Ambulance Driver’s Best Friend

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That’s me, way back in the day. I’m the ugly one wearing the green shirt. Every one who sees that photo pegs me at age seventeen and about 180 pounds.

Apparently dog training was a little less stressful than being an Elderly Mobile Transporter, because I was actually twenty-three and weighed a solid 230 pounds. Now unfortunately, I look every bit of my thirty-eight years, and we won’t even talk about my weight.

But reading about Flo and Mair blogging about their favorite pooches got me a little nostalgic about my own, and I thought I’d favor you with a tale of simpler times and loyal dogs.

I had inherited a showcase dog from my brother when I took over his training kennels. Jazz was hands-down the hottest retriever I’ve ever seen – pure rocket fuel. I’ve seen some of the best ever do their stuff in training and field trials, and none of them had her drive and speed. I learned how to train dogs while watching her develop. You could say we grew up together and attended the same schools.

Unfortunately, she suffered a career-ending injury in a training accident in California and we had to retire her before she could prove herself. Even at half-speed and old age, she was pretty hot.

But I needed a showcase dog, one that I had trained, and so I went shopping for a puppy. I found a friend who had a litter of well-bred pups, and on their 49th day of life, I went to pick mine out. I brought a pigeon wing with me, turned the litter loose in the yard, and waited for one to distinguish herself from the bunch.

Yeah, I said her. Male dogs are much like male humans – both of them are exceedingly stupid for the first third of their lives. I wanted a precocious pup that could learn and develop quickly, and I had learned that while Y chromosomes definitely come with clumsiness and a thick head, toughness and smarts are a little harder to predict.

And so this little ball of attitude promptly seized the thrown wing and set about keeping it from her litter mates. Her brothers gave up pretty quickly, but one sister kept after it rather, well, doggedly.

“I like that one’s spunk,” my buddy had said, referring to the determined sister, “but I think I’m gonna keep the big male for myself.”

“And I like the other one’s guile,” I had replied. “Watch how she fakes her sister out every time. She’s always half a step faster, and not just in speed.”

“But she’s so little,” my buddy had protested.

“And while that black Shetland pony you have your heart set on is wearing himself out lunging through flooded rice fields, my dog will be swimming through them. Plus, she’ll be a lot easier to lift into a boat. My advice is to keep the other female and sell the male to the first sucker that thinks looks and conformation are everything.”

So I took the mischievous little sprite home, and that became her name – Sprite. It fit her well. It took me a month of chewed boots, soiled carpet and a scarred stock on a Browning pump shotgun before I figured out that it was a Wise Thing to put the expensive stuff out of reach with a puppy in the apartment, and she figured out that excess energy is best channeled into those times when we are outside.

It shames me no end that we both figured out the rules in roughly the same amount of time, even though her brain pan was about 1/4 the size of mine. And I had opposable thumbs, too.

But that’s the kind of dog she was. She just knew things. She lived inside with me, and when we were inside the apartment, she was the world’s worst soup hound. She had loafing down to a fine art. At night, she’d snuggle close and lay her head on my right shoulder and root around until she was flat on her back, and there we’d lay, two slugs trying their best to take up every inch of a king-sized bed.

But when we went outside…hoo boy, was she a different critter. She had this internal switch that tripped when the door opened. She could hear a shotgun shell drop into a khaki shirt pocket from a hundred paces. She could go from semi-conscious floor mat to whirling dervish in a heartbeat, and all it took was the musical tinkle of duck bands when I’d slip my training lanyard over my head.

Still, it took me a couple of months to figure out just how much dog I had. I was goofing around in the yard one day after I had finished with my regular training string, and I let Sprite out of her kennel. Threw a few bumpers and let her work off a little steam. When I say this dog was fast, I mean fast. She’d move across the ground and you could barely hear her passage, yet she’d be outrunning the big dogs at the tender age of four months.

Fun retrieves had lost their luster for both of us, and she could already fetch anything I could throw, as far as I could throw it. So, I decided to extend her range a bit. I called my bird boy (read: dirt cheap nephew labor) over and sent him out into the pasture with a handful of bumpers.

“Go out about a hundred yards, Dusty. I don’t want to overwhelm her just yet,” I had told him. “Angle the throw away from us, and once she’s picked that one up, walk out to where you threw that bumper and we’ll work from there. Let’s see how she does.”

After she nailed the first five throws, I changed my strategy. I was running out of bumpers, and Sprite still hadn’t been challenged. I called Dusty back in.

“Walk out about two hundred this time,” I ordered. “Walk fifty yards further with every throw.”

“That far? But I’m tired!”

“Don’t sass me, boy. I’ve got my first three nephews buried in the yard around here, and I killed ’em all for sassing me. You think your Mama had her first kid so late in life? Puh–leeze. Don’t make me tell your mother it was necessary to kill one of her offspring. Again.”

Well, a handful of bumpers later, Sprite had nailed her third consecutive 450 yard retrieve. At four months old.

And she kept finding ways to amaze me. She retrieved 76 ducks and 23 geese before she was seven months old, including a live, uninjured wood duck drake that had the singular misfortune of landing a bit too close to the dog stand, one brisk morning in the flooded timber.

At single retrieve competitions, she beat Hunting Retriever Champions and Grand Hunting Retriever Champions like they stole something. Never placed lower than third, and all against much older and more advanced dogs. Clocked a 450 yard retrieve in one memorable finals in 48 seconds, there and back.

I turned down a $10,000 offer for a half-interest in her that day, from the owner of the second place dog.

Got her Hunting Retriever title at nine months.

Got her Hunting Retriever Championship at just shy of three years. She should have gotten it in half the time, but me training this dog was like handing the Ferrari keys to a kid with a learner’s permit. I was good, but I wasn’t ready for a dog of this caliber.

She’d retr
ieve a beer from the ice chest for you…

…even if you put the ice chest on the other side of an eight-foot wall…

…but not if it was Busch Light. Those, she’d drink about every third one she was sent to fetch. Hey, she was a Cadillac dog, but she had Yugo taste in beer.

She could stay in the house for 48 hours with an auto-feeder and a water bowl, and never bark , mess the floor or scatter the garbage. Once you got home though, she’d take a dump fit to impress a Tyrannosaurus. In the neighbor’s yard, no less.

You could unload the groceries and put them on the coffee table right in front of her, and she’d turn up her nose at a porterhouse steak. Put a loaf of white bread in front of her, though…and she’d inhale the entire thing and leave you with nothing but a few shreds of wrapper on her whiskers and a “What, who me?” innocent expression on her face.

She’d sit on a dog stand, encased in a sheet of ice with icicles hanging off her nipples for hours on end, and she’d never even whine. Didn’t want you to pet her, either. Petting was for playtime, and hunting was business.

She could do blind retrieves as far as you could see to handle her, yet I rarely had to get out of the blind. We could have eight ducks on the water, and she’d mark them all. She’d go into autopilot, and all I had to do was take the duck, watch her ears come up as she locked on the next one, and send her on her way.

I loaned her to a client early one season because his dog wasn’t quite ready for prime time. He came back with an offer.

“I’ll give you $3,500 for that dog, right now.”

“I’ve turned down over three times that already, back when she was half as valuable as she is now.”

“Okay, then $3,500 for breeding rights, and a lease for this hunting season.”

“Nope.”

“Okay, then how much would it take?”

“$30,000. Plus I get the pick from every litter, and I choose the stud.”

“Shit. Let me talk to my partners and see if we can raise that.”

I never expected him to bite. What I didn’t want to say was “Hell no, I won’t sell my dog! She’s family!” I was running a business, after all.

Thankfully, the deal fell through. I don’t really think I could have gone through with it anyway.

In the early 90’s, I got soured on the whole dog training business. I had millionaire clients with crappy dogs that no amount of money would improve, and I had dirt poor mechanics and rice farmers who were only willing to spend $1,000 training a world-class dog. I got so tired of it that I quit putting any effort into training, until one morning I woke up and couldn’t stand the sight of the lying face I saw in the mirror.

So, I borrowed a few thousand bucks, refunded training fees for all my clients, and shut the doors to the place. I enrolled in EMT school just a few months later. Things were a lot simpler when it was just me and Sprite.

When I graduated, I applied for a job at Podunk Ambulance and got hired. Sprite was waiting in the truck during my interview. She slept next to me on the couch at the station that night. My dog was part of the package – hire me and it was understood that Sprite occupied a room at the station when I was on duty. The boss was fine with the arrangement. I suspect he was more impressed with the dog than with me.

After I had worked at Podunk for a few years, Sprite started to show her age. She was only eight years old, but highly bred field trial Labs often die at relatively young ages. They’re high strung, in much the same way as thoroughbred horses. You can’t kill a mutt and they’ll eat your food for sixteen years, but I suppose God only blesses us with the once-in-a-lifetime dogs for a short while. Like comets, their light is bright but fleeting.

I sent her home to my parents one weekend during paramedic school. Between class and work, I was hardly ever home, and I couldn’t see her cooped up in an ambulance station all day. Mom promised to take care of her, but barely three weeks had passed before I got the call I dreaded.

Sprite had gone missing just before dark, and Mom went looking for her. She found her, curled up dead in her old travel kennel, behind the pigeon coop at my old training kennels. Mom told me she had been listless since I had brought her home. Personally, I think she grieved to death.

I had never before felt a shame as deep, and have rarely felt since, from knowing my best friend died thinking I had abandoned her. I quit hunting for years afterward. For me it was always about the bond between me and Sprite, and the pleasure of seeing a good dog work. Without her, hunting left me cold.

Pardner talked me into trying hunting again a few years back, and I got the duck fever once again. Now I go whenever I have an opportunity. Still, whenever I hear wings whistling in the wind, I instinctively look to my left expecting to see a dog there, ears up and watching the birds come in. And it still hurts a little not seeing Sprite there.