December 13th, 2015 is a day I will never forget. It was a typical Sunday afternoon in central Montana, 30 degrees and the wind blowing hard enough that it made wearing a hat beyond pointless. I was with my boyfriend and my two-year old English Setters, Vixie and Rio. We were hunting (or at least attempting) Ringneck Pheasant and Hungarian Partridge in the stubble fields. We had planned on meeting up with my father (and our two family setters Maddie and Cooper) that weekend to do a group hunt, but given the tornado status of the winds that weekend, I said we'd save it for another weekend. Up until I got Rio and Vixie, I hunted only with my dad and our family setters. After I got my setters, my hunting trips with my dad kind of dwindled as space is limited to hunt four dogs compared to two dogs. However, I made it a point to at least do a couple hunts per year with dad to maintain tradition and hunt behind the family setters I grew up with.
After a fruitless hunt, we got back to the truck, loaded up dogs and gun,s and were headed home to get out of the wind and settle into the sofa, bird dogs and all, to watch Sunday Night Football. I checked my text messages, more out of habit than anything, when I saw I had a text from my mother.
"Maddie's gone. She fell through the ice. Please take care of your babies while out hunting."
I was in utter shock, was I reading this text right? I called my mom to make sure what I was reading was actually reality. She told me that my dad and his hunting partner were out hunting along the Teton River on one of our favorite pheasant spots. She chased a hen over the carved out bank, fell through ice and got sucked under. They left at once to come home and get equipment to try and find her body in the river. What absolutely killed me was that almost exactly a year ago to that date, my male Rio had ran into that river (only 200 yards away from where Maddie went in) and almost got sucked under an ice shelf. However I don't let my setters get too far out of sight and sound near water. I was able to pull him out of the water and save him with the only consequence of having to hunt the rest of the day in cold pants (Rio didn't seem to care, I on the other hand was not impressed).
Mustering through my tears, I called my dad to ask him what the plan was. He said he didn't see it happen and didn't see her go under but he knows where she broke through and that he knew where she was in the river because she had her GPS e-collar on. So I told him we'd be over right away to help them find her in the river. I cried the entire way over, so heart-broken that one of our family pets and hunting companions was gone. Maddie was my parents' dog, but was pretty much my dog while I went through nursing school and lived with my parents. We did everything together. We went on walks/runs, ran errands, and she accompanied me on many fly-fishing trips into the Rocky Mountain Front where she caught minnows in the shallows of the small back country streams.
We pulled up to the river where my dad and his neighbor were already wading into the river and breaking ice. My boyfriend and I gathered our things to begin the search. With tears streaming down my dad's face, he incessantly told me "she's right here" (about 4 feet where she went under), showing me the location the GPS remote was giving me. We broke the ice with sledge hammers and used rakes to prod the bottom. After 4 hours and prodding every square centimeter of where the remote was telling me Maddie was at, I had finally asked the undesirable question no one wanted to ask, "Is there a possibility the GPS is wrong?" Any bird hunter knows how remarkable these GPS collars are and how many times they've probably saved their bacon out in the field. They're your lifeline to keeping your dog safe. What if it wasn't as "fail-proof" as it seemed?
While they continued to prod and break ice, I started investigating what the remote was telling me. The collar will tell you how far and in which direction the dog is located from your GPS remote. This GPS was constantly telling me "You have arrived at Maddie". I'm screaming at the remote saying "Well then where is she?!?!" I then opened Maddie's collar profile which will tell you if the collar is connected to GPS, the GPS signal strength, battery level on the collar, and collar-remote signal strength. Her profile showed this: GPS signal: ?. It finally hit me, the connection between her collar and the GPS satellite was lost. I was baffled because we've never lost a GPS signal with these collars. I started walking down stream to see if I could get a GPS signal as I walked downstream. It didn't make a difference. The GPS collars communicate in a triangle function. The GPS function communicates from remote, to satellite, to collar and back. However all the other functions are communicated directly from remote to collar. But as I walked down river I did notice one thing...the signal strength between the collar and the remote was getting stronger, kind of like bars on your cell phone. This was telling me that I was physically getting closer to the collar. I kept telling them "Guys I don't think she's so close to where she went in, I really think she's down river". To no avail, we did not find her December 13th.
That week, I engrossed myself in research for water cadaver searches. It's a pretty morbid research topic but I was determined that we could find her. There's a science to how a body drowns and boy did I learn a lot.
First, a body does not sink right away, it gradually sinks to the bottom, so if it is in a river, it will be downstream 200-300 yards depending on a few factors:
Body composition: More fat=more buoyancy=body settles further down stream
River speed: The faster the current, the further the body will travel down river
Coat consistency: A retriever's coat is naturally buoyant which makes them great water dogs, setters have fine hair, which makes them not so buoyant.
Any additional dead weight will cause the body to sink faster (like an e-collar).
Second, the body will only stay on the bottom for so long. Once the bacteria in the GI system start to multiply and produce gas, the body will then surface as it bloats and continue to float downstream. How long it stays on the bottom depends on the temperature of the water (when the water is freezing, the decomposition process is arrested until the water warms).
Third, once the body rises to the surface and gases from the body are expelled, the body will then return to the bottom to settle.
Given the environmental circumstances and physics laws of drowning, I knew Maddie would be on the bottom of the river within 200 yards of where she fell through and she will stay there until the ice on the river starts to melt.
I downloaded Google Earth Pro (which is free now FYI) and marked where she went in, and what areas of the river had already been searched. I also marked off the 200-300 yard marks of where, scientifically, she had to be but I was banking on her being closer to the 200 yard mark from where she went in. I also studied the river in Google Earth Pro, looking at the varying satellite images taken during different times of the year. I found the image that most accurately fit the current water levels of the river, which showed a definitive main channel with varying smaller channels and large portions of shallow spots. The Teton is a "meandering river" meaning it doesn't move that fast and snakes its way from the Rocky Mountain Front to it's drainage in the Missouri. These types of rivers have its fastest current in the channels and so more than likely she would be in a channel. By that weekend I had my search and rescue plan drawn out and a search party of 5 people to chain saw through ice and start prodding the bottom inch by inch as we started 275 yards down from where she went in and worked our way up in a grid-pattern.
Saturday we made progress and fast, clearing ice bank to bank. The water was cold but shallow with its deepest points only being up to 3 feet deep. Insulated waders make all the difference in the world. We got ice cleared up to about 200 yards away from where she went in, but met a challenge when a sheet of ice over a sand bar that divided the deep channel from the shallow channel had gravel frozen into it. It was impossible to move. Everyone decided we should just keep working our way up the deep channel because that's probably where she was. The shallow channel was left unchecked and we made it to within 75 yards of her entry point up the deep channel but without success. I was blown away. I was sure we would have found her around the 200 yard mark. My boyfriend and I wanted to go back to the spot where the sand bar was and start clearing the other side to see what that other channel was like, however my dad was sure she was in a deep pocket closer to her entry point. We only spent half a day on Sunday searching from where she went in to where we left off as the ice we had broke on Saturday had dammed up the river and the river was rising. Our own safety took precedence over the search effort. My mother sorrowfully folded up Maddie's blanket Maddie slept on it every night on my mom's bed) that she had brought to carry her body back home in. With a search team plagued with defeat and heavy hearts, we left the river accepting that we might never be able to bring her home and put her to rest.
I racked my brain, going over and re-analyzing my search plans, where did I go wrong and where could she possibly be? I organized the search effort and failed to bring my dad's hunting partner and my mom's little girl home for them. That shallow channel that was left unchecked haunted my dreams. I had accepted the fact that the only chance we would have in finding her would be to walk to banks when the ice started to melt (which typically occurs in March here in Montana).
Thanks to El Nino, that day came sooner rather than later. With two weeks of weather in the 50s and 60s, coupled with warm Chinook winds, my mind was constantly consumed at work of whether we needed to go back out and walk the banks.
On Valentine's day my dad said that we would go walk to the banks and see what the river looks like. According to the rancher who owned the land, the river was still frozen over on that Friday February 12th, so I had very little hopes that it would be a successful trip. If we didn't find her in December, the odds now are slim to none. But I still wanted to go, I didn't want to give up on our faithful setter girl.
We pulled up to the river, this time on the opposite bank where we searched from in December. I walked to where she went in at and then walked downstream along the bank. The river was 75% melted off, leaving only ice shelves on the side of the river we were walking on. At my 200 yard mark I stopped and looked very closely at the ice, and low and behold, I see something odd in the ice. A spot of brown fur about the size of my hand frozen in the ice. It wasn't white and it didn't have orange ticking, what could it be? I told my boyfriend to get the waders because I was intrigued as to what it was and this was a spot we were unable to get to in December. My dad said it was unlikely it was Maddie but we can't not find out what it was. The fur easily broke away from the ice and as my boyfriend lifted this dark brown mystery item out of the water, I saw it...the long e-collar antenna breaking the surface of the river. My breath rushed out of my lungs as I screamed "It's Maddie! We found her!" and broke into tears. She was inches away from where we stopped working the south bank of the river because of the piece of ice we couldn't move.
My boyfriend, with tears streaming down his face, washed her off in the river, talking to her and telling her that we didn't give up on her and that we were bringing her home so we can spread her ashes in her favorite hunting spots. As he washed her off, her white coat with delicate orange ticking slowly revealed itself from under the silty mud of the Teton River. Nine weeks completely submerged in sub-zero temperature waters, and she looked the same as the day she went into the river. In the bed of the truck, I held the sopping wet mass in my arms, thankful I got to hold her one last time and telling her that I knew we would find her and we never gave up on her. We had to put her in a cooler to keep her cold until we could take her to be cremated the following day. I went and trimmed some of her beautiful feathers from her tail, so that a Christmas ornament could be made in her memory with locks of her soft, wispy setter hair. It finally hit me after closing that chapter of finding her...the dog that went everywhere with me, had given me many splendid days of bird hunting, consoled me through break-ups with boyfriends, lounged around on lazy Sundays with me, was always ecstatic to see me, and looked for me in my room after I had graduated from nursing school and moved out of my parents house....was gone.
This is a tear-jerking story that is more common than one thinks. Many bird dogs fall victim to the icy depths of a river while hunting. You even here stories of hunters dying trying to save their dogs' lives, only to meet the same untimely death of their four-legged partner. Most try perilously to recover their companion's body so they can ceremoniously put their partner to rest and never be forgotten, only to turn up empty handed. And in no way am I blaming my dad because accidents do happen and he has hunted 40+ years with bird dogs without any major accidents. And in no way can every accident be prevented because sometimes, it's out of our control and it's divine intervention. In this case, Maddie had been diagnosed with cancer just a month previously and this was most definitely a better way for her to go, instead of a slow and painful death from cancer. There were so many lessons I learned from this experience, and ones that I would like to share.
1. I will never hunt near a river that has ice on it with my dogs. Yes, the pheasant hunting is amazing, but my dog is worth more to me than a stupid bird. I realized that when I got lucky with Rio in 2014. So if we have to work harder in the brush and cat tails of a wheat field, then that's what we do.
2. If you insist on hunting near the river, only hunt one dog at a time. It's harder to keep track of two dogs, let alone one dog. Minimize your risks.
3. Never go in after your dog unless you know it is safe. I lucked out and Rio was next to the shore so I did not have to go onto ice or into a fast current to pull him out. Maddie would have been hard to rescue due to the fact that she went in in the deep channel and the ice was questionable.
4. If your dog goes under the water under the ice shelf, let them go under. They will pop out on the other side. In this case, the ice shelf was only 30 yards long. Had my dad went down to the end of the ice shelf and waited for her body to come out of the other side, there was a possibility of revival. After all of my research I learned that all mammals have what's called the "mammalian reflex" that is activated when drowning. The heart slows down to conserve oxygen and glucose during this time of deprivation. The best chance of taking advantage of this unique adaptive mechanism is in cold, fresh water as long as CPR is performed within 15 minutes of going under after which time the dog needs to be taken to the vet right away for hypothermia and pneumonia treatment. If you are unable to revive your dog, at least you have their body and have the opportunity for those rituals that make death easier to cope with (cremation, burial, etc).
5. The GPS collar does not work under ice and neither does the beeper. The ice actually blocks the signal to the satellite, and your GPS function is useless. Your best reference as to where to find the body is the collar-remote signal strength. I got my strongest signal on the remote when I was right across the river from where we recovered Maddie.
6. Know your GPS collar. On this particular collar, invisible fences can be drawn on your GPS map so that when a dog goes near that "boundary line" they will be beeped and/or zapped, keeping them out of harms way, even when you can't see them. It is also water proof. We were able to charge it and it is 100% functional, even after being submerged in water for 9 weeks. There's also the LED light function that has many different settings. Had we known about this, there was the possibility that we could have turned on the LED lights when the sun set on the first day, and very well could have seen the lights through the ice. These lights are visible from over a mile away. There also is a battery preservation mode that you can turn on, in case you need extra time to use the light and/or signal strength to help narrow down the area where the body is at.
7. Use the physics of drowning to help guide your search efforts. Everything that I read about cadaver water rescues was 100% accurate, and my estimates based on all of the determining factors were right on. Start about 300 yards down from point of entry and work bank to bank in a grid. If you encounter a sand bar, cut small chunks of ice that can easily be moved so they do not obstruct your search efforts.
8. Google Earth Pro is extremely useful and accurate and will help give you a reference as to the topography of the river bottom. It will also help show you spots that may be dangerous and help you plan your search efforts safely and effectively.
9. Safety, Safety, Safety: Search in a group, during safe weather conditions, with changes of dry clothing, and cold-weather gear (like insulated waders and gloves). If at anytime your safety is compromised, get out. On larger, faster, and deeper rivers (like the Missouri), this recovery would have been impossible...do not even attempt it. One life lost is hard enough, two or more lives lost is an absolute tragedy.
10. An e-collar should not replace field obedience, it should complement it: Sometimes when your dog encounters a danger, there might not be enough time to use the remote/collar. With Vixie and Rio, I rarely have to use the beeper function and can count on one hand how many times I've had to use the shock function. When I whistle or yell, their concentration is broken immediately and they stop hunting. They respect the stay, sit and down commands in the field which are useful when we are hunting wheat fields along busy gravel roads.
11. Evaluate your method and theory of working your pointing dog: Many people let their pointers range far because in theory, you find more birds. I'm however only let my dogs range within hearing distance. For me, personally, this is my comfort level...not because I can see them because there's many times in thick cover that I can not see them...but more for increasing my odds of rescuing my dog should they encounter danger. There's many hazards out there for bird dogs: rivers, traps, snakes, badgers, etc. I've had time to pull my setter our of an icy river before he got sucked under, because I kept him within range. I've been able to shoot a rattle snake, because I saw my dog's bizarre behavior and fear when they caught wind of the snake. This is just my personal preference and I still come home with bag limits.
