In a gesture that easily might have been taken purely as affection, the old man plunged a hand into the dog’s thick, black hair and began climbing the snowpacked river bank.
“Bucky helps me up the slippery slopes now,” Eugene “Swede” Anderson explained, the concession to a bum knee and advancing years.
For someone who has spent much of his life providing assistance to dogs, the act seemed like fair trade.
Anderson and Bucky have been constant companions for 13 years, one of those sunrise-sunset relationships that mark the too-soon passage of a dog’s life.
In more than a half-century prowling the South Platte River, Anderson has buried many a good hunting dog. But it’s what he did when they were alive that counts.
Anderson is the only two-legged Coloradan inducted into the Bird Dog Hall of Fame, a 2001 honor he shares with two deceased dogs – a golden retriever from Longmont and a Labrador retriever from Fort Collins.
Anderson gained fame as a trainer, for his 45 years as a national field trial judge and for, well, being Swede, a bigger-than-life personage of immense dedication and matching good cheer.
“I’m just an amateur trainer,” Anderson said with undue modesty. “I usually keep just three dogs around.”
Among these is a Lab female back home in Denver who recently dropped a remarkable 12 pups, 11 of which survived.
“It’s a heckuva lot of work,” he said of a feeding ritual that would cut his hunting day in half.
Anderson doesn’t seem to mind. In the 51 years since he made the permanent migration from his native Minnesota, he has had enough good days to make several hunting lifetimes.
He grew up trailing after two woodsmen uncles.
“We did everything from trapping to chasing raccoons to hunting ducks – anything you could do in an outdoor life,” he said.
He made a temporary landing in Colorado at age 12 when his stepfather landed a job working on Green Mountain Dam.
“I knew right then that when I was old enough to control my destiny, I’d come back to this country,” he said.
As soon as he finished college in 1955, he made the jump.
“My wife said, ‘Don’t you think one of us should have some money coming in?’ But that didn’t matter to me,” Anderson recalled
Working first for a petroleum company, he soon founded a graphics company selling drafting, engineering and architectural supplies, an enterprise he owned until 1992.
Anderson almost immediately began hunting the South Platte River north of Denver, and on one momentous morning, his fortunes changed forever.
“I was driving across a bridge and mallards were pouring into this place like I couldn’t believe,” he said, describing a scene that sent him looking for the landowner.
“I cut a deal with this farmer for $2 a year and formed a hunting club. Our responsibility was to keep poachers out so he didn’t have to be bothered,” he said.
The financial arrangement changed abruptly when the farmer died and his sons took over the operation.
“They jacked up the price to $25 a year. They said their father never did charge enough,” Anderson laughed at the absurdity of the deal compared to modern leases running to tens of thousands.
Swede and his buddies bought the property in 1972, keeping the club intact since. The mallards don’t often swarm like they once did, but the property provides a twice-weekly place for Anderson to exercise his creaky knee and, of course, his dogs.
“There’s one thing about me. If my dogs aren’t with me, I don’t care to hunt,” he said.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
