The Bird Dogs

Harlan: You've heard me tell about the snake. Let me tell you about the dogs, because a man is known by the company he keeps, and most of the company I ever kept had four legs and a good nose. Harlan: I was a quail hunter. I don't say that the way a man says he fishes a little on Sundays — I mean that in the season I was out six days a week, sunup to sundown, walking the fields and the fencerows behind a brace of bird dogs, and I'd have gone the seventh day too if the Lord hadn't had other ideas about Sundays. I trained those dogs myself, and I trained them well enough that people drove in from miles around hoping to buy one off me or trade me something for one. That was a kind of money in those days, a well-broke bird dog. But I'll be honest with you — I didn't sell the good ones. They'd got to be family. Harlan: Two of them I want you to know about. Rex and Pup. Harlan: Rex was an English setter, and he came to me as a reject, if you can believe it. The mayor over in Oak Grove had him first, a dog with a fine pedigree, papers and all — but Rex wouldn't honor the point. Now if you don't know dogs, let me tell you what that means: when one dog freezes on a covey, the others are supposed to freeze too, and respect it, and hold. Rex wouldn't. So the mayor, pedigree and all, gave him away. Gave him to me. And I took my time with that dog, and I worked him, and I taught him his manners, and when the mayor came down to hunt with me later and saw what Rex had become, he offered me five hundred dollars on the spot. Five hundred dollars. For a dog he'd given away. I told him no. Some things you don't sell back to the man who quit on them. Harlan: And then there was Pup. Harlan: Pup was a lemon-and-white pointer, and he came to me a reject too, and I'll tell you plainly — Pup near broke my patience. He would not honor the point to save his life. He'd rush in ahead and flush the birds before anybody was ready, and scatter the whole covey to the four winds, and I tried everything I knew, and nothing took. And I am not proud of what I did next, children, but I'll tell it straight, because I'd rather you have the true grandfather than a polished one. I decided that dog was useless. And out in the field one day I shot him, and left him for dead. Harlan: Now here is where the Lord, or the dog, or my own son had other plans. Buster — my boy who lived with me — went and found Pup, and Pup was not dead. Buster gathered him up and carried him home and tended him. And that dog lived. More than lived. Pup healed up and turned into one of the finest bird dogs I ever put in a field, and — I still can't fully account for it — he never turned gun-shy. Not one bit. A dog I'd shot, working happy at the sound of a gun, pointing birds pretty as you please. Harlan: I've had a long time to sit with that one. A man decides a thing is worthless and acts on it, hard and final — and then a gentler hand picks the thing up, and it turns out there was a great deal of good in it all along, just waiting on somebody with the patience to let it come out. I was the one who gave up on Pup. My boy was the one who didn't. And every bird that dog ever pointed for me after that was a little reminder to be slower, next time, about deciding what's finished. Harlan: I kept treats in my pocket for my dogs, to the end. Drove the gravel roads in my pale blue truck with them riding in the bed, sitting quiet and patient, waiting on me. Folks along Klick Road would see us coming and I'd tap the horn and wave. That was a good life, as good as a man gets. Me, and a truck, and a pocket full of treats, and a couple of dogs that two different men had thrown away — and that I, and my boy, between us, made whole.