Natural History

My favorite author when I was in my pre-teen years was Jim Kjelgaard.

Now you might not know who I am talking about. However, you may have heard of his most famous work, which was made into a Disney film. This book was Big Red, the story of a bench-bred Irish setter that belongs to a wealthy Canadian landowner. When he escapes his master’s kennels and joins the tenant farmers on that work the backcountry. He falls for a boy named Danny, and Danny turns the bench dog into a great “partridge dog” (ruffed grouse dog), trap-line dog, and even uses him to track down the outlaw black bear “Old Majesty.”

The book is fiction for boys. It’s not entirely realistic, but when I was growing up I had my own version of “Big Red.” Her name should have been “Big Gold,” for she was a performance bred golden retriever. Some people mistook her for an Irish setter or setter cross.

Now, she didn’t live in the backcountry of Eastern Canada. Instead, she lived in the back country of West Virginia, where she flushed grouse, caught rabbit and groundhogs, and swam in various ponds and streams as she ran loose through the wild hills.  She was a natural retriever that never refused a retrieve, and she was most trainable dog I’ve ever had. She could learn something in just one or two repetitions, something I’ve not seen in any other dog.

Despite her skill at varmint hunting, she retained her soft mouth. She could retrieve an egg without scratching it. Once she came across a wild turkey’s nest deep in the undergrowth, and thinking I could use another egg, she picked one up and brought it to me.

The only things she really hated were coyotes, the castrated Dalmatian that wanted to hump her, and deer season, when she had to stay in all the time. A dog of that size and color looks something like a deer in its summer coat, but many flatlanders who would be nimrods didn’t know that white-tailed deer are gray in November and tawny in summer. They’d as soon shoot a tawny retriever as they would any trophy deer.

Her ghost casts a long shadow into my conscience. I’m always looking for a dog like her. I’m sure that it affects some of my biases on this blog, but I’m more and more sure that my biases are grounded in reality. It’s now very hard to find a good golden like her anywhere.

She really was my “Big Gold.”

Kjelgaard grew up in Potter County, Pennsylvania, which is at the northern reaches of the Alleghenies. Those are the same mountains in which I grew up, although I grew up in the unglaciated plateau region of those mountains. His family had moved there from New York. His father was a physician of Danish decent and had moved to the country to be a gentelman farmer and a country doctor.

Jim Kjelgaard was always a writer. He wrote all sorts of stories about the wild animals and the people who lived close to the land. Many of his characters were dogs– often just ordinary hunting dogs or dogs that had been abandoned to live on their own in the wild. I read all of his books that were in my school library, although some of the lewd children had written rather nasty things in the books. In my school’s copy of Big Red, the picture of Red standing next to his mate suckling their puppies has the word “SEX” written above it. I always thought that was a profane vandalism of an excellent book.

I also liked Stormy, which is about a retriever cross that becomes an outlaw after attacking his master. The dog is eventually rehabilitated by a young boy, Allan Marley, who turns the dog into an excellent working retriever and wilderness companion. I also liked Desert Dog, which is about a greyhound that must live wild in the deserts of Arizona. I doubt that many dogs could handle that enviroment, but when I later visited that part of the country, I realized how well Kjelgaard captured the natural world of southern Arizona in his writing.

Kjelgaard had often experienced health problems. He had a bout of epilepsy as boy. He was discovered to have a brain tumor, which as treated with the rather drastic procedure of drilling a hole through his skull to relieve the pressure. While living with his family in Thiensville, Wisconsin, he began to develop severe arthritis. His doctor told him that he should move to a warm climate, which is why he moved to Arizona.

His brain tumor later reappeared, and he mood began to change. He was having severe bouts of depression, and these got worse and worse as time progressed. Then, one day, he committed suicide at his home in Phoenix.

I know I’m not the only person who grew up reading the Jim Kjelgaard books. I am also sure I’m not the only one who could read the books and then experience some of the adventures on his own with his own dogs running the wild ridgetops. I wish more children of this day and age got to experience at least part of this lifestyle, not only through the works of writers like Jim Kjelgaard but through their own experiences as well.

I know that having these experiences has greatly enriched my own life. I wish others could also have a taste of it.

An excellent resource for Jim Kjelgaard information can be found here.