Cristy – The Bird Dog

My family is a very outdoorsy family. My childhood vacations usually involved camping, hiking, or fishing – which was amazing. My dad and brothers would regularly go hunting too. I have since gone through hunter safety and ventured into the world of hunting, but in my younger years I sat it out. I did, however, begin going on hunting trips as more of a sidekick/observer before I started hunting.

I started accompanying my dad and brothers on hunting trips in my early teens. My mom joined us on a trip shortly after I started going, but ended up having to beat a dingo off her leg with a coke can. That was not a fun trip.

Each weekend we’d make the arduous journey to eastern Washington and spend the day in the sun looking for doves passing through the sky. My dad would sit with Brent and I would sit with Eric. Because I wasn’t actually hunting, I wanted a task of my own. Eric told me that could fetch the doves from the field. I now had a sense of purpose. I was the bird girl. I would retrieve the doves better than any other bird retriever. My competition was the bird dog.

I would proudly collect the fallen doves and felt a sense of accomplishment sitting there next to my pile of dead birds. And when Eric called me his bird dog, I didn’t mind. I was Cristy the bird dog.

However, on one particular bird retrieval things went awry in the field and Eric had to be called in for backup. The dove fell from the sky, but it did not die. Not only did it survive the gun shot and the fall, but it survived being skewered through the eye by a dried out stem in the crop field. It was flapping around on the ground as I looked on in horror with no tool to finish the job.

I yelled for Eric and he hurried over to bring the retrieval process to completion.