Recompense

You will see it coming, no matter if this is your first or your fifteenth. And if you are a kind soul who has never viewed this relationship as one of leader and subordinate, but as two functioning as one, it will knock you flat.

Perhaps, if you are a planner, as I am, you will have another coming, a toothy, petulant, laugh-inducing distraction or merely just the younger of a fine brace, but a diversion all the same. On balance, this will not help much. Your dog is dying. The dog is dying.

This is where I am as I push the diesel pickup across the vast Plains of Saint Augustine. Scaled quail country and far across the flat, whispers of Mearns country. Threads of oak and juniper dark against the impossibly blue southwestern sky.

Behind me, sprawling across the seat are the dog and the distraction and the sun is falling out of the sky, taking the shooting light with it. Five hours one way this morning, five hours back. Maybe an hour to hunt. We know a little pocket, a pond – called a tank in this country – above which lives a covey or two of Mearns in the catclaw and cholla, maybe even some Gambel's at the head of the canyon. We will hunt, just for an hour, a half, fifteen minutes, but by God we will hunt.

She has what Corey Ford called "the brown of October" in her eyes, but since chemo started, it feels as if the brown has taken on a sheen of gray, like an unexpected fog climbing up out of the timber below, shrouding the hunt.

You will see it coming. The falling off, the tottering, the hip bones pushing up, the flanks tucked, the spine prominent.

I am not ready for this. Too soon. Just 10. She is so skinny, despite the homemade wet food, despite the high-end kibble. I lift her into the pickup now, stopping her from leaping and, never a big dog, she's an easy heft.

"The optimum relation between a gunner and his bird dog is a fusion, the man giving his soul to his dog with the unconditional devotion with which the dog gives his soul to his man. This is easy for the dog, it doesn't come easily for some men, but it is that simple and when you see one of those meaningful man/dog combinations, this is what has happened," wrote the setter man George Bird Evans.

Evans had a literal pile of setters in his life, and he knew them. When he had the one, he knew that too. I have had enough to know as well and this little setter, her hide stretched like silk over bone, is it for me. We are it, that combination. Here at the end of her first, last, and only decade, there was never any hesitation, never even a thought to the cost of six months of weekly chemotherapy because there was no cost, there was only repayment. A debt.

At the end of it all, the price will be as much as two or even three started bird dogs to treat a cancer in a dog that likely only had a couple years left healthy or not. Yet the debt is so great that double or triple – hell there is no figure – would still not be enough. Unconditional indeed.

Treated and in remission, she may have as many as two years. Untreated, two months.

I am not ready and were it not for the swollen lymph nodes and the subsequent blood work, I would have never known. Before they pumped chemicals into her veins every week, she had the same fire as she always has had, the same she had as a pup released to the wind.

A decade before on the western edge of this same vast savanna, she made a point on a covey of Mearns tucked beneath a shimmering Emery oak within shotgun range of Sonora. Tail high, frozen spectacularly, her nose barely quivering, huffing tiny breaths of quail through that fantastical sensory machine. I can see it still because it was a point so stunning I had the talented bird dog artist Kate Hall record it forever and this bit of art capturing art hangs on my office wall back home in Montana. A little setter doing her thing.

That same trip was the last one into southwest quail country for my lifelong mentor, a Stetson-hatted retired game warden who rode good horses, hunted backcountry elk, and swung double guns on quail in the tall grass. He was everything my young self wanted to be when I grew up, so I emulated him for 40 years. He was well into his eighties on that trip, and after he shot his last quail over one of her points he said, "I've hunted over literally hundreds of dogs in my life. That little dog is the best I've ever seen."

The last quail, a beautiful bit of russet, black, and white, a Mearns male for my lifelong friend. I hope it was one of his fondest memories as he stepped off this blue marble.

So, there is that debt to repay for the last 10 years but the principal and interest kept building. There is one of the best hunts of two lifetimes as great friends walked off a mountain of Nevada slide rock, the sky afire with a going-away sun from another high desert day. The weight of two limits of chukar warm against our backs in one of those rare moments when the dogs did well, the shooting was straight, the cripple-finding spectacular.

But there is also a wing-tipped rooster spinning into a Montana buffaloberry coulee on a cover we call Top of the World, shot by the lovable preteen son of my best friend. His first pheasant, a memory that will undoubtedly come to him decades hence when he remembers a long, good life.

There is the first pheasant for my falconer wife's Lolo, a peregrine/gyr released into the sky where Montana meets Wyoming and the Sioux gave their lives to keep their heaven on earth. Two animals living their genetic selves, both carried aloft somehow, some way, by clean, fresh air into a forever blue yonder.

Too much to list and that combination of which Evans wrote is so personal that recounting feels like bragging and I was taught by Great Depression-honed parents that the Good Lord has no use for a bag of wind.

Good memories die with the rememberer, but the best memories are shared like Kansas pheasants from the tall grass prairie, chukar partridge from Wyoming sandstone caprock, Mearns quail off horseback in the southwest oak grasslands over a fine little dog.

You will see it coming. You will not be ready. Perhaps it will be the relentless, cruel plod of time, a reminder that Heaven's gunners need a good bird dog every decade or so too. You will see it in your old dog and it will not be easy to watch. Aging and death will always be too soon, that is the repetitious lifetime heart-pain for the lover of gun dogs.

But this is not about the next possible two years, it's about the last 10. I am in arrears. I got you, girl. I will do the driving to the far-away veterinarian on the family vacation, I will make the weekly trips when we are back home, I will repay what I owe you. I got you. There was never any question.

An old man's last quail, a young man's first pheasant, the hearts and intentions of good friends turned to pointing dogs because of your carriage and grace afield, a best day for two great friends who have had a lot of best days, my lady's falcon released to the zephyr to dazzle us all.

This is recompense but perhaps it is also greed, for I would like to have my breath taken away, just one more time. Hammer down on the diesel pickup, the tall tanned Indiangrass of the vast plain a blur alongside, racing the sun. For her, this hunt, but also for me. Just one more hunt, one more point. Please, God. One more. And then maybe, just maybe, another.

Thomas Reed writes and ranches from outside Pony, Montana. He is the author of several books, most recently co-editing the upland hunting anthology, Mouthful of Feathers, Upland in America.

This story originally appeared in the Fall 2026 issue of Quail Forever Journal.