Best girl

It's taken me a week to write this—a week and sixteen years, really—and it will still be an imperfect, though heartfelt, appreciation of a sweet, beautiful, and beloved dog. Always a presence, she made herself known again when I made this morning's tea: as I lifted the lid on the electric kettle, there was the fill line, a metal tab inscribed "MAX". Even now, this dog finds ways to make me smile.

Sweepstakes winners

I know the prescribed method for obtaining a hunting dog: meet the breeder, pore over pedigrees, see the parent dogs in action, and so forth. That's not how I met Maxine. She was an advert in the classifieds section of the Journal Star, a lone dachshund puppy off a farm somewhere down near the Kansas border. We met the breeder in the parking lot of the Tractor Supply store in Beatrice, handed over fifty dollars or some such paltry sum, and were on our way back to Lincoln in minutes. To an outside observer, had there been one, it might have looked like a drugs deal but for the happy eight-year-old girl in the back seat.

In fairness to me, the new puppy was intended primarily as a family pet. I had just bought a home after years of renting, and the aforementioned eight-year-old and her mother were pushing hard for a miniature dachshund. Believing that dogs are happiest when doing what they've been bred to do, I agreed to a dog on one condition: that she be allowed to chase rabbits with me.

I began Max's training by playing scent games with her. A plush toy rabbit, quail, or pheasant would be anointed with a drop of an appropriate training scent, dragged through the house or across the lawn, and hidden; then she would be released to find the toy. She usually gave the rabbit a good thrashing, but surprisingly was inclined to retrieve the birds to me. (Later, we discovered she enjoyed fetching lacrosse balls as well.)

I was two years into a sharp-shinned hawk when Max came to us, and when the autumn rolled around I tried to get her out in the field as soon as I could. Predictably, the passage sharpie was having none of that, but after a short third season, and about the time that most of the migrant passerines were departing, I released Talkeetna to follow them southward and subsequently trapped a red-tailed hawk, Stekoa.

Maxie was present at every stage of Stekoa's manning and training—until one day, as we entered the mews, the hawk launched from the perch and bound to Max's face. Fortunately no serious injury resulted, but this behaviour was repeated a few days later during a creance session. Because she was still a shy dog, I was concerned that Max might be ruined for the field, and reluctantly continued Stekoa's training without her. 

After Stekoa had caught a half-dozen rabbits, though, I cautiously reintroduced Max on a weekend hawking trip, with several companions available to intervene in case something went wrong. As it happened, nothing did. A few minutes into the hunt, both Stekoa and Maxine found themselves chasing the same fox squirrel across the forest floor, and a partnership was forged beneath those bur oaks as hawk and dog realised they were supposed to be working together. We never had a problem after that.

I may have gone about acquiring a hunting dog all wrong, but after that first outing there was no doubt that Max was born to hunt, born for falconry. I wore jeans almost every day, but she quickly learned to distinguish my Cordura-faced brush jeans, and eagerly anticipated the donning of my hawking vest as the prelude to adventure. One of the few verbal commands to which she was always ready to respond was "Outback!": her cue to jump into the Subaru. (A nice parallel to Stekoa, who is always happy to fling himself into his travel box both before and after a hunt.)

I can't honestly say whether Maxine made a major difference in Stekoa's head count. Eastern cottontails spend most of their time above ground, and are abundant enough most years that I flush plenty on my own. But falconry is an aesthetic pursuit, and it was a beautiful thing to watch Maxie flowing through the landscape. She didn't use her nose very much, so far as I could tell, but she had a strong sense of where rabbits would be. And after the flush, if Stekoa made a catch deep in cover or on the opposite side of a creek, I could count on Maxie to sit quietly but alertly, guarding her hawk, until I could make in.

Maxie's inherent respect for her hawk, and her joy in hawking, extended beyond Stekoa. Years later, she was pressed into service as a spaniel, flushing sparrows and quail for my merlin, and could be trusted alone with the little falcon hooded on her perch. Not bad for a fifty-dollar dog out of the classifieds... While I had undeniably been lucky, the luck ran both ways. Maxie and I won the jackpot when we met.

Adventures, misadventures, and ordinary Tuesdays 

Max became world-famous—well, known to some, anyway—when I wrote a profile of her, Karl Linderholm's beagle Houlie, and Mike Cox's Jack Russell terrier Gypsy for a 2007 issue of International Falconer. (Sad to think that the beagle, the JRT, the magazine, and Mike all preceded her.) A gifted athlete, Maxie took second place at the Plattdeutsch Society's Running of the Wieners in 2008, then first in 2010. 

She might fetch plush quail and pheasants for me, and she loved to play ball—my lacrosse stick excited her about as much as my hawking vest—but Maxie's Labrador tendencies only went so far. I once made an ill-advised attempt to enter her into a Dock Dogs competition, but while she would swim an icy creek for Stekoa, nothing would induce her to jump into the Dock Dogs swimming pool, and I remember apologising to her for putting her on the spot.

Another apology became necessary the day I left her behind at Davis Creek Reservoir in the Sandhills. I had driven out for the day with Stekoa and the dogs, Stekoa had flown a rabbit flushed from the switchgrass and taken it under a red cedar tree, and we were leaving the WMA when I stopped to retrieve something from the cargo area of the wagon, or to fix something loose back there—I don't recall the exact circumstances, but I was only out of the car for a minute, and then we were back on our way. We were nearly to Farwell, some twenty miles down the road, when I was petting and talking to Anya and suddenly noticed Maxie wasn't there. Realising she must have slipped out with me while I was fiddling in the back of the car, I turned around and set a new land-speed record for the Farwell-to-Davis Creek run. Halfway down the gravel access road to the WMA, about where we had stopped, there was my lost and perplexed dog. She seemed glad to see me, but couldn't possibly have been as relieved as I was. 

A family dog. At various times, she hiked with us, camped with us, kayaked with us, gardened with us. She was there for road trips, Christmas mornings, ordinary Tuesdays...just a part of our lives. And she was a hardworking, blue-collar hawking dog, flushing rabbits day in and day out for years on end. But by the winter of 2018-2019—her thirteenth season—she was starting to slow down, and to feel her age. On some days, she got as excited as ever to see me gathering my gear for a day of hawking. On others, though, particularly the coldest days, she opted out; while Anya ambled toward the back door to go out with me, Maxie would pointedly stay in her bed in the corner of the kitchen, thumping her tail when I petted her goodbye but making no move to join us. And I was glad to see her taking care of herself; God knows she had earned some time off.

The colour of sunlight on fallen leaves

By the autumn of 2019, her vision and hearing had both deteriorated to the point that she simply couldn't keep up with the hunt. One day at Pawnee Lake, Jessa and I heard her whining from a patch of gooseberry and other briars; though we were within a few yards of her, she didn't know where we were. Her retirement started from there. 

As Maxie aged—and especially, it seemed, after Anya passed away—her mobility decreased as well; she lost strength in her hindquarters, and sometimes toppled over, or struggled to get up after a nap. My own struggle was with misplaced guilt: I had known her in her prime, and this half-blind, half-deaf, fractionally infirm dog seemed diminished, and it must somehow be my fault. Max herself, though, didn't appear to be embarrassed or frustrated by her limitations. Like a Zen master, she accepted challenges gracefully, and I eventually made my peace with the fact of her aging, confident that she still enjoyed her life. (I took heart, too, from watching her feet twitch in her sleep, knowing that in her dreams she was still chasing rabbits and lacrosse balls.)

In her old age, Maxie became very fond of warm weather, and her last summer was a good one. She spent long days outside, alternately patrolling the back garden and napping wherever the mood struck her. She could be difficult to find while sleeping under the oak tree; her red coat, now fading and dappled with grey, Jessa described as "exactly the colour of sunlight on fallen leaves". She also became the unwitting proprietor of "Maxie's Sidewalk Café", as first the robins and later the blue jays discovered and pillaged her food dish. With hungry chicks to feed, the robins must have thought of the kibble as protein berries, and we sometimes saw them queuing up behind Maxie, who may have been unaware of their presence but wouldn't have begrudged them in any case; she was accustomed to sharing with birds.

A couple of years ago we built a zigzag bridge leading down the slight slope toward the mews; Max occasionally napped on the bridge, especially when it was in sunshine, and this autumn we'd noticed some depressions indicating that the rabbits sometimes sheltered or at least traveled underneath. Jessa and I spent the better part of an October day working in the back garden, raking and mulching leaves, chainsawing a dead apple tree into manageable chunks of firewood, and so forth. Along came Maxie, who had been napping on the patio; she stuck her nose under the bridge, and a rabbit who had evidently been there for hours bolted out. Two humans and their power tools hadn't fazed the bunny, but one sniff from Maxie was enough. It was her last hurrah.

Once the weather turned cold and Max was confined to the kitchen, her condition declined rapidly. Previously a "good relaxer", she now had difficulty falling and staying asleep on her own; her pacing began to seem neurotic and then neurological; and she began losing weight she could ill afford to lose. I eventually made the call I never wanted to make, to the vet clinic where Ellie works.

Maxie's appointment coincided with her usual evening nap; she was asleep when I picked her up from her bed, and fell asleep again in Jessa's arms as we drove. At the clinic, she woke briefly, but seemed utterly relaxed: she boarded here when we travelled and were unable to bring her along, and was always popular with the staff. Even though Ellie lives with her own dog now—a goofy shepherd mix named Rocky—everyone at the clinic knows "Eleanor's dachsie", and she spent as much time "helping out" at the front desk or napping in a receptionist's lap as she did in her kennel. On familiar ground and amongst friends, Maxie fell asleep again even before the sedative was administered, and passed in her sleep with Ellie, Jessa, and me smiling and crying over her, our hands finding one another's as we stroked Maxie's soft fur.

I'm thinking this time not of Winston Churchill and George VI ["Farewell, Anyabelle"], but of Chingachgook and Uncas. "Great Spirit, Maker of all life, a warrior goes to you, swift and straight as an arrow shot into the sun." Not a warrior, this one, but a hunter, and the rabbits of the Happy Hunting Grounds had best be ready. After a romp with Anya, Maxie will be seeking out a hawk and getting back to her life's work.

Go get 'em, Maxwell, and thank you for everything. 

Farewell, Anyabelle

The start of the hawking season is usually joyous, but so far this year it has brought frustration and sorrow. First the frustration: Stekoa's first outing was nearly our last together. The debacle was entirely my fault, as I made a series of compounding errors, but I was fortunate enough to recover him the next day—warm, windy, and the opening day of the shooting season—after leaving him out overnight with a failing transmitter battery. Some re-training is called for, mostly for myself.

As for the sorrow, I'm sorry to report that Anya, the younger of my two dachshunds, has died. We've been expecting it—we nearly lost her back at the end of February, which is when we found out she had cancer—and we're grateful to have had these extra months, but there's never a good time to say goodbye.

She went by many names, this little puppy. Officially, it was just Anya, but I called her Anyabelle as often as not. Ellie (and later Jessa) called her Anya-bear, to which I always pointed out that "she's a dog!". In the kitchen, she was Anyanka the Underfoot, and I'm still a little surprised that she didn't meet her end by tripping one of us. She was also Keeper of the Two-leggeds, a title awarded by us but a role appointed by herself: anytime one of us went out to the back yard, even for a moment, Anya would come trundling along; and if we were doing yardwork, she might be out there with us for hours, as indeed she was just a few days before her passing.

We loved Anya dearly, but she could be a pain in the arse. She was a jealous little prima donna; if anyone fawned over Maxine, Anya would insinuate herself until all pets and scritches were hers, and she would bark obnoxiously whenever I hugged Jessa in her presence. She would also bark incessantly when Stekoa was on the ground with quarry—even after a decade of working together—and sometimes her bad manners extended to crowding him on the kill or even trying to appropriate his rabbit. She did not bark, however, on those occasions when she wandered off after hawking; nor would she respond to our calls, and I remember more than one pleasant day afield nearly ruined by the stress of trying to find my missing dog afterward. She did the same sort of thing at home: if the gate came unlatched, Anya would go on walkabout, completely unresponsive to our calls. (If we even knew she was out, that is; on a few occasions, our first indication that she'd gone was when a neighbour phoned or just brought her back to the house. ID tags for the win.)

But: Anya flushed a lot of rabbits for Stekoa over the years. She went out in good weather and bad, covered miles of ground on those short little legs, sometimes rubbed her chest and belly raw on brush and tough prairie grasses, swam across half-frozen creeks when she had to...then went out to do it all over again the next day. She may not have had quite the same zeal for hawking as her "sister" Maxine, but she hunted loyally and hard.

During her final days, I fingered memories of Anya like the beads of a rosary. Visiting the house in Seward where Anya was born, Ellie leaning over the edge of the denning box and picking out the same golden-yellow puppy that had already caught my eye. Bringing Jessa to the house for the first time, seeing how excited Max and Anya were to meet her and how warmly she responded to them, thinking in that moment that my life might just work out if my new friend liked my dogs that much. Camping at Verdigre Creek, several times but once in particular: we had left the dogs in the tent while we went to see a movie at the drive-in cinema down at Neligh, and immediately the film ended, a violent thunderstorm blew up out of nowhere; the twenty-mile drive back to camp was an agony of worry and guilt, as I envisioned the tent, dogs and all, whirling away on the gusty winds; we finally arrived to find camp still intact, Maxine asleep, and Anya whining softly to be let out to pee, God bless her—at home, she'd have had no compunctions about just peeing on the floor. Calmer drives, too, lots of them, my right hand gently stroking Max and Anya's fur as they slept in the passenger seat, worn out from hawking, the occasional ringing of Stekoa's bells from the box in the cargo area, driving home fulfilled and contented in the company of three of my closest friends.

Anya hated going to the veterinarian's office, and when her condition took a sudden turn for the worse on Sunday, we hoped desperately that she would simply pass in her sleep. We awoke Monday morning to find her still with us, but her breathing even more laboured, and I reluctantly made arrangements for the nice young Scottish vet to come to the house to put her down. Mercifully, however, we were spared that necessity, as she slipped away in her sleep, stretched out on her pillow next to Maxine, later in the day. Absurdly, perhaps, I recalled Sir Winston Churchill's tribute to King George VI, and his account of the King's end: "During these last months the King walked with Death as if Death were a companion and acquaintance whom he recognised and did not fear. In the end, Death came as a friend, and after a happy day of sunshine and sport, after a 'goodnight' to those who loved him best, he fell asleep as every man or woman who strives to fear God and nothing else in the world may hope to do."

As has often been noted, the tragedy of living with dogs is that their lifespans are so mismatched to our own. And as the song says, to love is to bury. So why do we have dogs, get married, have children? Why do we put ourselves through it, embark on journeys-for-life, build relationships that will inevitably end in the death of one party? Because not to do so is even worse, even more heart-rending. Anya will be missed—is already missed—but Jessa, Ellie, and I are so grateful that she was our dog.

A week of hawks and dogs

I took some much-needed time off over Thanksgiving week—the occasion was the North American Falconers' Association field meet in Kearney, but as with the last time NAFA was in Nebraska, I actually split my time between Kearney and more familiar fields close to Lincoln. Still, it was good to focus on hawking for an entire week.

Stekoa did well, taking a couple of cottontails in addition to a mouse and, a first for us, a wood rat (a.k.a. pack rat). And the dogs clearly loved the combination of time afield and luxurious accommodations.

Some photos by Jessa by way of illustration:

Anya in the car, atop the cooler.

Maxine in the field, attentive as ever. Not to me, necessarily, but to the possibility that Stekoa might drop something edible.

Stekoa about to launch.

One of the places we hawked, on the south shore of Harlan Lake not far from the Kansas line.

Stekoa finishes off his wood rat.

The lap of luxury: Anya settles for a towel on the washroom floor, while Maxie considers ringing room service for more pillows.

Not quite Dover

This starts with a campsite where once there was a vast inland sea...

On our most recent visit to Verdigre Creek, we arrived late, found our traditional campsite occupied, and ended up at a secluded spot on the shores of Grove Lake. Exploring our surroundings the next morning, we found a chalk seam on a nearby hillside.

Right in the middle, about two-thirds of the way up the hill, was a red cedar growing straight and tall, its trunk no longer in contact with the ground but cantilevered by its root system.

The hillside was steep, and took some clambering...

...but reach the top we did, led by the indomitable Maxine.

And on top was a lovely little pocket prairie, dotted with sumac and a few dwarf oaks (whether bur oak or post, I couldn't say.)

It's possible this pocket meadow exists in part because of the chalk seam—calcareous soils being more capable of supporting grassland species than trees, this patch may have resisted the encroachment of the surrounding woods, an isolated but relatively undisturbed relict of what was once a vastly more extensive prairie.

[Little bluestem, with prairie coneflower and leadplant]

[Blue grama]

[Goldenrod]

[Sumac]

[Leadplant]

[Asters]

[Rough blazing star]

[Juniper (red cedar) berries]

But back to the chalk itself... There is a stairstep erosion pattern typical of chalk deposits [most evident in the sixth photo below] and some darker striations that may have been flint [first three photos]. Most of the holes in the chalk are, I believe, from roots of grasses, forbs, and (particularly along the edges) trees [see especially the sixth, eighth, and ninth photos below].

This small seam certainly isn't the White Cliffs of Dover—though it might have seemed that way to Max and Anya—but many of the same geological and ecological processes can be seen here on this miniature down.