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Kentucky Color: Bird Dogs and Me By Billy Joe Fudge As most of you know, I was raised an only child. I had a big brother, Daryl Gene, that was born just barely alive for a few minutes. His claim to fame that I keep going for him is that he weighed 13 lbs. Even though I had no siblings with which to grow up, I can assure you that I was never alone. I was never alone because wherever I went on the farm, I always was accompanied by one or more of these guys. In the front of this picture was the elder statesman, Smokey. Behind Smokey was his son Mickey and the liver spotted dog to the left was the odd ball out of these three, Duke. Duke was a hard worker in the field but even with much less talent than Smokey and Mickey, Duke became a most adept, Singles Dog. I'll explain later. Although there was a dog or two which entered the scene for varying lengths of stay during my childhood and teenage years, these three were my friends and we were always there for each other. The only exception to our time together was when one or all of them would be on the hunt with Dad and one or more of his friends. There were times when they (the dogs) would take a long road trip or even a plane ride as far away as Indiana, Illinois and Iowa to hunt landlubber type birds like quail or pheasant. Yes, these three were, in the professional vernacular, Bird Dogs. You must remember that Bird Dogs were not just dogs that hunted birds but they had to have the genes for it. Like Thoroughbreds who can run long distances at great speed and Quarter horses that can accelerate like a top fuel dragster and stop on a dime, Bird Dogs are born with a superior sense of smell, a desire to interact with and please humans and a sometimes spooky level of common sense. These three dogs are English Pointers. English Pointers can be one of four colors: liver, black, lemon or orange. Duke is the liver colored on white one while Smokey and Mickey are lemon or orange. Those two colors are sometimes hard to distinguish. We always called them lemon. Smokey as you can plainly see was almost solid white with a few freckles of lemon on his ears and about an inch diameter spot right above the base of the tail. Liver pointers like Duke have brown noses while the lemon pointers have basically flesh colored noses. For your information, what appears to be a spot on Smokey's elbow was a scar left over from Dr. Jones sewing him up following his encounter with a passing car. Smokey had a surgery to remove the outside toe of his left hind foot which had a cancerous tumor. We could readily identify his footprint compared to other dogs because of that smaller foot. There are many Bird Dogs and Me stories to be told but as I end this introductory chapter, I will do so with a "this is why Smokey was special" story. Dad would often say "Smokey has more sense then many of my friends" and with all due respect to many of Dad's friends, I suspect that Dad was right. Somewhere along the line, Smokey and I decided we liked frog legs. So as an 8 or 9 year old, during summer break from school in the early morning hours before my "youngster" farm duties began, Smokey and I would slip off to the pond to replenish our stores of Bullfrog legs. With Pa Fudge's 22 automatic rifle in hand I would walk out the door and Smokey, in one of those clairvoyant moments would already be slowly making his way across the road toward the farm pond. He and I, the night before, had listened from the yard to some big Ol' Croakers doing their Johnny Cash impressions. When we would get to the pond, Smokey would slowly creep along while looking at the water's edge just ahead. If I thought I saw some movement in the water, I would lower my voice and say, "Eeeasy, eeeasy". I had heard Dad do that dozens of times when Smokey's body language seemed to be signaling that he was smelling the birds just ahead. Smokey's gait would then go into slow motion with every sense on high alert. After smelling and or seeing the bullfrog, he would lock up, dead still, staring right into that Ol' Croaker's eyes. Then as that frog seemed hypnotized, I would raise Pa's 22 and shoot him just inches off Smokey's nose! In the same motion Smokey would lunge forward and come out of the water with a mouthful of pond water, mud and frog! Ol' Smokey, he was affectionately called in his latter years was much more that a Bird Dog, he was my friend! This story was posted on 2024-01-19 10:15:32
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More articles from topic Kentucky Color by Billy Joe Fudge:
Kentucky Color: Citizen's Park III, Tree Killers Kentucky Color: Sumac Kentucky Color: Citizen's Park II Kentucky Color: Flatwoods Scarlet Oak Kentucky Color: Citizen's Park mulberry trees Kentucky Color: Past That Lives In Us Kentucky Color Past: Autumn Dogwoods Kentucky Color: The Master A couple of Ed thoughts Kentucky Color: Grissom's Rolling Store View even more articles in topic Kentucky Color by Billy Joe Fudge |
 
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