The Final Hunt
Albert and Tony, Photo Credit: Courtney Perry
A few weeks ago my friend lost his beloved dog. Albert and Tony leaned on one another while hunting and while navigating life. The current situation we find ourselves in during the COVID-19 pandemic has caused many of us to forget that life is still continuing. While we may be locked in our homes, keeping a safe distance (six-feet) from our grandmothers and neighbors, life is continuing. People are falling ill due to COVID-19 but people are also spraining their ankles, having babies, having heart attacks, and losing dear members of their family to illnesses other than the one that has shutdown the world.
I could never write of Tony’s love and affection for Albert. This is Tony’s story to tell and I think it is a story we all need to hear in a time when we are being reminded of our own mortality.
While he loved everyone, Albert’s greatest loyalty was always to me. I don’t know if it’s because he spent his first year in a kennel, but he never had any interest in playing with — or even sniffing — other dogs. On a hunt, he ignored his peers and locked in on me, obsessed with my every move, waiting for a release command so that he could chase birds.
Albert and I stalked ducks and pheasants in South and North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota and Oregon. His résumé is littered with miraculous retrieves, like the pheasant he found after dark and under a snowbank when all the hunters had retreated to our trucks. Or the very-much-alive Canada goose he fished out of cattails and swam across a lake to me as it squawked and pecked at him.
Once while pheasant hunting, he emerged from a field with a half-moon flap of skin hanging off his chest, the result of running into barbed wire at full speed. I hoisted him onto a pickup tailgate and used a surgical stapler I keep in my canine first aid kit to close the wound. He didn’t even flinch. Then I put him in a crate in the back of the truck — his hunting concluded for that trip — and I set out into the next field. Ten minutes later, he ran up alongside me. He’d busted out of the kennel, intent on hunting at all costs.
I invite you to head over to the StarTribune and read the rest of Tony’s tribute to Albert, and be reminded that while we may be distancing from one another, we are not alone in our grief or in a life that continues to move.