“The Backward Bird Dog” is a pleasant, quick MG read.
Bill Wallace based his 1997 book The Backward Bird Dog (illustrated, like Wallace’s Upchuck and the Rotten Willy, by Daniel Slonim) on his family’s experience adopting a pointer named JC.
Like many of Wallace’s works, an animal (in this case JC) serves as the narrator, and as the story opens his mother is explaining that the worst thing in all the world for bird dogs would be to lose their nose.
This is bad, because without your nose, you cannot find quail, and finding quail makes your Mys Proud, and that’s the best thing ever.
JC gets selected by People named Bill, Carol and Justin, and he throws up in their monster machine on the long drive to wherever they live – which is very embarrassing.
Things don’t get much better – Gray Cat swipes him a couple times right on the nose, and then Chomps the Scottie bites him on the nose for being in his yard.
Then JC falls into the huge drinking bowl called a swimming pool, and gets pecked by a mama bird for frightening her children.
So it’s a lot safer to stay in the house with the Mys, enjoying cuddles and “helping” Bill type words into a machine, which makes him smell all sorts of different emotions – happy one day, disappointed the next. As JC notes, “People animals are kind of weird.”
As the summer goes on, JC grows up, and learns that he loves going for a walk, doesn’t like baths or going to the vet. He also learns that barbed-wire fences really hurt if you get your ear caught in them.
His Mys pack him up to go to bird-dog training school, where he meets Big Mike, another pointer who he becomes friends with. At the end of school, the trainer isn’t very impressed with JC’s performance, which leaves Bill, Carol and Justin very unhappy.
So JC has to stay home and keep Chomps company whenever everyone else takes their boom-boom sticks out for a hunting expedition.
Then, one day, Carol is taking the house dogs for a walk when she makes a discovery – JC does know how to point! It’s just that because of everyone whacking his nose all the time as a puppy, he points with his tail.
This makes Bill, Carol and Justin very Proud, and JC realizes that it is just as good a feeling as Mother said it was.
The dog’s-eye view of normal human behaviors is entertaining, and the dialogue is well-done. The tangents JC’s brain trails off on are one of the best parts that make Wallace such a great writer, in my opinion.
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