Rich Landers: Expectations for Dickens seemed great

“He’ll be OK after the surgery, but he won’t be the athlete he was before today.”

The effect of the veterinarian’s assessment was almost as painful as if I were the one who’d slid off a 25-foot cliff and into the basalt rubble below.

My English setter and I were on a training run last Friday, the day before the pheasant season opened, and I can picture Dickens coursing ahead like a black and white phantom, sweeping back and forth with the intensity of a middle linebacker and a grace rivaling ballet.

Both of us had been following his nose through the scablands for an hour when the pointer disappeared at full stride into a thin curtain of tall grass that hid the ledge. Somehow, he wasn’t dead.

I scrambled down a chute, trying not to become the second casualty, as Dickens struggled to his feet and staggered. Despite the bleeding cuts from nose to tail, he didn’t wince at my prodding to his body. I thought maybe he’d lucked out until I saw his right front foot dangling as though it were a mitten about to fall off a child’s hand.

Although the skin was not broken, X-rays would later reveal that his wrist had been sheered from crushed leg bone.

I draped him like a scarf around my neck, clawed my way up the scree and began hiking the mile and a half to the pickup. Dickens put his faith in me, moving not a muscle as my feet plodded forward and my thoughts raced in all directions.

Last week, before the accident, I had already planned today’s column to be a first-person account on why hunters should never give up on a dog with a seed of promise.

Dickens is an offspring of the late I’m Dick Too, one of only 14 dogs inducted into the National Shoot-to-Retrieve Hall of Fame. When I picked him up as a tiny pup nearly three years ago from Medical Lake setter breeder Gene Mahoney, Dickens’ bird-dog genetics already glowed like coals in his furnace. Depending on how they were fanned, they could produce either smoke or fire.

Training started immediately. Everything associated with field and feathers was made to be fun. His classy tail-to-the-sky point came naturally, and with the help of trainer Dan Hoke, we started finding balance in the contradictory instincts that rank pointers among the wonders of the world.

A pointer casts off as a fast-moving predator, its nose sorting countless odors until it somehow it filters for the singular scent of a game bird – paying no attention to meadow larks or robins while targeting grouse, partridge, pheasant and quail.

Once locked onto game, the pointer closes in like a heat-seeking missile. Then, unbelievably, just at the moment the canine instinct should be lunging for the kill, the pointer reverses all that energy into a skidding stop and freezes as solid as stone.

The riveting presence of a motionless predator pins the quarry-in-hiding until the hunter arrives.

In his pup season, Dickens was developing bird sense, pointing beautifully, retrieving fairly well. Last year, however, he retreated into the rebellious equivalent of bird-dog teen years.

I’m glad nobody offered a quarter for him early in the season, because I might have accepted.

His performance was erratic – solid one day, distracted the next. While he chased down every bird that dropped from the sky, he suddenly refused to bring them to me, having realized that retrieving interfered with his passion to seek and find.

He resisted force-breaking with the vigor he applied to overcoming thickets and thorns that harbored ringnecks. Hoke told me to be patient.

Almost every morning Dickens had to whoa, seek and hold to flush on the neighborhood quail, and retrieve a dummy, starting just a few feet away. Inside, he’d hang his chin on my lap while I read the paper on the chance that we might do it all again.

Radar, my old arthritic Brittany, was employed to trigger Dickens’ competitive spirit. I’d toss a dummy and let Radar have a head start. The old dog beat Dickens for the retrieve the first time, but never again. With a check cord and lots of praise for both of them, Dickens was on the way to bird dog maturity, one day at a time.

Dec. 17 in Lincoln County was a cold but brilliant day that I’ll remember as clearly as the fog of six-dozen quail flushing from a feedlot and scattering across 100 acres of sagebrush and powder snow.

It was the day Dickens put it all together.

Every bird that fell from the sky was found and retrieved at a sprint. Dickens’ feathery tail usually was a hundred yards away and erect toward the heavens before I could reload.

I stretched a hunt that could have bagged a limit in 20 minutes into a 3-hour point-and-flush seminar that started with me guiding Dickens and ended with him leading me into a major league of our own.

Every bird hunter dreams of having one great dog in his life, and mine had arrived.

For the rest of the season afield, I never called his name to come, but only to let him know my location as he ranged. I’ve never wanted a dog that had to be followed on horseback, yet demanding a great dog to hunt within gun range would be as silly and insecure as limiting the space shuttle to 20,000 feet.

Dickens could be trusted at 300 yards. If he was out of sight for more than a few minutes, my thumb would feel for the safety.

He hunted for me and I hunted for him. We teamed as fluidly as Torvill and Dean.

Our bond owed to countless hours of training and togetherness, and so did the lump in my throat when the vet said Dickens was out for the season and possibly more. The bloodlines that drive him to tackle any terrain in the pursuit of birds might not allow Dickens to scale down and cope with his disability.

There’s a limit to the strength of a fragile joint fused together by metal plates and screws in bird-thin bones.

But Dickens has already taught me to never give up on a seed of promise.