The author and Covey take a break amid some spectacular Alaskan scenery

Covey bolted for the dead spoonie, backtracking through the frozen debris with renewed enthusiasm and made quick work of that last 15 feet of icy resistance. He brought that bird back strong and I couldn’t have been prouder. I had no camera that morning but I will never forget the sight of my little “black and white” crashing through the ice for a one-shot duck on that tundra lake in God’s country.

All my hunting life, I had dreamed about having a good bird dog. I grew up like many aspiring young outdoorsmen reading Outdoor Life, studying Herter’s catalogs and devouring every hunting, trapping, and fishing book I could find in that little junior high school library in Anchorage. I dreamed of one day owning more than six decoys and having a dog that could get those elusive birds that always fell over big water or deep grass where I spent hours searching and went home only with stories of the birds I couldn’t find.

Since 7th grade, my hunting buddies Doran and Leo and I had spent unbelievable hours looking for and trying to retrieve lost birds. We carried fishing poles with snag hooks, military exposure suits (similar to modern survival suits used by commercial fishermen today) for “extreme wading,” and in our later years even an eight-foot pram that weighed only 60 pounds and could be carried on your back and in the back of a pickup bed.

We analyzed every situation in detail. Which way will the wind would wash them ashore? What if they fall in that deep grass? Which way will they fly after we jump them? Where should we be for the flush? We drove the Seward Highway for years in south-central Alaska jump shooting ducks and probably passed up 50 percent of the opportunities because we knew there wasn’t a chance in hell we could recover the birds.

For another 25 percent, we watched the crippled ducks dive out of sight or we spent innumerable hours walking our makeshift search grid, designed to cover every inch of that marsh where we knew that mallard had to be. We stooped and stared and spread every frond of tall grass and cattail knowing that it had to be there somewhere. Too often we walked away shaking our heads.

“I hit him hard, guys. I know I did!” one of us would say. “I don’t know where he could have gone. He fell right next to that muskrat house by that tall patch of grass.”

But none of us owned a dog. We all longed for that dog that would retrieve our ducks from the water, our ptarmigan from the tundra, and curl up underfoot, listening to our hunting stories while we prodded the oak rocker into motion by that proverbial fireplace, hot coffee in hand. These images we saw too often in those outdoor magazines, calendars, and outdoor TV shows like The American Sportsman.

Then at age 51, after all those years since boyhood, I scooped up that little bundle of fur with a docked tail and my hunting world changed forever. I had owned a golden retriever and a springer before Covey’s arrival and my family had a history of hunting dogs (not necessarily dogs that could hunt), but I made many of the mistakes and fell into many of the pitfalls that young people do when owning a dog.

I was a busy young fisheries biologist with two young children and a loving wife. I had less time to hunt and even less time to train. My dogs were not high on my list of life’s priorities. In addition, I was very strong-minded, had my own ideas about how to train a dog, and often tried to impart that knowledge with more force than finesse. I am older and I’m pretty sure I am wiser now and I made up my mind that December evening after Covey arrived that I was going to do a better job.