Tales of the Big Mean White Dog
My 9 year old pointer Frieda is very vocal and has always been a bit of a Prima Donna. She also isn’t hesitant to throw down with another dog which ended up putting her in a portable kennel a lot when she was younger. On one occasion two hunters stopped their truck by the side of the road to chat with us and she started barking loudly and aggressively at them. Later at the Nimrod, we saw the same two hunters and one said to the other ‘those are the guys with the Big Mean White Dog.’ What can I say, she is an Alpha female. She has mellowed considerably with age and we don’t have problems with her anymore. Every once in a while we still refer to her as the Big Mean White Dog.
This past weekend my partner in crime, the Judge, had to work. My wife wanted to go camping. I wanted to get out in the woods. My wife is a dog lover so we took the two Pointers and our Golden Retriever up to where we have the Bellagio parked. The Golden actually works pretty well for a flushing dog though she runs out of gas pretty quick and the young pointer is just a little over a year so I didn’t anticipate a highly successful outing. My wife is a photography buff so she hoped to get some pictures. Worst case scenario; the woods are beautiful this time of year even with the foliage just starting to turn color. We saw some birds and got a couple of points. The pup backed up the Big Mean White Dog on one occasion. The birds either were flushed by the retriever out of sight or just flushed where getting even a chance at a shot was impossible.
The most interesting thing happened when we made a push down in this little hole by a river. Beaver had put a fresh dam in sometime over the summer; the area has always held a few birds and I wanted to show my wife the dam. She had never seen one and I wanted to get her the opportunity for some pictures. As it was hot out the dogs all dove in the water when we got close. They were upstream of the dam where the current was slow and they ended up covered in the black smelly silt we like to call Loon Shit up here. I directed them downstream of the dam where I knew the bottom would be cleaner and the pup and the retriever dove in. The current was a little faster and the bank a little steeper and the pup failed at her first attempt to get out. She ended up going under water and then the current got her. She doesn’t have that much experience swimming and she started to panic. My wife not knowing that the water would be shallow a short ways downstream also panicked. Enter the Big Mean White dog. Frieda jumped in the water, swam out to the downstream side of the pup, and herded her to the shore. She acted like it was all in a day’s work. I love that Big Mean White Dog.
This is the shallow side it dropped off steeply on the other edge.
Scooter
