Stick To It. For one last glorious summer weekend, the stick was the carrot. New rewards are just ahead, however as hunting seasons approach. Simonson Photo.
By Nick Simonson
Summer bookended the season with a Labor Day weekend of epic proportions as stable weather and warm temperatures produced a three-day September holiday unlike any other in recent memory. While lazily fly-rodding bluegills just after sunrise from the dock at the cabin, I listened to the distant thunder of shotgun blasts beyond the hills on the west side of the lake. Even in the heavy morning air which already felt more like a July day (and was hotter than some of them we experienced in that month) hunters were at it, and it sounded like their early management take season for Canada geese was continuing with at least some level of success.
While it will be a couple of weeks until my dog hits the field for upland birds, he too was on the hunt and aggressively in pursuit of something to retrieve. Whether it was a chewed up tennis ball, the headless foam duck bumper, or the reliable stick that avoided a late-night trip into the firepit, alongside me in the shallows, he would drop the small branch and let out a series of barks alerting me it was time to release the landed panfish and launch something for him to swim out into the late summer shallows off to my right away from the dock where my school of fish sat and grab once again.
It wasn’t long before my brother’s chocolate lab joined in on the fun, bringing his own well-gnawed stick to the party. Shortly thereafter my wife’s German shepherd came along and began her half-hearted chase after the two water dogs as far as she felt comfortable, corralling them and barking out her commands as she nipped at the latter’s hind end as he raced off at an angle and bounded until forced to swim in the deeper stretches between our family’s dock and the neighbor’s. In session after session over the three day stretch, the competition between the trio of animals grew and grew, and while my larger lab hinted that he was tired later in the day as he’d lay down to pin the stick to the sand and tear off the last remaining bark, he’d never show it when the other dogs would approach and he’d rise up and offer a series of barks for me to once again toss the gnarled wood back out into the lake.
A reward all its own, the weekend’s stick could easily be replaced by a downed dove, a sniffed out sharptail, or a retrieved rooster pheasant in the coming weeks. While it certainly doesn’t have the scent trail of any of our favorite upland birds, it’s metaphoric nature and a small symbol of success for my lab’s efforts mirrors that of why we do what we do ahead of the season to get ready for all that fall brings. The training that goes into getting ready for our autumn hunts, whether it consists of our hikes in the hills or our walks around the block or the simple act of tossing a stick out into the pontoon-produced waves lapping at the shore, keeps the spirit alive and our bodies ready for the adventures to come in the next few weeks.
Thus, with summer’s unofficial end in the books and about a hundred bluegills brought to hand in the late-season warmth and probably a thousand stick retrieves accounted for at the meeting point between the slightly green water and sunbaked brown sand, we are ready. As the pages flip on the season and cooler air arrives and with it trips to favorite marked map squares, and the adventures to new parcels waiting just around the corner, the time for conditioning is over and the rewards will change from a simple stick to the laughing of a covey of grouse, the cackling of a rooster pheasant, and the sound of thundering wing beats becoming the new carrot we pursue…in our outdoors.