Dog Shots

My collection of fly-fishing photos dates back to the 1980s and mixed in among them are hundreds of images of my two Labrador retrievers, Moose and Shadow.

Check out what we offer online at North40.com for the four-legged members in your family.

Those dogs are long gone now, but I still enjoy looking at photos of them and remembering all the interesting times we had together. When I had those dogs I was on the water for a 150 or more days a year and they were with me at all times. When I wrote books about fly fishing, I told stories about those dogs and included photos of them in the mix. By the late-1990s, when the dogs were in their primes and the books were circulating well, people started recognizing Moose and Shadow on the water, which was always a nice way to start a conversation and make new friends.

Read my IFTD 2017 write up here.

This particular image dates back to the first trip I took to Montana’s Bighorn River. It was winter, late January I believe, and Moose was just a big, lanky puppy, maybe a year old. He loved being in the boat but was even more at home while running the banks and digging for squirrels, or trying to root pheasants out of the heavy cover. This shot shows him near the end of a float from Afterbay to Mallards, dirty as can be and absolutely worn out. When I look at this, as I’m sure photos of your dogs do, I get a smile just knowing that Moose was having the time of his life, hanging with the boys, floating for five straight days, and getting to chase things that tried to get away from him. Isn’t this the way you want your dog to look after a day on the water? To me, this says, “Ah, he’ll sleep well tonight.”