Hunting was a little slow on Saturday. They’d got a bear on Friday, after a lot of work, but they’re pretty thin on the ground where we are these days. Maverick and Dean looked all day long for a track for their client while the rest of us looked hard in the morning and started to slack off a little around our usual quitting time.

Junior and I were driving to listen to dogs the one time we turned them out, but Grey Fox had picked them up in the road at just about the same time, so it wasn’t urgent that we be anywhere in particular. So when I saw a fat grey squirrel sitting on the side of the road taunting us, it was shooting time. I was all for jumping out and waving my arms at it to make it go up a tree, but Junior said we might as well shoot him on the ground, so he did. Squirrel stew, here we come; I only need a couple more to make a real big batch to share at camp next weekend.

The next time, the squirrel treed right away and clung to the side of a scrub oak trying to be invisible. It was my turn to shoot, and invisible he wasn’t. So when we were next in radio contact with Grey Fox, Junior was giving me shit for trying to bird dog the first one.

And that’s all it took. Grey Fox dubbed me Bird Dog.

A radio handle has to come out of a story like that. You can’t pick one for yourself or you get laughed out of the county. Maverick won his in a poker game. Grey Fox was always after the foxes when another hunter would see him. Polecat got tangled up with a skunk one time. I’ll have to ask Bobcat where his came from, but he’s probably lucky he already had a handle when that mountain lion pissed on him from a tree that one time.

Bird Dog’s not a bad one, as handles go either. I made the obligatory fuss because Grey Fox does love to torment me. If I just let it drop, it’ll eventually go away, but if I grumble about it but answer to it now and then, it’ll stick. Nevermind that I don’t have pointers or retrievers and that I don’t hunt birds; bird dogging is what I was doing to that squirrel. I don’t mind it so much, and it’s pretty cool to have a handle after all of these years. They could have picked one that was truly unbearable, but this one, I can live with.