One After that first miracle season-miraculous if only for one grouse at dusk, in which flame leapt from the end of the gun-I had a hard decision to make. I didn't know much about birds, or bird-hunting, but I knew that I had a raging genius on my hands. And I'd bragged on him to my friend Jarrett Thompson, the best trainer in the world, who was anxious to see Colter and to work with him. Jarrett's Old South Pointer Farm was in Texas, though, and it seemed inconceivable to me to separate from Colter. To not be the one to feed him twice a day-to not have him bounding ahead of me on walks. To not see him for weeks at a time-as if he had cast too far out in front of me, working some thin ribbon of scent. As if he were up ahead, hunting without me. I went back and forth in my mind, tortured. It took about a month before I finally decided to do what was best for Colter, rather than for me. I flew to Houston with him in the spring, and then my father and I drove him up to Jarrett's place. Jarrett complimented Colter on his good looks: he was the only brown dog on the farm, amidst perhaps a hundred other white dogs-white and lemon pointers, white and liver ones. Colter's muscles stood out deeper than those of the other dogs. I said my good-byes to him and left, and I carried with me that huge and strangely empty feeling of having made a life-changing, or life-turning, decision, but having no clue whatsoever whether it was the right one. Some people say pointers are crazy, others say it is their owners. Jarrett's too diplomatic to take sides, but he has some stories. One of his favorite's is about this big hunter from Florida-big in the sense that he weighed three hundred pounds. The guy came to Jarrett's farm to drop his dog off, and at the moment of parting, he hugged his dog-a monster itself, an English pointer weighing almost eighty pounds-and then he took Jarrett aside and handed him a gallon of Jack Daniels. "Now Thompson," he says, "Old Buck and I each have a glass of whiskey in the evenings after we get through hunting, and I expect y'all to do the same." Then there was the oil man from west Texas, Odessa, who decided he wanted a bird dog-one of the best-but he wanted a friendly dog, one he could keep in the house. So he flew to Rosanky in his Lear jet and picked out one of the dogs Jarrett had raised and trained to sell. It cost him about three thousand dollars to bring the jet over there, and another twenty-five hundred for the dog, Ned. Jarrett drove him back to the airport in Austin, where the jet was waiting, oil derricks painted on its tail. The oil man put Ned right up there in the front seat and strapped him in with the shoulder harness next to the pilot, Ned looking all around and wondering, perhaps, if he would ever hunt again. The pilot, says Thompson, was rolling his eyes-dog hair on the seat and Ned panting, Ned slobbering. A week later Thompson got a call from the oil man. "I think Ned's homesick," he said. "C Excerpted from Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had by Rick Bass All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
