Hard to define, and harder to measure.
by E. Donnall Thomas Jr.
Editor-at-Large
Lead photo by Steve Oehlenschlager Photography
The drake mallard was the third and final bird to fall from the flock. Lori and I had each left a greenhead kicking in the decoys with our first barrel. My second shot left its target gliding downward on locked wings toward the far side of the pond. It hit the water with a soft splash and immediately began churning toward the tangle of Russian olive on the shore. I wasn’t happy with my shooting. Now the only thing standing between my mistake and an unrecovered bird was a young dog.
We broke open our shotguns and left them unloaded, an old, ingrained safety precaution whenever anyone is going to work outside the blind. In hopes of salvaging the situation, I stepped through the door with Rosy prancing eagerly at heel. Despite the ability she’d already demonstrated a month shy of her second birthday, I realized that she would face a daunting list of challenges if we were ever to see that mallard again.
She took the line, but it led her right by one of the dead birds floating in the decoys. I wasn’t surprised to see her veer off course in that direction. At my first whistle blast, she turned toward me, obeyed the back command, and continued on her way past the distraction. We’d worked on that problem with dummies over the summer, but this was the first time she’d faced it in real life.
So far, so good, but there was still a long way to go. She turned and looked back at me several times during the swim across the pond, always obeying the back command with minimal hesitation. When she hit the shoreline 20 yards from the spot where I’d last marked the cripple, she sat at the sound of my first whistle blast and ran the waterline correctly in response to my hand signal. The moment her nose contacted the duck’s trail was obvious. Then she disappeared into the tangle, leaving us nothing to do but wait.
Somewhere there may be thicker, nastier escape cover than flooded Russian olive, but I have yet to find it. A wounded mallard can travel a long way through the stuff ahead of even the most determined retriever. As soon as Rosy entered the tangle of branches and thorns, I lost visual contact. She might as well have dropped off the face of the earth.
When a flock of teal appeared low over the far end of the pond, I thought about reloading but knew it would be unwise to distract a dog on a mission with the sound of gunfire. At this point, the game was hers to win or lose. The odds seemed stacked against recovering the bird, and I began to console myself by appreciating all that she’d already done right no matter how the chase concluded.
The dog finally popped out of the brush at the far end of the pond, so far off the original line that I assumed she’d been wandering aimlessly through the brush. I didn’t get my first good look at her until she hit the water and began to swim back toward the blind. There was the drake with its neck extended and very much alive, held firmly but gently in Rosy’s mouth.
“How did she ever find that bird?” Lori asked, a rhetorical query that could have ended with an exclamation point as well as a question mark.
“I have no idea,” I replied honestly. We were looking at the results of two summers’ worth of training with a busy puppy season sandwiched in between, but we were also looking at a lot of intangibles.
Hard to define and harder to measure, intangibles are the mysterious qualities that can make the difference between a good dog and a great one, a useful hunting retriever and a pot-licker. They are the reason why dogs selected from the same litter and trained in more or less the same way can turn out so differently, a phenomenon that has puzzled many of us. Although largely subjective, they are like art. You know them when you see them even if you can’t always explain why.
Read the rest of Don’s article on Intangibles in the upcoming June/July issue, which is mailing soon! What else will you find? Read the table of contents.
