Lydia Angylou was a middle-aged woman with a small build.  She was described by Captain Larry Hubert of the Kativik Canadian Police as “about 5-foot-nothing and 90 pounds on a wet day”.  One evening Lydia was watching her 7-year-old son play hockey with two of his friends when a 700-pound polar bear lumber up to the boys to grab its evening dinner.  Lydia seeing the oncoming bear, in an instant transformed from middle-aged mother into an uncontrollable fighting machine and threw herself at the bear and the two began wrestling on the ground.  Lydia was able to keep the bear at bay until a passerby saw the commotion and put three bullets from his .303 caliber rifle into bear killing the predator.   Although unmatched by size and strength this polar bear’s instinct to survive was no match for the power found deep within Lydia Angylou.

I grew up in East LA and I’ve never seen a wild polar bear.  The closest thing I came to wildlife was at night lying in bed listening to the howling of the coyotes in the nearby Whittier hills.  In the day I would explore those hills with the hope of finding an abandoned coyote puppy that I could rescue and take home as mine.  When I was 10, I visited a cousin on his small family farm in Logon Utah.  While we were walking through a snowy cornfield his dog flushed a large colorful bird, which I later learned was a pheasant.   These small but significant memories never left me but eventually they diminished as I went off to college, was married and over the years had five wonderful children.  As time marched on and as children left the nest, I met a man who helped bring these childhood memories and desires back to the surface.

Gordon was a passionate hunter.  He was especially passionate about pheasant hunting with his dog Lizzy.  Gordon had hunted since he was a young boy but Lizzy was the best dog he had ever owned.   She was an 11-year-old chocolate lab with a graying muzzle but with drive and instinct that could rival any dog her junior.   Lizzy had a tough time jumping into a truck and her flanks and underbelly were becoming covered with cancerous lumps, but she could still outperform younger dogs by flushing more birds or finding lost birds in the densest thickets.  When converting dog years to human years, Gordon and Lizzy were contemporaries in age as well as health.  Gordon was 80 years old and had recently experienced a mini stroke and shortly after recovery, then the doctors discovered some cancer, which resulted in surgery and the insertion of a urine drainage bag.  However, age and sickness did not slow down this pair’s thirst for the hunt. 

When Gordon discovered that I had repressed my hunting drive over the years, he quickly helped me rediscover this dream.   His first instruction for me was to get a hunting dog and get her trained before pheasant season.   He explained that the most important aspect of a great hunting dog is its passion for the hunt.  He called this passion the Prey Drive.  He warned that not every dog possessed it.  For example labs were bred to hunt and retrieve but over the years and through lax breeding, many lab pups were bred to be lovable pets but lost their prey drive.  In effect, civilization had unbred the natural instincts resulting in a dog that is calmer, with less purpose, a dog that will be content to just lay at its owners feet and wag its tail when stroked.   He warned me to pick wisely.  Look at the pedigree and choose a pup from a line, which had not lost its drive.  If I was smart and with a little luck I would choose a pup that would grow into a dog with a drive to hunt with fervor and passion and not be content unless it were hunting.   I knew I could find such a dog.

I flew from Denver to Salt Lake City and drove to Oakley, a small farming community where dogs were not just pets but bred to work.  I chose a precocious little puppy from a long line of hunters.  The owner claimed she was the smartest of the litter and had learned to open the gate to visit the horses, a skill she continued to perfect into adulthood that I would learn to regret.  I named my new black lab after her hometown – Oakley. 

At 6 months of age Oakley went to boarding school.  Gordon suggested a trainer that knew about prey drive.  He lived on the prairie east of Denver.  He had trained Lizzy and he lived on wild meat.  That was a strong enough resume for me so I hired him. He would teach Oakley some simple commands such as heal and stay but most importantly and critical to her success was the unleashing of her Prey Drive.  He would accomplish this by first introducing her to a caged chucker.  Then he would hide the caged bird on the prairie and let the puppy chase the scent until the she was close enough and then he would release the bird with a remote control.  He would shoot the chucker and the dog would retrieve.  This would be done over and over until the dog could barely control herself.  When he picked up Oakley for her three-week boot camp he was a bit miffed that I had waited so long for her training. As he walked Oakley to his truck he gave me a disparaging look and said, “You waited to darn long, its bests to bring out their drive at four months”.  It was a little sad to see Oakley going away an innocent lanky pup knowing that she would return a hunting machine.  

To my dismay Oakley’s prey drive was slower to surface than expected.   After week two, the trainer called.  I was so excited to hear how my precocious puppy was doing until he informed me that Oakley was having a tough time finding her inner self.   He shocked me when he said, “Your dog shows some promise, but she doesn’t have the drive or the intuition of Lizzy”.   I told him to keep trying.  A bit devastated, I waited for her final grade on week three. On the last day of her final week, the trainer called and said with some excitement, “I need her for another week!”  The drive was beginning to immerge.   After the fourth week of training it surfaced.   He brought back a different dog.  Oakley left a bumbling puppy and came back with a new intensity.  She now retrieved like a hunter and would roam our 5 acres of land now with a purpose.

Muslins make a yearly trek to Mohammad’s birthplace of Mecca; Jews are drawn to Solomon’s temple where the law was given; and Christians flock to the old city of Jerusalem where Jesus walked.  Pheasant hunters make their pilgrimage to South Dakota for opening day of pheasant season.  Gordon had made this pilgrimage to South Dakota for many years.   He had purchased a 300-acre farm in Mitchell and built a beautiful farmhouse for the express purpose of pheasant hunting during the short 2 ½ month season.  Oakley and I were fortunate to be invited to participate in this almost sacred event.   We would move from classroom training to the field in the best pheasant hunting spot on earth. 

There was an air of excitement on the night before the hunt.  Gordon had been anticipating this day since the end of last season and Lizzy knew what it meant to be visiting the farm.   Lizzy slept on Gordon’s bed that night and they were up before the sun.   We were joined in the morning by 10 seasoned South Dakotan hunters and their seasoned dogs.  These dogs were not selected for their beauty but for their love of the hunt.   For the first seven days of hunting season, the hunters are required to wait until noon to begin each day’s hunt.  I wondered if the intent of this policy was similar to a parent telling their children not to open their Christmas presents until the sleepy parents slowly got out of their beds.   Like children on Christmas morning, the hunters paced the farmhouse waiting for noon to arrive.  At noon the hunters would walk out the back door of the farmhouse with their dogs in tow and enter food plots and shelterbelts that housed some of the greatest pheasants in the world.   At the strike of midday the hunt began in a fresh corn plot that was sure to contain both hens and roosters with their bellies near bursting with corn from their morning feed.   We were not disappointed!   The dogs charged into the food plot always staying within shooting range of their masters.  Oakley also charged into the melee but after the confusion caused by hunters shooting and dogs running madly, fear overcame her instincts and she retreated back to the farmhouse. My heart sank as I watched her retreat.  

I continued the hunt with Gordon and Lizzy.  They were a fine tuned hunting duet.  Lizzy would cover a 40-foot semi circle radius in the front of Gordon and ensure that clever pheasants would not back track and sneak behind the marching group of hunters.  If a hunter shot a bird that couldn’t be found they would yell for Lizzy to go into the thicket to retrieve the bird.  By the end of opening day both dogs and hunters were exhausted.   There was not a fresh dog in the pack except for my dog Oakley.  We walked back to the farmhouse and helped Lizzy who struggled to get on the couch.  Gordon administered a healthy dose of aspirin to her and to himself.   After a quick dinner of lemon pheasant, we all collapsed on our beds.

In the morning, the hunters gathered and strategized which farm to hunt.   It was decided to hunt a section of CRT farmland, which had thick grass up one’s waist.  By noon, the pheasants would have had time to eat and would be enjoying the early afternoon sun in the long grass.   There is a strategy to hunting upland birds in a group.  These birds like to run and stay ahead of dogs and hunters.   The hunting strategy is to walk with a long line of hunters with dogs in the front moving the birds toward blockers.  As the birds are pushed down the field some will flush and be shot but the excitement is at the finale when the birds run into blockers and rise to a chorus of gunshots.   Gordon volunteered to be a blocker this morning.  This would allow him to save his energy and his two new knees from the exertion of walking miles in waist high grass. 

The rest of us started pushing the birds through an expansive field of grass towards Gordon and his dog.  The long grass was terribly hard to traverse and walking 2 miles that required high leg lifts in long grass felt more like 2 miles in waist deep water.  Not only was the hunt exhausting but also uncanny as men walked through the long grass with guns above their heads while each dog would occasionally leap vertically out of the grass into the air to get a glimpse of its location.  It gave me the eerie feeling that I was in a Jurassic Park scene about to be gobbled up by a hungry raptor.   Meanwhile on the Southeast corner of the CRT land, Gordon and Lizzy unwilling to wait for the hunters, decided to test the neighbor’s field.  The only thing separating them from the neighbor’s field was a barbed wire fence.   Lizzy gingerly stepped over the bottom wire and hopped through.   Gordon laid on his belly and did his best army crawl until getting pinned on the ground by a barb on the wire.  He lay in this prone position until we rescued him at the end of the field hunt.  We helped both Gordon and Lizzy into the Suburban and the doctor in the group determined that Gordon had broken his right rib in his struggle with the barbed wire.   On the ride home, Gordon would groan every time we hit a bump on the dirt road but the pain did not stop him and Lizzy from participating in a road hunt on our drive home.

Each day of the hunt took its physical toll on Gordon and Lizzy.  However, they continued to show an inexhaustible determination when each day’s hunt began.  Lizzy would transform from an old limping dog to the queen of the field and Gordon would forget about his broken rib and follow his dog with equal enthusiasm.   I wondered where this fount of seemingly endless endurance would end and how would it end?   Would dog and man eventually hit the end of this wellspring of hidden energy and just collapse?  It never happened and I had to conclude that both dog and man’s prey drive in this duo was so strong that I would certainly expire before witnessing their demise.  

The last day of the hunt was cold and wet.  We drove two hours north to the Clark farm where there was fresh fields and unsuspecting pheasants.  The drive was long and painful for Gordon.  His broken rib felt every bump in the road.   When we arrived at the Clark farm, Gordon emptied his urine bag and started struggling with his new boots.  Gordon has a reputation in Mitchell as the Imelda Marcos of hunting boots.  He has a different boot for each type of bird and each type of climate.  I helped him put on his pheasant snow boots.   Gordon verbalized his frustration at having to have someone help him with his boots by swearing he would never hunt again.  I knew his promise was not a possibility.   He later told me a story about Eldon Honker who had the prey drive as strong as anyone.   Towards the end of Eldon’s life, Gordon would take him goose hunting and would help Eldon put on his boots.  Eldon eventually lost his ability to lower himself into the goose pit so his friends would lower him with a rope. At Eldon’s funeral, while his casket was lowered into ground with two ropes, they performed a 21-goose solute by all blowing their best goose calls in memory of this man’s passion and drive for the hunt. 

A miracle happened on a small riverbed on the Clark farm.   Something switched on inside Oakley and me.   We transformed from worrying about the cold and fatigue to appreciating the thrill of the hunt.   It was towards the end of the day as we hiked down a riverbed.   As we walked alongside the bank, Oakley and I began to really hunt for the first time.  She would quarter and I would call commands.   She would flush and I would hit my target.  As we hunted this riverbed, I began to feel the stirrings that drove both Gordon and Eldon to go beyond simple comfort for the drive of the hunt.  We began working as one – dog following her senses while maintaining restraint and hunter following the dogs lead yet completely in control of the team.  Our prey drive was finally beginning to be released.  I could now understand what drove Gordon to hunt with the discomfort of a broken rib.  I could now see how Eldon in his final days allowed his fellow hunters to lower him into a goose pit with a rope.  I could see how Lizzy barely able to jump up on a couch was able to run over 30 miles in a day during a hunt.   Civilization has repressed this instinct from most of her population.  But on occasion we see behavior such as Lydia Angylou fighting a polar bear, which can only be explained by a power or instinct deep within us.   Some may call it a survival instinct, others may call it an adrenaline rush, I like to think of it as Prey Drive.

The drive home to Colorado was quiet as I sat alone with my dog.  I admired corn and bean fields of the South Dakota and Nebraska landscapes.  These fields looked different than they did seven days prior when I started my trek.  I thought about what fed in those cornfields and what each shelterbelt might be protecting.  I wondered if I would return home changed like my dog Oakley from her training on the eastern plains of Denver with more purpose, confidence and power than I previously had possessed.