Chapter One

Where does a great story begin? We all have stories to tell. I have become a believer that God puts us in different places in this world to live a story, figure out how He became involved in it all, and finally to share all that with others. It is called our living witness. It is our life. We all have such a story—some of us just take a lot longer to figure it out. Some of us take longer still to get to the point where we can begin to share it with others.

During the 1970s, I was an outdoor writer for the Lincoln, Nebraska, newspapers. Not long out of college and just finished with a two-year stint in the military, my young wife and I settled into our new life just a few hours from our native home in central Iowa.

As an outdoor writer, I had opportunities to interview and spend time with a number of people in the outdoor-recreation world. Outdoor writers write about the great outdoors—hunting, fishing, camping, and the like. It is a pretty nice job most of the time. My job basically allowed me to do things most people have to take vacations to enjoy. I was paid for it. Despite the facts that I was always looking for a story and generally carrying around bulky cameras for illustrations, it was a lot of fun to write about people enjoying the out-of-doors. I made a lot of friends over those years.

Of particular fascination to me were the field-trial-dog trainers and what they could do with their dogs. It amazed me how those retrieving dogs could be directed by a whistle and hand signals from what seemed to be hundreds of yards away. It was delightful to wa