Fall fun and fowl

     Man where does the time go?!  It seems as though it was just yesterday that I was dusting off my golf clubs to go hit a bucket of balls with Dad on a chilly spring morning.  Now the golf clubs have more or less been rendered idle for the year, barring a trip down to Mom and Dad's Arizona house, and the camo has been pulled out of the closet!  You've read about our bowhunt for elk on here and I haven't hunted with my rifle since I picked up a bow so my big game season is pretty much over so now it's on to the wild animal that really gets my blood pumping, ducks!

   I hunted waterfowl a few times growing up but it wasn't until I moved to Conrad, MT and got my baby girl Duchess that I really got interested in the sport.  Since getting a dog who pretty much lives to retrieve my desire to bird hunt has only grown stronger each year!  Duchess has been an amazing dog over the years, showing me some of the most awe inspiring retrieves one could imagine.  She's had so many of them it's hard to share all of them but one sticks out above the others, we were hunting outside of Laurel, MT on the Yellowstone river when the buddy of mine that was with us winged a goose and it sailed all the way out into the middle of the river which was starting to freeze up so it had little icebergs flowing down it.  Duch never hesitated, she swan out to the wounded bird, picked it up and began swimming back to me, getting slammed by icebergs along the way!  I ran down the river bank to shorten the distance she had to swim and all I could think of was how I was going to go get her when one of the chunks of ice took her under!  Thankfully this never happened and she eventually made it back to me and I'll never forget the look in her eyes as she sat there shivering in my arms, looking up at me with a face that simply said lets go do that again!

    
     Duchess turned 11 in June and as much as she seems to defy the odds of aging I know her hunting years are numbered so I take each hunt were on as a blessing in itself.  She has been an extremely healthy dog her whole life but recently she had a small growth show up on her eyelid.  We took her in to an optician, yes they actually have a pet optician, and she's going in to have it frozen off and sent in for testing in a couple weeks.  The vet was pretty optimistic that it was not a cancerous tumor but never the less I know I am going to treat every hunt we go on this year that much more special!
     So as the days start getting shorter and the thermometer becomes more resistant to showing warm temperatures, I know at least two of us who are eager for the snow to fly! 

Remember, if you try hard enough you can usually find a silver lining in every situation we come across in life, the trick to happiness is being open to trying to find it:)