Story and photo by Chad Love
He was born in a land of grouse and woodcock and woods and horizons defined not by the infinite stretch of the earth itself, but by trees and hills and the ancient, glaciated folds of time and rock, winter and water.
He died in a land of quail and grass and heat and sky; a gaunt place where rain and dreams often evaporate long before reaching the ground and the pungent scent of crushed sand-sage underfoot permeates clothing, hair, soul, as you walk atop rolling hills of alluvial sand in the slanted amber light of evening chasing dogs and dreams.
In the space and time between those two moments of coming and passing, he was my dog.
I met him at the airport, the first pup I’d ever bought that required a plane ticket. I placed the crate on the front seat of the truck, bent over, and got my first good look at what I had purchased. One black eye and one white eye stared back at me from the rear of the crate. I opened the latch, coaxed him out, and for the next three hours he pushed himself hard against my leg and slept. When I stirred in my seat, he’d look up to make sure this quiet, warm new human wasn’t leaving him.
For the next four years, we were joined at the hip like that, in the curious, tensive way bird dogs and their owners always are; the dog’s inner struggle between the desire to run free to the horizon and the need to stay and be loved, and our inner struggle between giving so much of ourselves to dogs, all the while knowing we will eventually bury them.
We named him Ozzy. I told people the name was inspired by the Ozymandias of Shelley’s poem, but that was a lie. He just looked and acted like an Ozzy, so the name stuck. He joined our family as seamlessly as if he’d been born into it. We were smitten. I like to think he was, too.
He was slow to mature, as some setters are, and slow to develop the fire I hoped he would. There were times that first puppy season when I questioned if he’d make a bird dog at all. And then, midway through, Ozzy discovered himself. He ran bigger, faster, and with purpose, barreling hell-bent across the landscape like he suddenly knew what his legs and nose were for.
His first solid point on a wild Oklahoma covey came on the side of a panhandle sandhill. Legs quivered, birds erupted, and from that moment Ozzy was never same. Neither was I.
We had three more years after that moment, three more seasons to grow and learn and trust and bond and love, and by the end of the fourth season Ozzy had hit his stride. The scared little pup who had stared back at me from the rear of the crate was gone. I had a bird dog.
The day I noticed the slight limp in his rear leg, I didn’t think anything of it. A week later, I was in the vet’s office looking at an x-ray and learning a new term: osteosarcoma. The vet explained the options, gave me her opinion. I peered at the x-ray once more, traced my finger over the area she was pointing out. I glanced at Ozzy, who just a few days before I had watched glide across the sandhills like a flowing white wraith. I looked back at the vet, took a deep breath, and said, “take it off.”
When you hunt the sandhills of the southern plains, the scent of sand-sage permeates everything, and bits of it finds its way into your vest, pants pockets, boots. At the end of a hunt both you and the dogs exude it. The aroma of dog and sage and dust will always mean home to me. It takes me there.
I was cleaning out the vest, getting the past season’s worth of stray feathers and bits of dried leaves from the game bag and pockets when he limped up to me and nuzzled my hand. The vet had warned me it would probably come back, even with the amputation, that by the time you could see it on an x-ray it was probably too late. She had been right.
I stood there in the garage, stroked his fur, and cried. I thought back to the day he arrived from that foreign land of water and trees, and how he’d grown into a dog of grass and sky. I thought of everything we’d shared in between that moment and now, and of all the future that would be denied us.
I picked a few bits of dried sage, still smelling faintly of earth and memory, from the vest and ran it through Ozzy’s fur. It was the last time he ever smelled of sage and home.
Chad Love is editor of Quail Forever Journal
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of Quail Forever Journal. If you enjoyed it and would like to read more, join Quail Forever today