“He leaves a trail of books, but he really marks the passage of time by the series of hunting dogs he’s left behind.” -Jim Harrison

Three dogs have walked with me through the three chapters of my adult life.

My first dog, Beaumont, walked out of the house with me when I left my first marriage with nothing but the clothes on my back. He died two months later.

A year later, I was broke and foreclosed upon. My girlfriend sent me a check for $425 and told me to go buy Albert, a yellow Lab who’d been returned to a breeder I know.

Over the next decade, Albert was by my side as I rebuilt my life, married Courtney, and won custody of my kids. As Albert aged, I wondered if I would ever again have such a bond with a dog. He came to me at the lowest point in my life, and he walked alongside me through the valley of the shadow of death. I never saw him play with another dog, not once — he didn’t care about them, only me. His commitment to me was absolute. When I walked through a field with Albert in search of game, he and I were mutually dependent. It was nothing less than a spiritual bond.

Having hunted with him for so many years, I could predict his movements, and he mine. Through whistles and staccato shouts, I made my wishes known to him. He in turn worked the apportioned territory, occasionally looking back at me to confirm that he was on the right path. In the early years, I could tell in a binary fashion whether or not he was on game: birdy or not birdy. Later, with hundreds of hours hunted together, I saw gradations of birdiness in his behavior, indicated by the vigor of his tail-wag, the angle of his ears, the zeal of his sniffing. His entire demeanor communicated to me how our hunt was going.

I relied on him to find and flush the quarry. He relied on me to down the bird with a blast. I relied on him for the retrieve. We were simpatico.

We got a puppy in 2018. I laid down a deposit with a breeder and returned a month later with my son, who brought a pheasant wing tied to a string, which he dragged around the grass. One pup showed some interest in it, then another and another, but each had a short attention span for the pursuit. One yellow male, however, chased after that wing for a couple minutes. Aidan would let the puppy catch up to it, get his mouth around it, and get a snootful of the scent, then he’d tug it away. The puppy bounded after it, and the longer this game continued, the more we knew: this is the pup we want.

We named him Crosby. He’s of slighter stature and lighter coat than Albert. For most of that fall, I heeded the advice of all the hunting handbooks that warn against taking a puppy afield.

Then I reconsidered. If Crosby was going to be a hunting dog, he might as well start straightaway. Those same hunting books urge you not to shoot over a puppy, lest you make the dog gun-shy. Instead, they counsel a staged approach, first clapping your hands, then clapping sticks together, then a starter’s pistol, and finally a gunshot — breaking in the dog over a thousand miles.

I bothered with none of this, taking Crosby into the grouse woods when he was just shy of six months old. He showed no evidence that he understood his job, but he did follow Albert back and forth. A grouse flushed and flew straight over my head. I emptied both barrels of my over-under and missed twice. I immediately looked for Crosby to see if he’d been traumatized by the blasts. He was unconcerned, chasing after his mentor.

I didn’t dare take Crosby with me to South Dakota early in the season of his first year — too much pressure not to screw up the hunt for other guys and their dogs. But late in the season, with a smaller hunting party and a couple more months of life under his collar — and with Albert sick at home — Crosby accompanied me as I drove west.

Over the course of four days, I watched him improve, each day building on the day before. On day one, he stuck close to my boots, and I had to encourage him to move out in front of me. I didn’t care much if his nose was up or down, I just wanted him to get the rhythm of working a field.

On the second day, he started to range out in front of me without much encouragement. Occasionally he’d bump a bird, probably by accident, which startled him, but I overwhelmed him with praise so he’d know that’s exactly what he’s supposed to do.

On day three, he and I were blocking at the east end of a shelter-belt, positioned on a gravel road. Crosby was doing a nice job of sitting at heel when a rooster cackled and flushed out of the sorghum in front of us. I fired and the bird dropped dead right in the middle of the road about 20 yards away. I sent Crosby to go get that pheasant. He ran over to it, stood over it, and sniffed it. “Fetch it up!” I yelled, clapping my hands and coaxing him to bring that bird to me like he’d brought tennis balls and canvas dummies a thousand times. He put his mouth over the pheasant, then pulled back. I shouted encouragement and he tried again. Finally he got a hold of the bird’s wing and half-dragged, half-carried the rooster to me.

That experience sparked something in him, and by day four he needed neither encouragement nor direction. His instincts had been rewarded, and now he relied on them.

The next fall the three of us hunted together — Albert the wise veteran, Crosby nipping at his heels. We visited all of our favorite South Dakota fields, and we drove 1,800 miles to Oregon to duck hunt with my brothers. After one of those hunts, Albert could not stop shaking. We wrapped him in blankets and stoked the fire in cabin’s stove, but the convulsions went on for hours.

Back home, Albert struggled to eat. He’d swallow some food, cough, gasp for breath, and then eat some more. We took him to the vet, and an X-ray showed cloudy lungs and swollen lymph glands constricting his airway. After ruling out other possible afflictions, our vet gave us the diagnosis: lymphoma.

She started him on a steroid to shrink his swollen glands, which provided immediate relief. Nevertheless his prognosis was dire.

Just as I had with Beaumont, I drove Crosby to a hunting preserve, and I asked them to put four pheasants in a field. I opened the door of the truck and Albert climbed down. For the next 45 minutes, he hunted hard, nose to the ground, quartering in front of me. Almost like he didn’t have cancer.

One by one, he flushed the roosters, I shot them, and he retrieved them. He climbed back into the truck, exhausted, and slept the whole way home.

We loved Albert in the last days, inviting him onto the bed, giving him extra treats. But a week after that final hunt, he stopped eating and his breathing was disconcertingly rapid. We laid a dog bed in the backyard, and a vet from an at-home euthanasia service met us there. In a small consolation of the pandemic, my college kids were home, so we could all gather around Albert as he took his final breaths. He’s buried next to Beaumont, overlooking the lake.

One dog is not a replacement for the other. They each occupy a unique place in my life. Beaumont lived and died with my first marriage. Albert accompanied me as I rebuilt my devastated life. And now Crosby journeys with me into the new wild places. These three dogs don’t just mark the three chapters of my adult life. They have also reoriented my theology — my perspective on the whole created order, and whether there even is an “order.” It’s more of a woven web in which some threads are thicker than others — the strand between dog and human is among the thickest. But whether closely linked or distantly related, all are connected.

— Tony Jones

Tony Jones is the author of The God of Wild Places (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). This article is adapted from that book, and used with permission of the author. You can find him at ReverendHunter.com.