He was sitting on his customary stool at the gun counter when I walked into the shop. He was loudly shooting the bull with the other regulars, just like always. Except that it was mid-July, which meant he was supposed to be in Montana with a truck full of dogs.
Like many pro trainers, Lyle’s was the gypsy life: South Texas in the winter, Montana in the summer, interspersed by a few brief interludes back home in the spring and fall.
I had first started training with him not long after I moved here. I was young, on my first chessie, and at the time I was about as clueless on how to train a dog as a person could be.
All I knew was that a switch had been flipped with that first mallard she dropped in my hand, just as something clicked the first time I watched my long-ago first pointer instantly transform from a flowing bit of grace into a quivering mass of instinct and intensity at the first scent of a quail. I was hooked.
So it was fair to say that by the time I’d met Lyle, I was a dog-crazy kid with a lot of enthusiasm and not a helluva lot of knowledge. And for some reason—I never really knew why— he took me under his wing, and in time he would become the person who—more than anyone or anything else up to that point—stoked my interest in gundogs, not just as a tool for hunting, but as a means to its own alluring and obsessive end.
Not to say that Lyle didn’t have his faults. He could be a crusty old bastard, and that crustiness extended to my love of fishing, which—according to him—took away from the time I should be training.
One day, when we were taking a break from training on a local pond, I broke out a fly rod and started casting. “What the hell are you doin’ with that thing?” Lyle barked from the shade of the awning he had installed on his dog truck. “Stop thinking about fishing when you should be thinking about how to get your dog tightened up on her blinds. Remember that water’s for dog training and drinking, in that order. It ain’t for screwing around with that fairy wand.”
I never tried fishing around Lyle again.
He pulled a travel trailer behind his dog truck and would spend the summers camped out right there on the grounds, training dogs, running a few trials or hunt tests and laughing at all us suckers back home who were sweltering in the heat while he lived the kind of grand, carefree, nomadic lifestyle that can only be had by a retired lifelong bachelor whose nuclear family consisted wholly of labradors.
That’s why it was a surprise to see him sitting there. I hadn’t seen him since spring, and didn’t expect to see him again until September. But it only took a second to figure out why.
When he turned to see who was walking through the door, I noticed immediately how tired he looked, as if some unseen force had left a patina of fatigue on his face and in his voice.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Cheap Chad!” he called out as I walked up to the counter. It was his usual greeting, but it was missing the good-natured bellicosity that had always been his trademark. And it was punctuated with a long, rattling cough.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, grabbing a stool. “I didn’t expect to see you until at least mid-September.”
“I retired,” he replied, coughing into a handkerchief. “Sent all the client dogs home, selling the dog truck, the trailer, everything.”
A pause. Confusion. This was inconceivable to me. This man’s entire life—his entire reason for being—revolved around retrievers; training them, hunting them, talking about training and hunting them. Living them.
There are those of us who love dogs and there are those of us who live dogs, and I always figured he’d die—and die happy—while sending one of his labs on a mark in a duck blind or on a training pond somewhere. That I could be so lucky, I’d often thought.
“So, are you going to concentrate on your own dogs?” I asked.
Another pause, longer this time. “Nope, I’m done with the dog games. No more traveling for me.”
The question of why left unspoken, I replied, “Well, at least you’ll be here for duck season this year.”
“Nope, no more training and no more hunting for me, either. I got sick, and I’m just not physically able to do it anymore.”
Silence. I didn’t know what to say or how to reply. I didn’t ask what “sick” meant, and he didn’t elaborate.
We just sat there without speaking for a few moments as I thought back to a conversation we’d had back in the fall, right here in this same gun shop, sitting on these same stools.
While everyone else around us was busy getting ready for hunting season, he was packing up to head for Texas, and he had told me then, “You know, as old as I am and as long as I’ve been doing this, I don’t think I’ve ever been more addicted.”
And now, suddenly, it was gone. All over. The fundamental given of a person’s very existence apparently erased in the space of a few short months.
We sat there for a few minutes more, talk drifting to other things even as a pall lingered on the periphery of the conversation. After a while, I got up, told him it was time to go pick my kids up from school. But before I left, I said, “You know, I’ve got a boat now, so maybe a few times this duck season we can go out to the lake with one of your dogs. Maybe your young one? What’s he got, one, two master passes? He shouldn’t embarrass you too much. I’d do everything, and all you’d have to do is sit there and work the dog. Hell, that’s all you ever do anyway, right?”
Hiding behind the false bravado of cheap humor when real words fail is as good a definition of manhood as I know.
“We could maybe do that,” he replied. “We’ll see how it goes this fall.”
We’ll see how it goes this fall The past, present, and future of one’s existence distilled into a single, brief sentence.
We never realize how full life truly is until it’s not. How many more falls do I have? How many more dogs?
I have no idea, no clue. None of us has.
All we can ever do is see how it goes this fall.
About the Author
Chad Love is a freelance writer and unrepentant prairie rat bird hunter who resides on the plains of western Oklahoma. He watched his first cloud shadow drift across the prairie some 35 years ago and has been chasing them—and birds— ever since. You can read more of his work at chadlove.substack.com.
