One Year Later: Remembering Buddy

He died on a Wednesday at 8:47 a.m. 

I hustled Buddy’s 68 pounds from my truck’s passenger seat into the vet’s office and laid him on the stainless steel table, his aged and atrophied body on full display. 

I can still feel him cradled in my arms, how his dead weight felt heavier than I expected. 

He could no longer walk or control any of his bodily functions. His breathing was sporadic and labored. For each breath, his diaphragm would hit bottom with a muffled thud and contract ever so slightly. He moaned with each exhale, like he had repeatedly the night before. 

“He won’t feel a thing,” said the veterinarian. “He’ll drift off like he’s going to sleep. He won’t feel a thing.” 

As Buddy lay on the table, I looked into his eyes, his cold nose pressed against my own. Buddy had that unmistakable 10,000-mile stare, the kind soldiers get when they’ve seen too much combat. Buddy’s eyes were glossy and lifeless and resigned. The cancer, diagnosed only two short weeks before, was, little by little, stealing him from me.   

Birthday Bluebills for Delta’s Jim Fisher

An Epic Hunt at Mysterious ‘Lake X’

When Jim Fisher’s alarm went off Sunday morning, he hit the snooze button. Actually, he turned it off completely. It was his 44th birthday, after all, and he figured a little extra sleep would do his body good.

“My intentions were good, but I was too bloody tired to get up and hunt,” said Fisher, Delta’s director of conservation policy. “I spent most of Saturday on year-end yard duty, so I wasn’t moving as fast as normal and figured I’d sleep in a little before I went out. When I woke up, I was chomping at the bit.”

The day was shaping up nicely: a blustery weather system that would eventually bring the year’s first blanket of snow had Fisher with visions of bluebills dancing in his head. By 2:30 p.m., he and Mike Claussen, a friend and Delta member from Winnipeg, headed out for an undisclosed body of water.

“Where did you hunt,” I asked.

“Lake X,” he said.

“Lake X? Where’s Lake X?”

“Lake X is where I hunted.”

Hunting Etiquette 101

There are many joys to waterfowl hunting, not least of which is spending a quiet morning in the duck blind, working the occasional flock of birds into shotgun range as the morning sunrise bleeds across the horizon in multi-chromatic splendor.

What’s not so pleasant is sitting quietly in a duck blind and having steel shot from an unscrupulous group of waterfowlers rain down on you like a hail storm.

Such was the case a few years back while hunting a state wildlife area near Sacramento, California.

My group managed to navigate the early-morning fog deep into this increasingly popular piece of public land, after which we set up decoys and waited for shooting time to commence.

We made our presence acutely known, talking loudly and waving our flashlights in every direction. Soon, another group of hunters, apparently oblivious to our presence (that’s my diplomatic interruption, anyway), set up 50 to 75 yards from us in the same hole.

At shooting time, a flock of widgeon, if memory serves, wheeled in the morning sky right between us, and a rapid volley of shotgun blasts echoed across the marsh. We didn’t fire a shot, but our friends certainly did, sending nontoxic pellets into our blind.

“Incoming,” someone yelled. We all scrambled as the pellets started to land.

The short story: Hunting public land is a self-regulating enterprise, and we regulated the situation. Still, we got lucky; the above mini drama was an accident, perhaps even a serious one, waiting to happen.