They call it Red's Corner now. It's a tangle of alder and young aspen just off a gravel road in southern Koochiching County.
Red, an English setter owned by Scotty Searle, spent some of her last hours there. This was just last fall.
Searle and her hunting partner, Tracy Lee, had come to northern Minnesota from the Chicago area for a couple of weeks of grouse hunting, as they have for a dozen years or more. They had met their old friend, Pat Pollard of Grand Rapids, for several days of hunting before the Ruffed Grouse Society's National Grouse and Woodcock Hunt.
Searle and Lee knew Red was weak.
"Red was 7. She had cancer," Lee said.
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Searle let her out of the truck.
"She was a little wobbly at first, but once she got going, she was OK," Pollard said.
Lee remembers the hunt well.
"We hunted for an hour," she said. "I think we found four grouse and several woodcock."
Red pointed them all. Pollard and Lee let Searle do the shooting. They knew this might be Red's last hunt.
"When we were through, we put her back in the box [portable kennel]," Lee said.
The two women drove back to the resort where they were staying, and Red wasn't moving much in her kennel. They checked her again at the resort.
"You could see in her eyes she wasn't right," Lee said.
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They made plans to take her to a veterinarian in Grand Rapids the next morning to have her euthanized. But they didn't have to make that trip. Red died in her sleep that night.
She had hunted until the end.
Now, when they come north each fall, Searle and Lee will always hunt that little patch of aspen and alder.
They call it Red's Corner now.
