A FETCHING STORY

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LAST LAUGH

WELL SIR, ANY BIRD HUNTER worth gunpowder knows that a good retriever's worth more than a good shotgun: It don't do good to shoot something if you can't bring it home.

This truth came to mind the other day when the Plumtree Crossing General Assembly gathered at that hotbed of tranquillity, the front porch of Pennywhistle's General Store. The fellas were just swinging their rockers and enjoying the amber days of fall, when Doc Thromberg asked, "Where's Billy Parsons? Didn't Ott and Newt take him duck hunting yesterday?"

The respective Misters Bartlett and Blanchard grinned so suspiciously that the fellas swiped the pipes from their mouths and made 'ern talk.

"Yep, it's true," Ott said. "We decided to introduce young Billy to the fine art of wing shooting. So before bust of day—"

"—when it was so cold (Newt broke in) the mercury was hanging three clapboards below the bulb—"

"—we woke Billy up," Ott continued,

" — and headed out to our duck blind on Big Swampy River. It was still a bit dark—"

"—darker'n a stack of black cats!" (volunteered Newt)

"So we whiled away the time telling young Billy about my ol'dog, Dan. Dan weren't no purebred, just a black-and-tan pot licker, but, by thunder) that dog could bird. I remember once I found a whole flock of doves working a field of corn stubble and unloaded my shotgun at 'em. I'd aimed a mite low, but that didn't stop ol' Dan. He went out and brought back every one of those birds' feet for me.

"Another time, I took kind of a potshot — "

"—it was wilder'n a billy goat in a pepper patch — "
(courtesy of you-know-who)

"—at a bunch of geese flying overhead. Dan raced home, got a gunnysack, lit on back, and caught every goose before it hit the ground! — "

"Yessir, I lent Dan once to a pond hunter. I told him to just send the dog ahead and listen. If he barked two times, there were two ducks round the next bend. Three barks meant three ducks, and so on. But the fellow came back that same afternoon — "

"—tail up and stinger out — " (©1989 by Blanchard Metaphors, Inc.)

—and said the dog never barked once. Just kept coming back and hitting him on the leg with a piece of wood. 'Shucks,'l told him.

'He's just trying to tell you there aren't enough ducks there to shake a stick at.'

"Dan did make ducks nervous. I was hunting canvasbacks once that kept diving underwater every time I tried to shoot. Ol' Dan dove right after them. They were so scared they flew up, jumped into my sack, and started plucking their own feathers. After that, instead of putting bird decoys out in front of my duck blinds, I carved decoys of Dan and put them in front of the other hunters' blinds. Then I'd shoot my limit — "