Don’t send her. Don’t send her. For a solid minute,I stood motionless, watching, trying to determine just how hard the drake mallard had been hit. Ruby was not so patient, tugging on her leash behind me and whining softly. Duck territory in the northern states can be big lake country. The inland bodies of water where I love to hunt are small compared to the Great Lakes but large enough to claim a duck hunter and his dog. In that respect, they could just as easily be as big as an ocean.
I’ve never been one to hang my ego on a dog’s performance. It’s just a duck, after all, or so I kept telling myself, but deep down I knew we had to get that bird, one way or the other. I was raised to do everything possible to retrieve crippled birds, even if it meant ending the hunt early to mount a thorough search.
The greenhead remained well beyond the drop-off, which was perhaps 75 yards from our makeshift shore blind. The duck was slumped over, head slightly down and not moving. Five cripple shots seemed to have had no effect because it never flinched, further convincing me that it was about to expire. But something was gnawing at me. Something about this bird looked different.
I had never hunted this spot—a lengthy stretch of lonely, boggy shoreline that’s part of an 11-mile-long lake—without a canoe. Years ago, family friends had cleared a small area at the edge of the swamp on the lakeshore, planted grass, dug a fire pit, and parked an old RV so they’d have a quiet place to camp with their children. Their kids are grown up now, but the RV remains, providing a perfect place to park for a quick hunt a few times a year. The shooting is never great, and getting skunked is always a possibility, but every now and then a mallard or goose will fly by and find the lack of homes that ring the rest of the large lake appealing. Even the odd bluebill or goldeneye will zing by close enough to inspect the diver blocks set apart from the mallards.
On that particular November afternoon, ducks were finally starting to push through, and given the gray day and decent offshore west wind, I was more hopeful than usual. My optimism was tempered somewhat by the fact that I had somehow forgotten to load the canoe in the back of the truck, but the water is shallow enough to wade until you hit the drop-off, and I wasn’t about to take any long shots.
After tossing out the decoys, I leaned back against an overhanging cedar next to Ruby. She’s pretty effective when retrieving long birds, but with that comes a scary flaw—she can’t be called off cripples once she’s locked in. My other Labs would always come back, but not her. It’s that untrainable tenacity you hope to get in a retriever, that “no give up” that sets certain dogs apart. And so she remained leashed on dry ground until her services were required, though she still found a way to swipe my lunch.
After five long minutes and no change from the mallard, anxiousness got the better of me. Ruby strained violently against her collar as I walked her down through the rocks. Still no movement from the duck. Again, I watched. No change. With 40 years of waterfowling experience, I let her go. At that moment, the mallard sprang to life with terrifying alertness, and I knew I was about to lose my dog.
The duck began swimming toward the vast openness of the lake, which was over a mile across. Immediately, my mistake was obvious . . . and serious. Within seconds, both dog and duck were 100 yards from shore and going strong, and I was already hoarse from yelling.
Every duck hunter encounters cripples; it’s just the nature of the sport. You learn to chase and dispatch them in the quickest way possible, but some ducks seem like they’ve been training for it all their lives. As soon as the mallard saw Ruby hit the water, it began swimming like an Olympic champion.
The e-collar was either out of juice or, more likely, Ruby was ignoring me as the mallard led her farther offshore. With her obviously deaf to my incessant pleading, my options quickly vanished. In a state of panic, I ran to the truck for the canoe, which of course wasn’t there. I glanced back at the lake; Ruby was a yellow dot almost 300 yards out and getting smaller. You never know how long your dog can swim. I mean, who measures that? They swim until they can’t, which is when they drown, and then you know. On one of the worst days of your life, you find out how long your dog can swim, and the lump in my gut said I was about to find out exactly how long Rubes could go.
Resigned to watch the tragedy unfold, I was already wondering how I would break the news to my wife and two teenaged kids that their husband and father, who preached safety and common sense above all else, let the family dog drown chasing a duck. Then, like a bolt out of the blue, I remembered the kayak. My friends kept kayaks behind the RV for summer fishing excursions. Flinging off my hunting parka and lanyard of calls, I sprinted around the back of the RV to find nothing but a stack of old firewood. Searching frantically and bending over to curse in unbridled frustration, I looked under the RV and spotted the bright orange tip of a 14-foot kayak wedged in tight for the winter.
I am a canoe guy through and through, and I hate everything about kayaks, but at that moment I might as well have been a kayaker all my life. I was paddling offshore within seconds, not even taking time to don the clearly visible life vest. At the drop-off, the stiff breeze made me realize my mistake, but there was nothing to do now but keep paddling and save my dog, which was now 500 yards out in the middle of the lake. I continued to paddle furiously, but even with the wind at my back, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to catch up with her in time.
Ruby had been gradually gaining on the mallard, and when she closed within 10 yards of the bird, it dove. She’d taught herself to dive after cripples. Some dogs do; some don’t. It’s an unteachable but powerful asset in a retriever’s arsenal. The first time she dove for a bird she was not quite a year old. We were on an island two miles out in Lake Michigan on a similarly raw day, and my hunting buddy winged a goldeneye. I sent Rubes, and she chased it for about 150 yards in a good chop. She dove immediately after the duck submerged and stayed under for about 10 seconds before surfacing with the bird’s right foot in her mouth.
Not this time. The mallard was diving often and coming up on either side of her, leading to more energy expenditure. But the back and forth slowed down the chase and allowed me to close the gap, and I was finally within shouting distance. She didn’t acknowledge me at first, but I began banging on the kayak with the paddle, and when she turned her head, my heart sank. White froth was coming out of her nostrils, and her breathing was severely labored. Ruby wore a look of panic and exhaustion, and I wondered which would kill her first.
Then it struck me: I had no way of grabbing her. Even reaching for her scruff could make the kayak tip over, and there wasn’t any space to haul her into the boat anyway. No matter how much I loved her, I wasn’t going to make my wife a widow and leave my kids fatherless, even if it meant watching my dog drown. Duck hunters love to wax poetic about their toughness, but the impossibility of swimming while wearing waders in deep, icy waters was sobering.
Remembering my old martial arts training, I fought through the tunnel vision to search for a solution. The only reasonable one was to convince Ruby to turn around and follow me back to shore, a feat that now seemed even more impossible than hauling her into a moving, unsteady kayak. For some reason, right at that moment, the duck dove and resurfaced even farther away, making it almost impossible to see it in the growing chop. That left Rubes more willing to focus on me and my pleading to follow, and in one huge arc, we turned back to shore, now over 600 yards away, and into the wind. At one point, she tried putting a paw up on the gunwale, which almost ended everything right then and there, but I stayed just out of reach as we began the long trek back.
Incredibly, she wasn’t out of the fight yet, and she turned and went back for that drake three times before I was finally able to keep her aft just long enough to give up the retrieve. Maybe she sensed that she was coming to whatever end that dogs must sense, but her goal shifted toward the shoreline.
Nearly 40 minutes after I had first released her, she hit land, and I nearly tipped over in two feet of water as I heaved myself out of the kayak. I hauled Ruby up on shore, and we both collapsed in total exhaustion. Even then, she sat up and looked out over the water for the mallard, and I could tell that if I had sent her, she’d have gone after it again.
I wanted to scold her for not minding—that’s why we train for obedience—but all I could feel was relief. I felt that I had been given a second chance, not just for Ruby, but for me too. How would I have ever dealt with such an unbelievable tragedy? Would my family have ever forgiven me? Would I have ever hunted again or even owned another dog? So many things could have changed there on that lonely shoreline. The outcome certainly would have been different had my friends not decided to store a tippy kayak under their dilapidated RV instead of taking it home to their garage—and if my dog couldn’t swim for 40 minutes.
So many thoughts bounced around in my head as I dried off Rubes, kissed her wet nose, and kenneled her in the warm truck. Then I grabbed my gun, cinched the life vest on tight, and got back in the kayak to get that damn duck.
