Labrador retrievers didn't start out on ducks. That came later. They made their reputation as cold-tolerant, intelligent working dogs retrieving seine floats in the icy waters off Labrador and Newfoundland. They were the companions of fishermen not hunters. They lived aboard ship, were fed mostly fish, and were sent into the water to bring the outside terminal net float back to the work boat so hauling could begin. Only later were their exceptional characteristics and the bloodline refined into the dogs we know today. A kind of genetic echo of their origin still shows up from time to time in a small tuft of white hair on their chests.
I think of this background in fishing when I remember my black lab Moses who died last year. He started out as a proper duck dog, but his last adventure made a fishing story. The ducks came first. Moses was a Christmas present from my wife. One day after work she picked me up and drove me to a colleague's house. When we got to the front gate and I asked, "Why are we stopping here?" she said, "He has a litter. Let's go find you a puppy." There were eleven eight-week old black lab pups roaming the floor of the den. They were all about the same size in a beautiful, registered litter. The bloodlines of sire and dame were impressive. I handled several, looked at head shape, guessed conformation, and teased them for feistiness. The conversation turned from dogs to academics to community to family and children. Finally Pat said, "Well, which one are you going to pick?" After all the initial activity, the pups had wandered off into other pursuits--the food bowl, litter corner, sleeping box. A couple tumbled and chewed at each other in the center of the floor. One of the pups had crawled along the edge of the couch and had worked his head between my feet. When he had managed to get his nose out onto the front of my shoe, he had gone to sleep. He was the one I picked. I reached down and picked him up, tucked him into my coat pocket and said, "This one."
He wasn't going to be named Moses at first. I started to name him Messiah--savior--saying that he would save my ducks. Everyone in my house and Benson's house vetoed that one. "Smith, that won't do. You can't name a dog "Messiah." "Dad, that would be an awful name for a dog." "People would laugh at him." "His name should have two syllables, not three." I thought about it for a bit and said, "Okay, then I'll name him Moses--because he will part the waters." I had no idea then how apt that name would become. I began his training little by little, tossing balls and small dummies. At first he was timid about the water, tipping along the edge and not really wanting to get wet. Benson and I often trained our pups together. He had a yellow lab, Jesse, who was about a year older than Moses. Jesse was already getting to be a keen retriever and most of the time would bring back dummies tossed far into the lake. Usually, for discipline, we trained each dog one at a time and put the other dog on lead. When Jesse was working, Moses would whine and tug going crazy with jealousy. Some days he was hard to hold on a hand lead when Jesse was sent on a line to the dummy.
One day, Benson had thrown the dummy for Jesse and had just given the "Back" command to send her when I slipped Moses' lead. Moses was behind Jesse on the bank, but in his excitement leapt from the bank over her head and raced her to the dummy. From that day, his water entry was an explosive rush down the bank and a long arching leap into the water. Sometimes he would clear six or eight feet of water before splashing in. This trait excited the trainer I eventually took him to. For a few years, Moses spent the time during our family vacations--mostly long road trips to see relatives--at a kennel in Georgia. He was disciplined to the fundamental commands and hunting conditions and was worked daily with dummies, live birds, and gun over grass and water. He did well and his compact proportions, his energy, and intelligence suggested him as a show candidate. I have never been comfortable with the show approach to working dogs, so I told the trainer I just wanted to hunt him. He was an exciting dog to watch at work.
Moses should have lived in another time and place where he could have worked ducks most of the year. The few weeks of the Tennessee duck season were too short to drain him of his energy or dampen his enthusiasm for going to the refuge. In fact, all of this got to be something of a problem. If I left the house with a gun or in camo clothing without taking him, he would whine for hours. If I took him, he would still whine. The inside of a truck or jeep so excited him that he quivered and shook all the while he rode. Moses never slept in the truck--unlike Jesse who would quickly turn herself into a fur ball at your feet under the heater vent. Moses would have none of that. His idea of riding in a truck was to stand on the console with his front paws on the dash whining and salivating all the way to the marsh. I finally invested in a kennel cage to go in the back of the truck just to keep him out of our laps and off the dash. Some days I think he really saw himself as one of the boys and thought he was supposed to be up front like we were. The cage did nothing to quieten him though.
Only for a few minutes while he ran free on the way into the blind did he act like a normal, sane, dog. Immediately in the blind, the excitement overcame him again--often to bad effect as it upset his stomach. We discovered that it was better not to use Moses on blinds that were only a short distance from the truck. Moses needed the long runs to calm him down and to give him a chance to contribute several times to the organic load of the marsh bottoms before reaching the blind. On the short hauls, Moses would end up fouling the blind. We discovered this one year when we changed blinds and gave up a half mile walk for a blind that was a hundred yards from where we could park the truck. Moses was almost immediately in the water without being able to do his routine in the fields. No one noticed anything in the cold and dark until the first flight of ducks came over at daylight. When we rose to fire at the decoying flight, Barrett McCall, one of our students discovered a very unpleasant condition on his shoulder and cheek. Moses had made it into the blind before Barrett and had made a deposit on the floor under the gun rail just where Barrett set his gun. In the rapid action of the setting ducks, Barrett had mounted his gun and fired before he realized what had happened.
Once Moses made the connection between blinds, water, whistling wings, ducks calls, shots and birds to retrieve, he was maniacal in the blind. He was constantly under foot and whining and if I put him on a short lead at the back of the blind, he made the whole blind shake as he pulled at his rope. The only thing that would satisfy and quieten him would be to let him off the lead so he could stand with his paws on the gun rail and watch the sky with the rest of us. When we had kills in the blind, he was beside himself. He didn't want to eat the birds, but the scent of them drove him crazy to retrieve them again. One day, Benson had shot a duck which Moses retrieved in good order. But to quieten him, we had thrown the duck back onto the roof of the blind rather than have it in sight where Moses would continue to be agitated. Unfortunately, I did not have Moses on lead and Benson and I were at the opposite end of the blind. All at once we felt the blind shake as Moses leapt to the gun rail, turned, and bounded on to the blind roof to retrieve the duck again. He had an instinctual drive that I never saw matched in another dog.
He was a good duck dog, but good things always get older. Duck season is not that long, and dogs and men spend a lot of time dozing in the sun. The last few years, the duck numbers were so far down and competition for blinds so heavy, that we sat those seasons out. From time to time Benson and I would get a domestic mallard and train the dogs in the old way, but mostly Jesse and Moses and my bitch "Zip"--for Zipporah, bride of Moses in the wilderness--would roam the campus, visiting each other, and seeking out the scents of familiar trucks to sleep beside until their masters came out of class for lunch. Then they would ride home and sleep in the sun until supper. Moses and Zip were seldom far apart. In the evening by the fire they slept on the rug and Zip always seemed to manage to have some part of her body touching Moses. Sometimes they would lie together spoon fashion and she would drape a forepaw across his shoulder. Eventually, Zip died, and Moses did not quite know what to make of things. He reverted to the whining that I had not heard since he was a young dog, but now it was sad and not excited.
He would not leave the yard, was constantly at the door, and under foot. I knew that he was grieving for what had been a hide-to-hide companion for many years. Zip who had thrown four magnificent litters sired by Moses was gone--and Moses did not know what to do except try to be near me. By now I was fly fishing instead of duck hunting, and one Saturday morning in October a week after Zip's death, I said, "What the hell. He's a water dog. He needs water. I'll take him fishing." As I loaded up for the trip, he was on the porch but he already knew that fishing did not include him and he did not whine to go. But this morning I opened the passenger door and called him with the old boarding command, "Moses, kennel up." Arthritic joints and all, he was off the porch in a flash and managed the high step of my Ramcharger without help. By the time I made it back around to my side, he was sitting upright, paws braced, and was already panting and drooling on the seat.
Old Dam Ford is the last of my fishing beats in the sequence I fish along the Elk River. It is the longest drive, but I decided to go there because this section has a long median gravel bar and shallow water to each side. My thought was that Moses could swim a bit and then have the gravel to rest on if the cold was too painful for his joints. I could fish the bar to either side and not have to worry about him. That was what I though and it almost worked out that way. Almost. He whined a bit in the truck, but eventually the whir of the heater and the hum of the road tamed him and he slept curled on the passenger seat. We stopped at McDonalds for sausage biscuits--one for me, one for him, then drove on to the river country. At the river access, he was like a puppy again, running circles around the truck, marking every bush and tree, darting toward the water and back again. I put on my waders. I have always used camouflage waders even in trout fishing to help me blend into the background of trees and bushes along the bank. I think it was the camo that persuaded Moses we were duck hunting.
We entered the river, crossed to the gravel bar, and I began to work out my line and cast to the places Moses was not playing. As we walked the hundred yards down the bar, he wove a path in and out of the water and back on to the bar. He was as happy as I had seen him in years. He was on the water, with me, and back at work. I worked him with voice, hand signals, and my whistle. He played the game like a strong, young dog. I drifted the fly now and again, but mostly walked along with him. We had left home just after daylight, and we had the top of the morning on the river. The October sun was just firing the tops of the trees along the river, and the birds were beginning to wake up. The water was clear and cold and river mist drifted here and there around us. We had the river to ourselves. I should have expected something to happen, but I was being lazy in my head and not paying attention.
I have fished a lot and should know how to read the signs of the river around me: early morning, generator flow just finished and the river back down to normal flow, cold water, fall hatches and terrestrials on the water. It was all there, but I was at ease in the play world of dog and water watching Moses. We had worked one side of the gravel bar and had walked back up to the head to fish down the other side. Just at the head channel there was a large snag. A big tree had tumbled off the bank and had become mostly submerged leaving only a few of the sturdier limbs projecting out of the water. A couple of limbs supported the trunk in the water so that there was clear space for water flow under the snag as well as over it. I was fishing a #12 Olive and Black Wooly Bugger. I should have paid attention to this as well. I was standing on the gravel bar about thirty feet off the snag. My first cast, intended to drift past the protruding limbs was sloppy. The fly drifted more than a foot from the limbs. I told myself, "Smith, you are just being lazy. Do the cast like you are supposed to." My next cast dropped about an inch from where the angle of the limb met the water. And immediately the fly stopped. I raised my rod tip, and the rod bent, but the line did not move. "Dammit," I thought, "I hit the snag."
The next few minutes can be set in a certain kind of order by means of print, but what happened had nothing of that kind of order. Before I could think to free myself from the snag, the water exploded with a big fish. Although I eventually saw that it was a brown trout, the size of its eye made me at first think it was a walleye. Whatever it was, it was strong and it was churning up the water. That is when Moses did one of his leaping launches. I suppose he thought it was a crippled duck. In any case, he was hell bent on retrieving it while I was trying to strip slack line and keep the fish out of the deep parts of the snag. At the same time I was reaching for my dog whistle because Moses had totally rejected the conventional voice commands to stop, come, heel. A shrill attention blast on the whistle and then the two-blast, "Come!" command finally checked him. His old habits kicked in perfectly and he trotted right back to me, circled behind me to heel and sit on my off-gun hand. Since I shoot right-handed Moses had been trained to sit to my left--in this case exactly where I had stripped twenty feet of fly line.
The situation was dicey. This was a brown trout I wanted to catch, but it was strong and running toward me and away. Keeping line tension was difficult. And now Moses was entangled in the coils of line. If the trout took off for deep water, Moses would cause him to break off when the coils tightened. At the same time, I remembered that I had not brought my net. This meant that I would have to play the fish out and beach it on the gravel bar. I was also tangled in the line and starting to stumble about--rod high all the time though. I began to dump gear--hat, sunglasses, wading stick, vest. I got rid of everything I could shake off or drop. Moses started into the water again, yellow line around his neck. "Heel, dammit, Moses!! Heel!" I was yelling like any amateur trainer. He came back. The fish took off. I could see the glowing red spots as it rolled and headed downstream. I was jumping on one foot and Moses was twisting at a coil around his leg.
The fish did not beach easily. It was all I could do to strip line, hold tension, keep the rod up, and restrain Moses. He managed to get his nose under the fish as I grabbed his collar. The fish was flopping just in the edge of the water. How the hook managed to stay in I still don't understand. Finally the trout--green-yellow with cream-tan undertone and vivid spots--was on the gravel. This was the largest brown trout I had landed and I wanted a picture, but I also wanted to get it back in the water quickly. Again Moses lunged to retrieve and finally stood panting over the fish as he had done as a puppy with the training dummies. I pulled him away and went to find my vest. Behind me, upstream along the edge of the gravel bar, it looked as if a flying angler had crashed--or as if some bemused fly fisherman had begun a striptease along the water's edge. My gear was all over the place. I sprinted for the vest and the small camera in the pocket. Moses ran with me.
I made two quick pictures, one of the fish near my rod for a quick and rough size reference, another of Moses standing nearby. Then we had to get the fish back in the water. It was a strong fish and it tried immediately to swim from my hand, but I wanted to make sure that it got a good flow of oxygen going before I released it. I held it firmly and guided its head into the cold, flowing water. My hands were beginning to be numb. My knees had already been shaking for some time but not from the cold. Moses was not sitting on his haunches on the gravel watching me revive the fish and I am sure he was wondering what the hell kind of duck this was and why there were no ear-cracking booms of the shotgun. He was happy though. We were having an adventure and he seemed undistracted by the pain in his hip or memory of Zip. The fish struggled against my hands and I finally opened my fingers just a bit. It was gone in blur of deep green and shadows, headed for the bottom of the snag and the safety of the twist of limbs there. It was now only 8:30.
Back in the truck, Moses was soaking and shook water all over the cab. Papers, maps, emergency radios, and all my loose gear received a spray of mud and water. Then Moses sat down on his seat looking proud and content. As we drove in the warming sun of the October morning, the truck began to echo the scents and smells of years ago. There is nothing quite like the smell of marsh mud, waders, wet dogs, moldy biscuits, gun oil, fish, drying river grass and old men to make a truck be a truck. A truck that doesn't smell like a river bottom to my mind doesn't quite make it as a truck. Moses couldn't have been happier. He rode with his head by the window watching his side of the road. The smells must have been like a dog's version of a photo album as we made our way down the winding ridge to the West Prong of Farris Creek and then back along the valley of the Elk toward home. By afternoon the dry grass in the yard and the sunshine would bring back the shine to his coat.
My journal tells the rest: "Monday. 20 December. Moses the duck and fish dog was put down today. His arthritis had greatly pained him recently. Friday he could barely get up, Saturday not at all. Saturday afternoon I placed him with his head in the sun and sat in his box with him. I reviewed his old training commands, and when I called "Mark!" he raised his head to look. He slept through Sunday but was in pain in the night. Early Monday in flying snow and sleet I put him in the cab of the truck and went to the vet for his shot. Then we headed for water country around Woods Reservoir, looking for ducks. He died somewhere on the way to Blind #15. I buried him in the snow by the bitch Zip. His grave goods were empty shotgun shells and my memories."
Gerald L. Smith
Sewanee, TN 37375
July 1994