Holiday Hunting Dog Traditions This Season

The hunting season and the holiday season arrive together, and for hunters who run dogs, the overlap is not accidental. The late fall and early winter months are when the fields are at their best, when the retrievers are working hard, when the hounds are running, when the upland cover holds birds. They are also the months when families gather, when traditions repeat themselves, when the things that matter most tend to show up most clearly.

For most hunters, their hunting dogs are as much a part of their family as anyone else. That’s not a figure of speech. A dog that has spent years in the field alongside you, that has shared the truck cab on long drives to hunting leases, that has slept at the foot of the bed on the nights before opening day — that dog is woven into the life in ways that don’t require explanation to anyone who has had one.

The traditions that carry

The hunting traditions that survive from one generation to the next tend to have a dog somewhere in them. My wife’s family has a tradition on opening day of deer season: while the hunters are in the woods running the hounds, the women prepare a large home-cooked meal and bring it out to the tailgate of someone’s truck. The hounds and the food and the family have been in the same field, in roughly the same configuration, for as long as anyone can remember.

My neighbors return every Thanksgiving to the same stretch of water, with the family retriever, for a traditional waterfowl hunt. Not because the shooting is necessarily the best it’s ever been, but because that’s the morning they do it. The tradition is the point, and the dog is part of the tradition.

Fathers and sons and daughters gather for bird hunts and duck hunts that remind them of other hunts, other dogs, other years. Beagles are packed into the field for a morning of rabbit hunting. Exhausted Labs lie around the back of the truck as oysters get shucked at the end of a day on the water. These are not remarkable scenes to the people who live them — they’re just what they do every year. That’s exactly what makes them remarkable.

The solitary side of it

Hunting is also a solitary sport, and some of the best traditions are the ones that belong to just one person and one dog. A morning in the field alone with a good dog, moving through cover you know well, is its own kind of tradition — one that doesn’t require an audience or a gathering to be meaningful. The dog moves ahead, works the edge, checks back. The air is cold. The light is low. There is a peacefulness in it that is hard to find anywhere else.

The holiday season gives that kind of morning a particular quality. The days are short, the fields are quiet, the year is winding down. There is time to think about what the season was and what the next one might be, about the dog working in front of you now and the dogs that worked this same ground before him.

Starting and continuing

Some of the best hunting traditions started simply — one trip that went well, one morning that felt right, that became a plan for next year before the truck was back on the highway. The tradition doesn’t have to have history behind it to be worth starting. A first hunt with a young dog, a first December duck hunt with a child who is old enough to come along, a standing invitation to a friend to bring his hounds on the last day of the season — any of these can become the thing that gets repeated and eventually remembered.

What the dogs give these moments is a specific kind of completeness. They don’t carry the weight of obligation that holidays can sometimes bring. They are fully present, fully committed, fully themselves in every moment in the field. Taking the time to see it that way — to be in the field with a dog and let that be enough — is the tradition worth building, whatever form it takes.