppose I should be relieved that she’s gone. But now, six months later, I still gaze at her bed in the corner and half expect to see her small white form there, quietly asleep. And I still hear her bell.