Bacon

 Winner, Creative Corner
Brendan Batt, Louisiana State University 

There are times in life when it is best to fight your tears, and times when you must let them flow. We carried him in an ice chest from my truck through the house into the back yard, just as we had carried him from the mudboat to the truck, burning with remorse laden with pain; our minds still scorched by the horrible images to which we had paid witness. We sunk shovels into the hard earthen clay. Despite our efforts the digging was slow. It was important to go deep, at least four feet. My throat swelled and took off my shirt striking violently at the walls of the hole beneath me. Tears welled again in my eyes and streamed down my face. My brother’s face was stoic and unchanging, but equally hurt. He seemed to be reflecting on thoughts I was incapable of conjuring in my current state of emotion. I stared up at the sun squinting, clenching my jaws in despair.

 

“Is it our fault?” My brother questioned as he rested his weight upon the handle of the shovel, his head facing down into the grave. His eyes wandered to the ice chest.

 

“No. But there will never be another one like him.”

 

“Best dog ever.”

 

We continued in silence. Sweat mixed with tears and dirt, and in our heads the pain fused with remorse and heartache. When the grave was deep enough we both stared at each other and at the hole. My mother watched from the back porch. Tears had muddled her face.

 

“It’s deep enough.”

 

I walked over to the ice chest and motioned my mom to go inside. My tormented face was enough for her to know she would not want to see this. I flipped the lid back and gently grabbed him under the rib cage, wrapped in my bloody hunting jacket, his cold entrails stuck to my arm. Blood and water dripped from the towel down my chest, collecting in a brown stain on my pants. My brother rushed to help me. We laid him in the hole, his dry tongue hanging out of his mouth, eyes closed. His rich, black fur was caked with blood and dirt. There was nothing of my friend left in the corpse we now laid into the ground. His hind leg distorted, hanging on by tendons, showed bone at the corner of his resting place. I placed a clean towel over his body. My brother began to lay his favorite things beside the body. A training dummy from when he was a puppy, a few of his favorite objects to chew on, some duck wings from the freezer for training, and a Canvasback drake, the king of all waterfowl; we had frozen the bird with the intention of mounting it in the living room, its plumage was immaculate. The beautiful specimen would have looked gorgeous on the wall, but it served its purpose far greater in the tomb of our great friend. A final parting gift. 

 

At this point tears flowed freely from both our faces. We sobbed like children and embraced each other.

 

“ It’s just too goddamn much, I don’t get it….We should have known better.”

 

“Maybe.”

 

We filled in the dirt and soon he was gone. My brother drove a naill between two pieces of driftwood he had handpicked from a pile. We planted the cross deep and packed mud around our fallen friend.

If you have never had the great pleasure of rearing a duck dog it is unlikely you can comprehend the nature of a relationship between a man and the animal he hunts with. It starts at the beginning. We tried to look for a good bloodline, avoiding field trial dogs because they are hyper and have no place in a duck blind. Males have more drive but females are more easily trained and have better dispositions. We chose male. There are many schools of thought on actually picking the individual from a litter.  Alpha males are more obstinate and less submissive; you want the dog just below the alpha, because he will be smart and have drive, without the inclination to defy control; the levelheaded middle child. Bacon turned out to be the alpha despite what we thought. This quality showed early and often and it took a tremendous amount of obedience and discipline before he accepted a submissive role. Everyday my brother and I would meet to train him. Train not might be the appropriate word because a great retriever lives to retrieve, it is his world; all a good trainer does is channel that animals innate instinct. What started as obedience developed into various hunting simulated scenarios: blind retrieves, hand signals, scent training, and finally the culmination…the hunt. One key element of training a dog to be a champion is to never let him fail. If Bacon couldn’t find the dummy, we’d toss another one nearby when he wasn’t looking. If a dog never fails in training, he won’t know how to fail in the field; he will hunt until he finds the bird because he does not know what else to do. Bacon would never give up on a retrieve because he never knew it was possible to do so. Dogs that learn to quit never realize their true potential.

 

Bacon charged the water like a damn kamikaze, leaving a wake in his trail. Before every season we’d train him in the River to get him into swimming shape and there he mastered the enigmas of current, and how not to fight it. He was a solid sixty pounds of lean muscle with a prolific black shining coat, wavy hair draped his back and neck. Thick skin formed a mane around his perfectly shaped head. His bright brown eyes glistened in contrast to the darkness  of his coat.

 

His first two years were strong; he was a very good water dog and we couldn’t have asked more. In his third year he became a legend to me. He’d stay on a bird for two, three hundred yards, out swimming crippled birds, and when one would dive we’d watch him calmly circle until it surfaced and then he would turn on the jets.  With a dog of this caliber, shooting ducks becomes secondary to watching him retrieve. Pride wells in you when you watch him in awe. You begin to respect him as much as you love him, and he becomes so much more than a pet.  There is a bond that forms between a man and his hunting lab that exceeds any other bond between man and animal. You share memories and experiences that never fade. When he’d  see us load up gear for a hunt he’d be in the truck, if he saw camo, he’d be in the truck. He knew. He loved it more than we did… it was truly what he lived for. Riding downriver in the dark he would look back at us and almost smile, the engine humming in the background. If you so much as touched your gun in the blind he’d jump up and watch the sky to mark the bird. I saw Bacon head thirty yards deep, through fifteen feet of Roseau cane and come out twenty minutes later, all slashed up with a widgeon in his mouth. For years he was perfect.

 

It was late November and unseasonable hot. The season hadn’t been open for more than two weeks, but the migration had arrived. Thousand of ducks and geese funneled their way down the Mississippi Flyway, and they were stacked in all our favorite spots. A day of scouting had produced two mornings of easy limits. We camped out on Pass A Loutre and things could not have been going better. Although the weather was hot, the birds were so thick they were moving regardless. The remoteness of this area of the Delta created a feeling of isolation; this place is truly wild. Giant hogs sloshed behind our tent at night, raccoons and coyotes rummaged through our campsite. It is the largest river basin in the world and is inhabited by countless species of wildlife that use the river and its floodplain as habitat. When the sun graces this wilderness at dawn, the world stirs with creatures of the water, land and sky. Mozart and Bach in their silly little wigs knwo nothing of an orchestra so beautiful. And, when that sun sets into the West Delta, the birds head for the roost, the coons emerge on the flats foraging crabs, herons stalk baitfish in the shallows, massive reptiles ease into the water and begin their night stalks, and the land becomes alive. It buzzes and stirs with life. The sunsets down there are the most beautiful in the world, deep red streaks litter the sky, it captivates the soul.

 

That night, after a meal of fresh ducks cooked in bacon grease and green beans cooked over an open flame followed b wine drunk from the bottle, we settled into the tent early. Bacon curled at our feet exhausted from the day’s trials, but contentment welled from his form in an almost tangible aura. The warm conditions had created fog banks in the River and the soothing sounds of tanker horns lulled us to sleep. All three of us slumbered deeply with euphoric thoughts producing subconscious grins, I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier.

 

The battery-operated alarm woke us at four. Most of the preparations had been made the night before. We heated up some coffee and fed Bacon.

 

“No wind… I hop this fog lifts with the sun.”

 

“It shouldn’t even matter,” I said with confidence.

 

Bacon had shaken off the soreness from the day before and his light brown eyes illuminated in anticipation as we loaded the boat. He gulped water from the bank, for some reason he always preferred River water to the bottled water we offered him with breakfast. Maybe it tasted like hunting to him, and his mind told him that this cold silty water was far superior to what existed in his metal bowl. I think he was right.

 

We arrived at the spot and ran the boat deep into the canes. My brother launched the pirogue and I tossed him a sack of decoys. Bacon stood alert and watched us in the darkness. I turned my machete to the Roseaus and began chopping at their bases, draping them across the boat and driving them into the mud in fron of out shooting lanes. Fifteen minutes later the boat was nearly invisible.

 

“How does it look!” I shouted to my brother who sat in the pirogue contemplating exactly where to place each decoy. Bacon scrambled to the front of the boat to get a look at my brother. He was too deep in thought to respond. I situated our shell boxes and loaded both guns. Bacon watched, overwhelmed with anticipation he scrambled back in forth the crowded boat. Shooting time wasn’t for another thirty minutes.

 

“Bacon! Sit!” He immediately sat down in his position on the bow and waited as my brother headed back to the boat. He pulled the pirogue deep into the canes behind us and crawled into the boat.

 

“They should land in the gap between those two pods of decoys.”

 

“Yes, they should,“ I said as I loaded a pinch of Skoal into my lower lip.

 

The first few birds worked right into the decoys and landed on the water. We like to let them sit in the decoys until they realized something was wrong and lifted of the water. Purists never shoot a bird on the water, they also know this sport is more than just shooting birds. Bacon launched off the boat and made quick work of three downed Gadwall. As pink began to emerge from the blue dawn before us, bands of birds worked on the horizon. Tactful calling lured a pair of Pintail drakes and several more Gadwall.  We were on our way to another nice limit of ducks. But, as soon as the sun broke and the mournful yelps of coyotes wained, the action slowed down. We stripped layers off and watched vacant skies. By nine thirty, we hadn’t seen a bird within range for what seemed like hours.

 

“What do you think?”

 

“Let’s wait it out. We only need two more… what else are we gonna do all day, sit in the tent and sweat?” Bacon watched as my brother lit a cigarette and enjoyed the moment.

 

Before he took his last drag, I caught a glimpse of some low flying Canvasbacks streaking across the bay heading for out decoys. They worked in close, but with no wind to move the decoys, they flared just past the motionless plastic ducks.

 

“Take em!” I shouted as I stood and lined one up at the end of my barrel leading it by about ten feet. Four shots fired and only one bird had been hit. I had clipped it and it glided out of control another forty yards before hitting the water. Bacon shuddered with expectation, waiting to be sent out to the wounded bird.

 

“Dead Bird!”

 

He leaped from the boat and swam furiously after the bird, which was now over a hundred yards away and swimming fast. This would be a difficult retrieve.

 

The events that followed are burned into my memory where they exist as scars.

Bacon was closing the distance fast, and he was about a hundred yards from us when my brother noticed something strange. It looked like another dog was swimming right for Bacon. It did not take long to register…

 

Venice is home to a large population of alligators. The richness of life in this area dictates not only their numbers, but their size. I have seen a gator over fourteen feet at the mouth of Octave Pass near, near the Gulf. An alligator is an animal whose length and mass is controlled primarily by diet and food availability. In the swamps north of the Delta, there is not an abundance of mammals for them to eat, so alligators there tend to be smaller. In Venice, raccoons, nutria, hogs, coyotes, and deer are everywhere, aw well as other gators… so they get big , real big. These creatures can go a year without food and are very opportunistic. They are tremendous at conserving their energy until the prospect of a meal presents itself. During the winter they pose no threat because their metabolisms are slowed to a crawl, but hot weather stirs in them the need to feed. They are giant reptiles that have not changed for thousands of years.

 

It is most likely that he he heard us, and knew that he should come back, but Bacon never gave up on a retrieve. Not even for us. He was a solid two hundred yards out and the dark figure was swimming in a straight line for him. I jumped out of the boat and pulled the pirogue from the canes. My brother and I shouted frantically as I paddled off, shotgun between my legs. I stoked until my arms and back burned with acid. I flew past the decoys, but it was clear that I would not make it to him in time. I could hear my brother cranking the engine trying to free the mudboat from the canes. I fired a shot towards the steadily moving black head and continued to paddle. The bb’s danced across the water around the steadily moving black head. The beast was unphased. I stroked with that rare strength of soldiers fighting to save their brothers or fathers who fight for a child’s life. I could hear my brother screaming his name, and he turned away from the wounded bird and saw me paddling towards him; he headed in my direction. I fired again pleading aloud to God. This time the sinister head retreated into the dark water. Relief washed over me , but I paddled even harder. Bacon swam leisurely toward me, glancing back to where he had last seen the bird, confused by his master’s command, wanting only to return to the downed bird. With fifteen yards between us, the gator resurfaced directly behind Bacon, accelerated and struck. A massive explosion of water and jaws locked onto Bacon legs and the most stomach turning heartbreaking sound erupted from his mouth. It was somehow simultaneously high pitched and guttural. I felt like I stood behind bars watching my daughter being raped. He struggled to stay afloat as the gator rolled. The water was shallow and the gator could not hold him under. I fired another shot praying not to hit my dog. His paws struck violently at the water trying to stay afloat. The gator disappeared. When I pulled up to him he was still yelping, unable to swim towards me; it was clear he was hurt bad. I grabbed him behind the neck to pull him into the pirogue. I got him halfway into the boat when my throat dropped and chills covered my body. His abdomen was torn open completely and the contents of his stomach hung out. His left hind leg was shattered and severed. I pulled him onto my lap between my legs and took jacket off to wrap around him. He winced in pain until my voice calmed him.

“It’s okay buddy, I’m right here. I got you Bacon.”

 

He stared into my eyes looking for answers… but all he found was tears. My head spun as I held him tightly. His forearms dug into my waders and his head clung tight to my chest. His screams had slowed to whines and he did nothing but stare into my face. I could hear my brother cranking the engine and heading towards us. Blood pooled at my feet.

 

“I got you buddy. It’s okay… I got you.”

 

I watched the bloodshot eyes stare into mine, still beautiful light brown. His eyes never left my face, but soon he fell silent. He died, eyes open staring up at me.

 

When my brother pulled up in the mudboat, what he saw may have been worse that what I had experienced.

 

I lay, with my back propped in the stern of the pirogue, my hands and face covered in Bacon’s blood. I held him tight to me. I had completely broken down. Tears and blood streaked down my face is I clung to his now limp body. I cried aloud with my eyes closed, my face toward the glaring sun. My brother shut the engine down and coughed in agony. He shouted Bacon’s name choking on tears. The tranquil stillness of the Delta was broken only by our grief.