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"His
inherited position will be as expansive as this new world he is
experiencing one tumbling leaf and drifting smell at a time."
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Sometimes,
when he's bounding
across mounds of late-winter clover beneath the elbows and shoulders of
moss-draped live oaks, I wonder if he suspects how much rides along on
his blonde shoulders. A yellow-furred streak of unrecognizable,
wind-blown something-or-other, the little pup cannot possibly know the
weight he'll be asked to bear upon his wide little back.
"Good boy." I rub his tender, soft ears as he
chews my thumb, and I am grinning with pride: He just raced right to me
when I called him, for the very first time, ever. "That's a good
boy. You probably deserve better, but I'm the lot you've drawn, dang the
rotten luck."
He arrived just a week ago. Muscular, stout and thick, his
proportions are classical, his little Lab face rife with expression. In
accordance with the gospel according to Wolters, we took him home in his
little pet carrier at exactly seven weeks. He slept all the way. I
watched the sugar cane fields as I drove home through an auburn
February, searching for mottled wings, but all I spot are killdeer and
blackbirds.
At home, Daisy whines, trembling and eager to get at that
pup from behind her fenced-in yard, but we are exercising generous
caution in their introduction. She's a black, grown version of the pup,
raised by my fiancée. Susan found her, then owned by devils that seldom
fed the year-old lass, and they beat her mercilessly for barking. A born
savior, Susan took the pitifully thin and traumatized dog home, poured
boundless love and patience and healing touches on that scarred,
suspicious sweetheart for many months. What she molded with the loving
hands of a woman I learned to love myself and make my wife, is a gentle,
brilliant seventy-pound package of absolute trust and devotion nearing
her sixteenth year on this earth.
And there's part of the burden the little pup must endure:
three-score-and-ten pounds of the kindest, most abiding dog a man should
ever be privileged to know. He has some mighty big paws to fill, in
mighty varied ways. She was never a hunting dog, but Daisy in her youth
might have been a champion. On treks to fishing ponds back behind
acreage of sugar cane, Daisy and I sometimes scare up woodcock in
spiraling escape, and she chased them, when she had such ambition, like
a banshee. She once swam nearly across Bayou Teche to retrieve an oak
stick, and she was thirteen years old then.
We named the pup Bogie, after that estimable actor of half
a century past. Seemed to fit his sleepy-eyed face. He came from a
litter of ten, leaping and rolling and yelping around the owners' living
room carpet. There were two young boys gleeful in the fray and two
parents looking pleadingly at us to make a decision and reduce the din
by one-tenth, perhaps more, if they could only possibly talk us into two
puppies. An exhausted flaxen mother trying to sneak in an undisturbed
nap in the corner. I let the pups romp on and around me, watching them,
letting Wolters' parables guide the choice.
All at once, this sturdy package of straw-shaded frazzle
walked right up to me and sat down. He looked me dead in the eye for a
good minute, and I swear that dog smiled. Smiled, panted at me, and I
knew I was lost.
God save our souls.
~
We live in the lowlands of coastal Louisiana, in a little
160-year-old cypress house built by my great-great-great uncle. Bayou
Teche flows at the north edge of the wooded lot where a five-century-old
oak grows. It was here before Columbus. Bogie took up residence in my
woodworking shop where he would begin to learn the few things essential
to moving into the house proper. We brought him home on a Friday so at
least we could sleep in if he cried all night. But Bogie was one chapter
ahead of us in the books. He cried briefly three times the first night,
two times the second, only once the third night and has been silent ever
since. To our amazement and delight, he immediately learned to take care
of the pesky biological urges of a small pup outside on the grass. The
moment I free him from his kennel we rush to the back door, fling it
open excitedly, and race together to the grass where obligatory duties
are dispatched in short order. By the fourth day he responded eagerly to
his name and "Come!" most of the time, and by the fifth was
learning that those rubbery, bone-shaped things we brought him were
meant for chewing, unlike shirt sleeves, shoe laces, thumbs and noses.
He had been fitted with his leash and drags it around, accustomed
already to it and collar without a bit of fuss. Even without it, he
stays at heel by some preternatural inclination. All of which just
augments the gnawing guilt in my bones.
"You're doomed, you know," I tell him as he
wrestles with a rope toy, slinging his head to the melody of a vicious
puppy-growl. "You and I both. Bird hunters, of all the wretched
things. Day late and a dollar short, that's what we are, Bogie-man.
Stranded here, in a world of deer stands and duck blinds. Automatic
twelve gauges and big rifles. Outcasts from the start."
At the bayou back of the house I watch him stalk and attack
driftwood and elephant ears in - to him - a world just born, just made
and unfolding in his eyes for the first time in history. So tiny, there
at the water's edge, nose lifted, sniffing at scents he never knew until
that fleeting moment. He leaps at the water, submerges his front legs
and chest only, pats and paws at the water happily, then races off to a
patch of tall Johnson grass. Then he rockets back, plunges again into
the bayou, just his front half, slaps at the water furiously.
His inherited position will be as expansive as this new
world he is experiencing one tumbling leaf and drifting smell at a time.
Never does a mean-spirited utterance comes from Daisy's jowls. A perfect
lady, she holds her head high like the belle of a Southern plantation,
neck rigid and stance proud. Quick to make friends with every
respectable dog she met not so long ago when she still managed to trot
along with Susan on bicycle rides. But she recognized ne'r do wells when
she encountered them and steadfastly ignored the miscreants of her
species with disdain. Her expressions betrays every emotion, her speed
and obedience were legendary.
Large paws to fill, indeed, yet Daisy seldom trots anymore.
Ambles along carefully, a bit stiff in the joints, but her tail remains
a decade her junior in its enthusiasm. Her graying muzzle is still
expressive - hints of a smile there, too - and her eyes bright, but she
takes longer and longer naps during the day, and sometimes rousing her
takes a raised voice and clap of the hands. They are getting to know
each other slowly, carefully. I urge him to look up to her, learn by her
example. From an origin of cruelty, Daisy became a showcase of all her
breed's much touted qualities, and a testament to love and patience.
But that's not all. The poor little pup. His arched back as
he races across the lawn after a daddy-long-legs mosquito or a patch of
clover undulating in a breeze will bear all the expectations and dreams
I've conjured for him, too. First, a fly fisherman by obsession in a
land of black water swamps and bayous. Therefore he'll have to learn his
seamanship and manners for the boat. Nothing worse than seventy pounds
of riotous canine without proper sea legs in a small boat.
"One paw for you, one for the boat, Bogie," I
tell him when he's rolling around trying to get at my shoelaces.
"Nice and easy, that's the ticket in a boat, little man."
We'll also fish clear, fast water in north Louisiana hills for spotted
bass and long-ear sunfish. He'll climb bone-white sandbars topped by
sweet-scented pines, and tumble over slippery sandstone terraces in the
streambeds of the Kisatchie region.
But the big bluegill and bucketmouth bass virtually vanish
in the winter months. The bamboo rods sit idle in their tubes in the
corner of my piddling room until spring, and I pass the restless months
jumpy and irritable. Little by little, year after year, notions have
wormed into my thoughts. And memories. A lifetime ago, when I was but a
lad from a poor Indian family with my granddad's old crack barrel .410,
a worn carpenter's belt and pouch donated by a father who was a
pedigreed fisherman. Though he never hunted he wouldn't dissuade a boy
from trying it. Down the fencerows and the ditch banks I went, no dog,
just eager feet. The heart-stopping flush when I stepped into the first
covey of quail possessed me like a voodoo spirit, and I learned soon
enough not to try to shoot them all at once with a dog-leg scattergun.
My mother, a Cajun belle raised on a sugar cane farm, smothered the
breasts in black iron skillets with onions and gravy, served them over
rice.
"Mais cher," she would croon over the first
taste, all four-foot eleven-inches of her. "C'est bon! That's
good!"
But within a couple years the guns were put away in favor
of a blue Mustang with an eight-cylinder engine and a high school full
of girls more alluring even than Bob. My old 311 in sixteen gauge was
pawned for want of stereo speakers for that blue 'Stang to blare rock
and roll.
Twenty, twenty-five winters later, I took notice and
received the condolences that Bob's pretty much vanished from the South,
leaving me a broken heart. The South without bobwhite is empty as a Jack
Daniels bottle turned on end; silent as a burned-out plantation. As
lonely as an elderly statesman, the landed gentry, holed up in a rest
home. While I wasn't looking, a part of the fundamental essence of the
South vanished into thin air.
And that's why I'm doomed, and dragging that tender young
pup with me on a collision course with disappointment. Chasing a world
that's folded up upon itself and vanished, along with the little
gentleman I so loved all those years ago. I'm not made for duck blinds
and deer stands. The man I've become aches for the boy I was, the sugar
cane fields where a gargantuan casino sits now, gaudy with neon, with a
skirt of concrete around itself to park several thousand cars and buses
full of eager gamblers..
They say there are still woodcock along the black water
sloughs near higher ground. Never sought them out when I was young,
never lifted walnut to shoulder for one. But timberdoodles are all
that's left to me in the "new" South. An attractive little
bird with a corkscrew flight. Hardly an anybody even takes notice of
them in this part of Louisiana, and fewer even than that pursue them.
But he's no Bob. That's the harshest revelation of growing
up, I think. Never mind piles of bills on the counter in the kitchen.
Forget the price of gasoline and the logistics of scurrying through a
life where there are few wild places even here in this sparsely
populated region at the Atchafalaya River delta. I grew up, and like
Santa and the Easter Bunny, the bobwhite quail became just a memory of
childhood.
Havilah Babcock would weep, I just know it.
~(Click Pics To Enlarge)
Bogie picks up his rubber bone and carries it around
the woodworking shop or the yard, and my heart leaps into my craw. I
throw a little chew toy and he bolts after it, bounding exuberantly,
half the time dropping it halfway back, half the time bringing it to
hand.
"There's a lot riding on you, little man," I say
when he's dozing off on my knee, and he cocks one eye open at me
curiously, but fades back toward slumber quickly. In my distant, glassy
gaze, if he looked, he'd see that we're no longer sitting on the
concrete floor of the workshop but beside a fireplace after a cold
November morning, the birds breasted and the twigs and burs combed out
of Bogie's coat. We're finally warming again.
"I'm sorry for all of it, really. You could have been a pampered
house-dog, you know. Laze around on your brass pet bed, eat gourmet chow
from fancy bowls. Yours might have been a life of leisure, daily walks
through suburban streets lined with identical houses and flirting with
the prissy French poodles and nipping in annoyance at the yapping
Chihuahuas we meet. But no. No such fate for Bogie. You had the rotten
luck of being kidnapped by a dreamer, a miscreant writer and clumsy fly
fisherman on a crusade to touch back through time a lad who has all
grown up into the aforementioned no-account. A relic. A throwback from a
bygone age."
But he has the polite manners to remain silent. There on my
knee, he's oblivious to all that will be expected of him in just a few
weeks, when we begin catechism and the Rev. Wolters' sermons will guide
us either down the road to salvation or descent into the inner circles
of Hades. Right now all he cares about is his chin on my knee, safe and
content. I stoke his back and he huffs, drifting, closer to a dark, deep
sleep.
"Of all the tough breaks," I whisper now, more to myself than
the slumbering pup. "To be adopted and imprisoned by a small-town
newspaper man captive himself to municipal meetings full of brouhaha
flipped into inverted pyramids, formulaic police beat reports and the
occasional obituary. When he'd rather be writing a weekly column about
largemouth bass on four-weight tackle, cutthroat in Montana and redfish
in the Gulf of Mexico. Or…" - and here my own eyes slacken,
dreamy, far away some place - "…traipsing through a field of
golden cane stubble, working close, waiting for the flush, the lift of
the gun to the shoulder, the shot and the perfect retrieve as read and
reread a thousand times in the scriptures. Those other gospels,
according to Babcock and Hill and Middleton."
Susan comes to the shop quietly then, and we sit together
with the pup while he dozes, though he favors her with a glance and
wiggle of his tail even in his dire exhaustion.
"One day," I tell her with a grin, "we'll be
sending him off to college."
We've both been parents, before we met and embarked on our
new lives together, but it rather feels like we're parents again, to
this yellow, snoozing delivery of expectation, laughter and boundless
dreams. He's going to grow up and be a "good dog," like that
venerable old doll of ours behind the fence, the model of what we expect
from the canon "good dog."
~
Down by the bayou, I step out from the bank to a bit of
riprap concrete spread there to halt erosion. The pup whines and scolds
me for moving out of reach, but finally he leaps - physically, and in
faith - into the water. It only reaches to his belly, and he climbs up
on the chunk with me happily.
He splashes through the water again just for the fun of it
and leaps to the shore to attack a suspicious-looking wild iris shoot.
The introductions with Daisy have not been entirely successful, but they
have been amusing. She won't look at the pup. Sits with her back to him
when we try to accustom them to each other. I know the old girl too
well: If she doesn't see it, it doesn't exist, and that yelping, spastic
creature has not invaded her happy home. We love up on her
enthusiastically.
Twilight, and a dragon-fire sunset is spreading like
wind-fanned flames across the tops of browned cypress along Bayou Teche.
It's getting chilly, but I stay, a little longer, step to the bank and
squat, leaning my back against a live oak. Bogie comes to me and, in an
uncommon moment of calm, sits and looks out over the conflagration to
the west. I rest my hand on his back. "I've been looking around,
little man," I say softly, and he glances back at me, pants twice,
then turns back to the dusk. That look. The same look as that day on the
floor with his littermates. "Still a few 311s out there in good
shape. Heavy as hell, they say, swing like a club but hey, twenty-five
years ago I could swing 'em fine. I'm not that old yet."
He whines, and it may have just been because he's had a
long, exciting day, but I'd like to think it's an exhalation of wonder
at the glorious sunset before us, and the sharing between us.
I stoke his little back, but if feels strong, and will only
grow stronger. I believe he can bear it all: living up to the example of
his predecessor, and the aching expectations of his friend and
instructor. The things he'll see, and learn and experience! The things
we both will. Takes my breath away now and then, when I dream of it…when
I glimpse it there in the sunset at the close of his eighth week of life
on this rare and wonderful old world, bathed in amber and saturated with
eventide. Only the silence diminishes my spirit. The unfilled voids
where Bob's winsome call once rang.
We watch the light fade and wait for the tomorrow of an
uncertain world unfolding before us one sunset at a time.
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About the Author:
 Roger
Emile Stouff is the son of Nicholas Leonard Stouff Jr., last chief of
the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, and Lydia Marie Gaudet Stouff, a
Cajun belle. He has been a journalist for 25 years and author of the
award-winning column "From the Other Side" in the St. Mary
and Franklin Banner-Tribune. He is the author of Native Waters: A
Few Moments In A Small Wooden Boat, a memoir, and Chasing
Thunderbirds, a collection of short fiction. He has been featured on
"Fly Fishing America" in 2006. He currently resides on the
Chitimacha reservation. |
