Hunting dogs, both purebred and not so purebred, can be one of the most precious possessions in a person’s life. They can be both entertaining and a big pain. Often these types of stimulations can come at the same time or in sequences that can vary.

We recently had to put our 13-year-old Lab Brownie down. He was our late son’s dog and the 10th Lab that we have had the incredible privilege of having under our care. The three short years that Brownie lived in our home provided way more pleasurable moments than some of the others, but the others may have contributed to some of our gray hair.

We’ll start with the worst one. Our property and shoreline on Great Bay was covered with about four inches of snow and there was thick ice along the shoreline giving way to thin ice out in the deeper areas. My wife had Brownie out with her when she was scraping off our deck and patio area. She called to him to check on his whereabouts but he never showed up. That wasn’t that unusual, because Brownie was very hard of hearing and wouldn’t or couldn’t bark.

When I heard the urgency of her calling for him, my first instinct was to try to track him in the snow. His tracks led right down to the shore, out onto the ice and then disappeared. This was shortly after he had undergone surgery for a big cancerous tumor in his belly and he wasn’t in very good shape.

My wife and I weren’t about to go out on the thin ice, so I jumped in my van and slowly drove the shoreline road, looking for where he might have come ashore, stopping frequently to look with my binoculars and blowing my dog whistle, which he could hear. But we had no luck.

My wife had gone in one direction and me the other. By now we both were having a hard time keeping the tears from flowing.

At that time I had been experiencing a lot of pain from a foot joint that had deteriorated from arthritis. But an on-foot search for possible tracks was a must and that was a good thing. Brownie had come ashore but his prints were hardly recognizable because the snowplowed banking had frozen.

Wading through knee-deep drifts and crossing neighbors properties, I screamed out to my wife that I’d found him, alive and well with a big smirk on his face. We had traveled deeply down the path of desperation and were elevated into the purest senses of intense relief and pleasure.

Our second dog, Skippy, was a black Lab that was given to us at a young age because the older dog of that home was terrorizing him. Although we spent a lot of time training him, his natural hunting ability was a joy to watch, at least most of the time. In several different instances he tried really hard to get his “old man” into trouble with the law.

Tomcat and I had been pheasant hunting in a great cover we called the hassocks. It was a part of what is now called Portsmouth’s Great Bog. This place always was alive with wild pheasants but hard to hunt except with a dog. We had worked about a mile of cover towards Greenland and both Tom and I had a nice load in our game bags with two cockbirds each. We were quite jubilant on our walk back to the railroad crossing with Skippy still working the edges of the cover. He never knew when to quit.

He got particularly interested in one spot and ignored my whistles and calls and eventually came pouncing up onto the railroad tracks with an illegal (at that time) hen pheasant that had a broken wing, obviously wounded severely.

We dispatched the poor bird and when Skippy wasn’t looking, tossed it back into the cover to avoid any conflicts and a sure summons to court. At our car we were storing gear and clothes when Skippy took off on the run and soon came back with that hen pheasant in his mouth. Did we mention his grin?

Illegal pheasants taste exactly the same as legal ones.

Dick Pinney’s column appears weekly in the New Hampshire Sunday News. Email him at DoDropInn@aol.com.