Day's End

NEAR MISSES

- Herb Evert

A few years back, the Grim Reaper took a swipe at me but missed. Oh, he winged me all right, but he couldn't make the retrieve. He hit me with a triple whammy: a prostatectomy, a rupture and an abscess on my colon. By the time I could crawl out of my den to enjoy the sun again, almost a year had passed, including the better part of two hunting seasons. Oh, I was as handsome as ever (which is not saying one heck of a lot), but the Reaper had left me just a shell of the man I had been. My nether regions felt like they'd been scrambled. My muscle memory had atrophied beyond recall, and my legs felt like stumps. My eyes wouldn't focus, and I flinched at the slightest sound. But I didn't intend to give that ornery, old cuss a second chance at me, at least not anytime soon.

Now, I'm a flushing dog man, springers to be exact, and they're not tuned to wait to make a flush until the old man hobbles up to them. My female pup Elf (short for Evertage Ebony Elf) lived to retrieve. As it happened, once I was healed enough to hunt, my dawdling or missing a bird or two just intensified her flushes. Because of me, we exercised a lot of birds that season but retrieved very few. That drove her nuts! Unless they died of heart attacks, they had earned a year's reprieve. It got so that Elf seemed to feel as though unless she hauled a bird out of the sky all by herself, it was as good as gone. I had never noticed before such positive effects of my own ineptitude.