A Good Nose

Our dog has a Sherlock Holmes nose. Vizslas do. It’s part of their equipment. She can find a quail in cover by scent alone at forty yards or more if there’s any breeze at all, and within feet with no breeze. But that’s not what this story is about.

It’s about a rockfish, a striped bass as they call them here, a fish I’ve been doing battle with for the last twenty-four hours. A single fish. Rockfish are such a delicacy on the shores of our bay that a few years back it became illegal to serve them in restaurants. They were becoming too hard to find. I can report now that they’re back.

At least, Sam can find them. Sam is the vizsla.

As I said, my battle began twenty-four hours ago, but this is not The Old Man and The Sea. I’d done nothing more heroic than open the screen door to let Sam out for a mid-afternoon pee. And she disappeared.

I always worry about that around here. She usually sticks pretty close, but there’s no accounting for the attraction of a young deer. A couple of years ago we got one of those hidden fences. The first time a deer crossed the property she lit the afterburners and vanished in a heartbeat. I heard a small yelp three seconds later and found her standing stock still beyond the driveway that she wasn’t supposed to cross.

But that’s not the story either.

This time when I found her she was rolling on her back in the grass. A bad sign. When she does that she always comes back smelling worse than foul. As I approached, she started eating what she’d been rolling in. On close inspection I saw that it was the head of a fish whose body lay nearby and was of a size worth frying, though it was too late for that. The body still bore the telltale black horizontal stripes of a rockfish, a striped bass.

How a rockfish had found its way into the center of two acres of grass I couldn’t guess, unless an osprey dropped it there. We have lots of them here, and they fly about with the fish they catch, as with a trophy before dinner. Perhaps this osprey was a klutz.

It was also too late to get the head out of Sam’s mouth, so I waited while she crunched it down.  Then, in one of her very rare moments of inattention, I grabbed her collar and took her to the house. 

The following morning I remembered that fish and went out with doubled  plastic bags to gather its smelly remains before she got them. To my surprise there was nothing left there but some bones and cartilage. The place where the nice, white rockfish body had been was empty. Perhaps the osprey who dropped it had come back to pick it up. Or maybe a raccoon.

This afternoon, Sam asked politely whether she might be allowed out of doors. I readily agreed and confidently opened the door. She left like a shot, heading straight for the bushes, hurried down the row to the second opening on the right and ducked inside, tail vanishing last.

“Sam?” I called.

“Oh, Sam!”

It took a minute or so.

Then I saw a white rectangle emerge in the mouth of our dog, now crawling belly-to-the-ground out of the boxwoods. Yup, it was the body of the stripped bass I’d been fighting for twenty-four hours, and now it was riper than ever.