The Prize at the End: Twinkies, NAVHDA, and a Bird Dog Named Aldo
Within days of moving into our house, just five minutes from my parents’, the deliveries began.
Boxes. Sacks. Crates. Dump-truck loads of I-thought-you-might-want-this.
My parents had discovered that homeownership came with storage, and that my storage could become their storage. A great-aunt’s lampshade arrived. Then my youth-league baseball bat. Then various objects I had not known were missing because I had not remembered they existed.
One afternoon, I opened the door to find my father on the stoop with a sack in each hand.
“Here’s these,” he said. “I’ve got some more in the car.”
I accepted the sacks with the gratitude of a man receiving property he had already managed to live without. I set them in the foyer and turned toward the car.
Aldo was only a few months old then and had appointed himself inspector of every delivery that crossed the threshold. He would have made a terrible customs officer. Everything got through. Nothing was quarantined. Not one item was returned to sender.
This shipment, however, warranted closer examination.
Before I crossed the threshold, my father began to giggle. Behind me, Aldo’s little tail hammered the floor.
I turned around. He had already breached one of the sacks.
“Oh yes,” Dad said. “I left those in there as something of a surprise. It seems Aldo found the surprise.”
Aldo emerged with a plastic-wrapped cylinder of golden sponge cake and vanilla cream.
A Twinkie.
In the time it took me to walk three steps, he had inspected the shipment, identified the only cargo of value, opened the box, and made his selection. He had never seen a Twinkie. He had never tasted a Twinkie. Nothing in his brief life could have taught him what was inside that wrapper.
But while Aldo may have been a poor customs officer, he had the nose of a smuggler.
I cannot tell you why I did it. I do not recall giving Aldo another Twinkie after that day in the foyer, but something compelled me to stop at a gas station on the way to our first NAVHDA test and pick up a double pack. Perhaps I thought it would make a fitting reward if the wind blew in our favor and Aldo performed well enough to earn a Prize I. Whatever prompted the idea, a double pack was waiting in the truck.
Aldo completed his first Natural Ability Test that day. It was also the first NAVHDA test either of us had ever participated in. He earned a Prize I and so there was a Twinkie for the dog and another for his handler.
At Aldo’s next test later that year, we stood in the parking lot waiting to hear the running order when my friend and training mentor approached with a few reassuring words about the day ahead.
“Oh, and if all goes well,” he said, “I have this for you guys.”
He produced a double pack of mint-condition Twinkies.
A tradition was forming.
Aldo earned another Prize I that day, and the Twinkies were awarded accordingly.
When Aldo ran the Utility Preparatory Test in 2024, the terms of the arrangement had become clear. Prize I meant Twinkies. Anything less did not. Aldo did not prize that day, and no Twinkies were awarded. The tradition had standards.
We did not test at all in 2025. That year was given over to Aldo’s health, first to lingering complications from his eye injury and then to an autoimmune disease. There were appointments, treatments, uncertainties, and long stretches when the goals I had once set for him seemed far less important than having him well enough to remain himself. Testing could wait.
When we returned to it in September 2026, we were no longer preparing for Natural Ability. Aldo was entered in NAVHDA’s Gun Dog Test. I knew better than to confuse it with the most demanding tests NAVHDA offers. But it was the test before us, and it had taken us years to reach it.
We attended clinics and more NAVHDA training days than I can now neatly separate in memory. Between them came our self-study, conducted at home and on my in-laws’ farm with check cords, training birds, and the usual succession of problems that appeared solved on Tuesday and returned fully restored by Saturday.
There were birds galore. There were considerably fewer straight lines of progress. Some days suggested we were ready. Others suggested that Aldo and I had recently met. Still, the work accumulated. A steadier dog emerged from it and, slowly, a more capable handler. By September, whatever happened on test day, it would not be for lack of preparation.
Rain pattered against the roof of the hay barn as the scores were read. When Aldo’s Prize I was announced, I cried.
The score belonged to one day, but the tears belonged to the years that had brought us there. They belonged to the clinics and training days, the birds and long drives, and all those hours on the farm. They belonged to the year we had given over to Aldo’s health, when another test seemed less important than getting another season with the dog himself.
Years earlier, a Twinkie had been a joke waiting in the truck. It was still a Twinkie. It just had considerably more work behind it.
The tradition has wandered beyond the testing field. On the drive home from our final hunt of each season, Aldo and I stop and sit together on the tailgate, sharing one more. I reminisce about the season behind us, romanticizing its smallest moments and exaggerating its grandest.
I seldom get very far.
By my second bite, Aldo has usually finished his and stretched that long neck toward my face, ready for seconds.
This year, however, that end-of-season Twinkie is still waiting. It is only October, and we have a few months of hunting ahead of us before the season closes and Aldo and I take our customary place on the tailgate.
There is also Amos to consider.
He has not yet discovered Twinkies. For now, that knowledge remains his brother’s alone. But at the end of Amos’s first hunting season, I expect there will be a golden sponge cake waiting for him, too. Next spring, we will enter our first Natural Ability Test together, and I hope there will be another double pack in the truck.
One for the dog and one for his handler.
Provided, of course, that we earn them.
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