When I got my first Lab, I had no prior experience at training a retriever. I had been the "assistant" when Dad and Harry Fleming worked with Harry's dog, Midnight. She was slow and steady. Got the easy birds, passed on the difficult retrieves. When she had a litter of puppies, I was given one for the help that I had been to Harry. Harry also gave me a book to read to help me train Chief. I would say the book gave me all the basics to start my dog. But I had no training equipment, no access to water, nothing. Basically my homemade retrieving dummies and my back yard. Chief was actually only in the water one time prior to making his first retrieve when he was 5 months old. I tried, but my Dad truly let me down. Somehow he had been so long without a retriever, that he didn't expect much from a dog. Keep it on a leash, throw rocks toward a dead bird to get the dog to head that direction. So, all my requests for help fell on deaf ears. Dad never had a retriever, content to rely on other hunters. To my knowledge he never had a dog in his life that he cared about, or was worth a damn. Whatever. But when my dogs performed well, he was the first one to step up and include himself in the credit for having a good dog.
Let that go.
When Chief was about 5 years old, he was a fine retriever. His only shortfall was his failure to go very far "back" on a blind retrieve. I take the blame for that. I didn't have access to the proper terrain to teach him. He would only go "back" about the length of my backyard. Huh, imagine that. Other than that he was a fine gundog. Something that I didn't train into him was his keen nose. I swear he had the nose of a fine bird dog. Quail and pheasant were a sure thing with him. He even ran rabbits, not that I wanted him too. He used his nose to all of our benefit, finding numerous ducks in solid reed patches where marking a bird was really only feasible to a small extent. He worked fallen Jacksnipe without ever losing one, in the thickest of cattails and reeds. Sweet.
So, anyhow, one day Dad and I were hunting in Lucy's Pond. We liked to set up in the first big opening just inside Blackhawk Point. About 5 acres of semi open water. A few lillypads and reeds, but a nice open water pond in the big marsh. That place was a fallback option for us when it was too windy to hunt our blinds. We had about 3 dozen Mallard decoys scattered along the bank and hoped for ducks to come into the marsh to get out of the wind. A Mallard drake swung on us, stayed a little wide, but was fairly low on the water. We both shot and he he crippled down about 80 yards from us, in near the bank on the end of the pothole. I sent the dog and he headed right towards the Mallard. The duck was swimming for shore, and I figured Chief would have no trouble. After a few minutes of Chief hunting around where we had last seen the duck, we lost sight of them both. I started a circuitous journey around the bank to get over there and see what was going on. When I got over there, I was up on a 10 foot high bank with a very steep incline down to the water. No sign of the duck or the dog. I couldn't see any way Chief could have climbed that bank, if the duck had somehow gotten up there. As I wandered around and called for the dog, I seemed to hear splashing, almost under my feet. I was perplexed. Finally I saw that the earth was caved away along there, and I was only standing on tangled tree roots with a little dirt clinging to them. I stood very still, ignored Dad's instructions and told him to be quiet. I could here the faint sound of splashing and it sounded like a dog attempting to climb up the bank. Turned out the duck dove and swam in under the bank, sort of into an underground cavern and Chief had followed him under.
I hollered at Dad to bring the boat, thinking that if I could get down to the water, right where he had disappeared, make a commotion and maybe he would dive under the edge and come back out. But I was seriously concerned. Before Dad even got up to head for the boat, Chief popped up, breathing hard, with a nice fat Mallard in his jaws.
I was relieved, and very proud of my dog.
We hunted on, killed a couple more birds and were having a good time. Chief loved it when I hunted there, sitting on the bank, because he could sit right next to me. We both loved it.
So a while later a hen Mallard flew by. Didn't really look at our decoys, but instead flew out the end of the pothole then abruptly landed in what looked like a solid patch of cattails. We called for a while, but the duck wasn't interested. I told Dad that I was going to try to walk and wade over there to see if I could jump the Mallard. Off Chief and I went on what I almost considered a fools errand, but nothing else much was happening.
It was difficult to get there, but the wind was in my face, so the duck would have had a hard time hearing us in that windstorm. Suddenly Chief seemed to go on point. The reeds were far too thick to see a duck, but Chief was solidly on point, facing the wind. I crept forward, Chief crept forward, we pushed on about 15 yards through the reeds. There she came, big Mallard hen, jumped about 20 yards in front of me. She climbed a little, then about the time she leveled out, I leveled her. Chief fetched her back to me in nothing flat.
Of course when we got back over to our hunting spot, I had to listen to Dad run off at the mouth about "good" dogs he had seen do this and that. Just a droning in my ears, like the unrelenting wind that was howling the worst of the day. I didn't need anyone to tell me about good duck dogs, I had one of my own.
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