Its big dog, that carries a big bird. , in Hunting Stories

There are three dogs on the living room rug. Two earned there dinner, one is just a house pooch that eats whatever I toss in the dish. I don't own any of the dogs, I just babysit the brown fluffy four footed cocker spaniel for my daughter. The two Chesapeake's make me a bit embarrassed because I consider those real dogs.

I watched them slosh through mud rows; they sat proudly when told, fetched without even looking back, they had been heavily trained and today was truly their day. I admire chessies for that attitude that's sez you can't make a goose big enough that I wont haul back to your pit and in any weather from way past warm to sleeting frigid blizzards, makes no matter, and haul a bird back almost matching there size and none the worse for wear, bird after bird, all day.

Dinner is over, the fire in the fireplace is glowing, and it flickers off the big dogs shiny warm water washed, towel dried coats, as we start to put an edge back on some steel. It's a shish, shish, grating, and metal to wet stone sound that after a full day of shotguns blazing away can be rather soothing. In the glasses next to each man, is a fluid that's taking the edge offs, our today.

From way before sunrise until my backside is now finally resting in front of this fire, long after a sunset of geese by the hundreds still honking, hinking, wings cupped, flocks and flights of birds dropping from a sky that pushed countless geese past us and then with only an hour left to hunt, that most black and white giant of birds, came by the hundreds.

They poured from above to land, wings sweeping the air backwards, forwards, bent wings and wings with feathers that most have been six feet long just trying to get out of the air. Geese feet stretching to touch the fresh cropped oats plopped, and then they honked all the louder. Necks craning, and searching for necks honking right back at them only inches from downy feathered breasts blaring away. The noise was everywhere as the sky was going dark, the noise of honk, kahonking, and with so much of it, a music, made us all just stop and listen.

We listened to it for a solid hour after dark as we packed all the gear and tried to wrestle mud off thick soled boots. A pair of chessies with dog haunches regally statured on the ground, those two big bulky heads in unison with the honking would lean slowly as they heard new flights fall in for the nights rest. And a nights rest, is what I will have shortly. The trout whisperer