Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/590511
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 9 5 B lue weighed 90 pounds, with webbed feet big as biscuits, long legs, and a deep chest, the biggest lab bitch I ever saw, out of Tomahawk, Wisconsin, from a kennel of field champions. An undertaker gave her away. He never knew when he might be called he said. Blue would nose the breeze, break loose, run down and swim in the Mississippi, 17 blocks from home at her extreme peril. She came with a doghouse made of salvaged casket crates. That was St. Paul where I broke down on my way to Alaska and holed up 20 miles north of the city in a farm house made out of defunct Soo Line boxcars. I could stand on my back porch, look toward my chicken coop and see the birch clump where I killed two fine bucks and to my left the flashing strobe atop the IDS Center in downtown Minneapolis. Gort we called it, from the ray-gun robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still. We would get all tuned up and holler "Gort, Klaatu barada nikto!" the command to make him go away. We bellered it for years, but the IDS tower never even twitched. I always had dogs, generally some indifferent boyhood cur or three, but I had no idea how utterly sensitive a good dog could be, and I whupped Blue for killing a chicken. She never States. His skinning knife was close to a Canadian Russell Belt Knife, a razor-sharp teardrop blade attached to an ergonomically shaped handle of African tiger wood, and I prized it above all others. I prized it but lost it twice. First time was field-dressing a deer. Blue backtracked my trail, nosed around in the leaves, and brought it back to the farmstead, a full half-mile. Second time, a green-broke horse bucked it right out of the scabbard, but Blue was in the ground by then. I buried her in a sunny spot along the lilac hedge she loved, where her bones made blue flowers every June. I came to Lacy by way of a divorce, not mine though I had several. There was an ad in the local farm shopper: "Give away to good home, two year old female Chesapeake." Momma was going one way, Papa the other. They split the house, one got the pickup, one got the car but they could not split the dog. Maybe you know about the Chesapeake, the most notoriously obstreperous blockhead of the retrievers. Legend says they came from a pair of yellow dogs, a sire and a bitch, sole survivors of a Spanish shipwreck. If it ain't true, it oughta be. A Chessie is tougher than a white oak plank. oger Pinckney and his yellow lab Zebo in a deep philosophical discussion. R How many good dogs you gonna bury before one buries you? killed another chicken, but she never brought a bird to hand either, faithfully making every retrieve but piling them in her own stash forty yards down the bank. But her most perfect retrieve was a George L. Herter skinning knife. Maybe you remember the fantastic mail-order Herter's, the smiling decoys that rode the water like their gizzards were full of wild celery, the lures guaranteed to catch fish when nothing else would, the Kenyan coffee, the investment-grade diamonds, the fly-tying feathers from exotic birds, the coon calls, the duck calls, the coyote calls, the goose calls, but especially the knives, worldwide designs replicated in the o r i z o n s H Roger Pinckney