Trip wasn’t the same without favorite partner

Great hunting dogs and great hunting partners have at least one thing in common. On the rare occasion that they check into a sportsman’s life, they inevitably check out too soon.

Even with a veteran Brittany and a rambunctious setter pup smudging wet noses against the windows, my pickup cab seemed huge and empty as I drove out of town last week.

I was heading to a favorite quail hunting spot minus Skip Hensler, my most dependable hunting partner. He died shortly after our last memorable turkey hunts this spring.

Our relationship spanned a combined total of seven hunting dogs and we bagged enough venison, waterfowl and game birds to keep our freezers well-stocked with the healthiest meat on the planet. We probably could have kept a large tribe well fed if we’d fired our guns as well as we shot the breeze.

It felt strange driving past the turnout I had become used to pulling into, without prompting, so Skip could relieve himself of the Thermos of coffee he’d consume before showing up at my house on cold hunting mornings.

Partners who spend countless hours together driving to the field and hunkering in duck blinds tend to know everything about each other, including family issues and body functions.

You know as much about a hunting partner’s wife as you do about his choice of guns. The best hunting partners speak fondly of both.

Hunting partners have plenty to tease each other about when they get together with friends. Skip particularly enjoyed skewering me for the goose hunt I lined up after spotting a bazillion Canadas late one afternoon in an irrigated Lincoln County field. The farmer had given me permission to hunt and I even went out that night in the dark and dug a small pit in ground that was 99.9 percent rock.

The decoys were out and we were in the blind the next morning, and the geese were setting their wings and dropping their landing gear at sunrise until, despite the clear skies, the rain started drenching us as though the farmer had started the circle irrigation system.

“Actually,” Skip observed dryly, “it’s the hired man turning on the sprinklers. Guess you shoulda got his permission, too.”

As often as we told the stories of hunts gone fowl, so to speak, I’ll join him in the great hunting fields above and beyond without revealing which one of us goofed and mistook a hen for a gobbler in one of our first turkey hunts together.

Hunting partners die with certain secrets.

I startled myself as I drove, glancing in the rearview mirror and realizing I could see all the way through the pickup canopy to the road behind.

I’m accustomed to seeing nothing in the mirror beyond one of Skip’s over-loved, overweight Labrador retrievers – monsters of yellow fur that could kill the uninitiated with either drooling affection or the unrestrained enthusiasm of a tail capable of pounding nails into concrete.

Skip dropped into my hunting life with the comic relief of tailfeathers drifting down from the passing duck that got away.

Like any good hunting partner, he was a catch worth keeping for numerous reasons.

I got to know Skip, a former paratrooper, by writing a story on his technique for speeding his physical and mental post-heart-surgery recovery by getting a hunting dog as an incentive to get back in shape.

I snapped one of Skip’s favorite photos as that first yellow Lab sat on the shore determined to stay dry while Skip – who was a little too soft-hearted to be a great dog trainer – had no choice but to wade out an inch or two over his hip waders to retrieve a duck.

Noticing the lack of tread on his pickup tires on one hunting trip years ago, I made the mistake of offering to drive until he got new, safe tires. He never took a turn driving again, even though it must have been a ton of work to put on that set of bald tires every time I came out to his house.

After dozens of trips in my rig, Skip was noticeably uneasy as we drove home from a stellar hunt that had filled our game bags with pheasants, quail and ducks.

“I feel as though I’m not paying my share while you do all the driving,” he said, pausing in a rare moment of sensitivity.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I’m thinking that if I shut up, this feeling will pass.”

Later, we compromised. I would continue to drive and Skip would bring the lunch.

This is a better deal than it sounds, considering that I knew Skip would enlist the services of his wife, Christy, who is an artist with food. He brought lavish lunches from his Pend Oreille County farm, featuring smoked home-raised lamb sandwiches with homemade bread and home-grown horseradish plus exotic homemade pastries and Christy’s hand-dipped huckleberry chocolates.

“She even helps me drag my deer and clean my birds,” he often bragged.

“But,” he once confessed, “she said bringing lunch to keep a hunting partner is as desperate as tying a pork chop around your neck to get your dog to play.”

My dogs rode in the back of the pickup inside the canopy when Skip and I would go hunting. Having them in the cab and taking on a few occasional friendly licks to my ear helped me get down the road to our little piece of quail heaven.

Skip was the gold standard for hunting partners: capable, available and generous, a curious man and a prolific reader, a talker and a listener, opinionated and open-minded. He was a mentor and a jokester who loved to dish it out and enjoyed a sharp comeback even more.

I switched on the pickup radio, something I never had to do when Skip was along.

Noise came out of the speakers, but there was nothing to listen to.