Natural History

Upland Passage: A Field Dog’s Education by Robert F. Jones is a book with which I reacquainted myself this weekend.

It is the story of two upland flushing Labradors, Jake and Luke, who are both cherished by the author, who uses the dogs to hunt ruffed grouse and woodcock in Vermont.  The narrative begins with Luke, the 11-year-old black Lab, whose body is starting to show signs of wear from his long tenure as a working gun dog. He is arthritic, but that issue is resolved with a low-dose of aspirin. However, when he is diagnosed with laryngeal paralysis, the author knows that the time has come to bring in a new trainee.

Over the years, Luke has become a seasoned flusher of grouse and woodcock, even developing his own technique for flushing the birds:

By our fifth season together…I began to notice that he was flushing more birds than ever directly back to me. At first I thought it was coincidence, but I began to make note of the flush-backs in my gunning diary. Over the next six seasons, Luke flushed a total of 1,078 birds (567 woodcock, 511 ruffed grouse). 63 percent of them flew toward or past my gun.

I had been able to tell when Luke was getting “birdy”:  his strong otterine tail would come up and start flailing faster; he would glance over at me, wherever I was moving through the cover, to make sure I had my eye on him; his coat, shiny already, seemed to light up from within and throw blue-black glints as his guard hairs rose. Starting with his fifth season, however, he added a new tactic to his repertoire. Now I noticed him purposely circling out beyond beyond where he’d located the bird, then pussyfooting in on it, his nostrils flared as he inhaled its rich scent, to end with a pouncing rush that made the bird fly. More often than not, it flew my way (pg. 6-7).

Such behavior can only be learned by a dog that has spent some time in the field. This dog figured out that the best way to catch one of those birds was to send it into the air and to do all that he could to ensure that the bird flew into the direction of the human, who has that thing that makes the loud sound. That thing that makes the loud sound makes the bird fall from the air, and when it’s on the ground, he’ll get to catch it.

But now that Luke has grown older, it is time to start training another flushing retriever, and a young yellow Lab named Jake.  Jake is purchased in the fall of the year, just before the grouse and woodcock season starts.

The author has never taken such a young pup into the woods before, but he decides to take him a as young puppy to see if the pup can learn from Luke. He did:

Most hunting dogs will run ahead of a gunner in zigzag patterns, called quartering, searching for scent in a wider area than could be covered if the dog merely trotted straight ahead of the hunter. At first Jake followed Luke’s tracks as he quartered through the covers. But Luke stopped one and looked hard at the puppy. He growled low in his throat, as he did when the ever-hungry Jake tried encroach upon his food bowl at suppertime. Jake came back toward me, crestfallen, but then suddenly an idea seemed to hit him. He began quartering a pattern of his own, exactly parallel to Luke’s but about twenty yards to Luke’s left. This was just what I’d hoped for….

Whenever the dogs got too far ahead, on the edge of gunshot range, I’d call them in with two blasts of the police whistle. When they were back within range, one whistle blast would make them sit. The I could signal them to hunt in the direction I wanted to go. Luke was a past master at reading hand signals. If I wanted him to hunt to the right or the left of our line, I’d wave that way when I had his attention and he’d go. It took Jake a while to see what was happening, but soon he got the idea– much quicker than it had taken Luke, in his puppy days, to learn it from me. Clearly, this method was a shortcut to teaching a new dog good field behavior. By imitating an older, already trained dog he soon learned what we all wanted, and was rewarded with praise for doing so (pg. 47).

Jones probably didn’t know that the cognitive science at the time said that dogs couldn’t learn through observation.  Anyone who has been around a dog knows this assessment to be patently false– dogs are more than capable of learning from each other.

As I’m sure you may have figured out, Luke passes on at the end of the book. A sudden cancer ends his life at the age of 13.

At the end of the book, the author realizes that Luke taught Jake more than he had realized. Jake is only two years old but he does something that it took Luke five years to figure out:

We walked back down the hill, with Jake quartering ahead of me the way Luke had taught him: down through the flowering thorn apples, scrambling over the spilled, lichen-grown stone walls, his own hunting bell clinging, down toward the edge of the swamp. The Jake got birdy. His tail came up, beating fast, then faster. His head was up, too, nostrils flared, mouth open as he sucked in the bird scent, head weaving slightly to zero in on its source. His feet took him, almost unbidden toward a clump of whippy doghair aspen. But as he neared, he paused for a instant, then circled out and around– just as Luke had taught him. He pushed into the aspens from the far side, to flush the bird back in my direction.

A grouse came pouring out of the cover in a stuttering roar of wings, directly toward me.

I raised an imaginary shotgun, swung through the elongated blur of the bird at speed, hit the imaginary trigger. “Bang!” I said. The bird flew on, but my inner eye saw it puff and tumble, primaries groping like fingers for the grip on the air. My inner ear heard it thud on the ground. Jake was out of the cover, standing at my legs. I could feel his heart thump, and his eyes were locked like mine onto the same empty piece of sky into which the grouse had vanished.

Luke lives (pg. 67-68).

This book isn’t very long. It can be read in just part of an afternoon, but the writing is superb and the photographs by Bill Eppridge are stunning. Jones writes with such poignant detail that one can see the black Luke quartering ahead with the cute, over eager yellow lump of puppy that is Jake soaking it all in.

This book is tribute to two working retrievers, written by a man who truly loves them and appreciates them for what they are.  Neither dog has ribbons or titles. Neither has been force-fetched or has worn an e-collars. (The author clearly states that he uses only his voice for correction.) They do this work because they love it– and live for it.

They are true Labrador retrievers. Intelligent, inquisitive, and very eager to please.

Dogs that are worthy of the tribute that is this gem of a book.