ANOTHER YEAR PASSED, and Colter was blossoming like a rose. We spent the first week of bird season skulking around in the wet woods of the Northwest, prowling for grouse—ruffed, spruce, and blue—and Colter blew through everything, then leapt dancing on his hind legs howling and yowling after the grouse flushed. A rose? you might say, and I will say, Well, in my mind anyway, he is beautiful. I am convinced he will learn to point those spooky grouse yet. It just may take ten or twelve years.
Point and Superman were yearlings by this time. Point, the speckled little stylish one—sensitive, like a little poet, but built like a bull—was too valuable for me to mess up: I’d borrowed against the children’s college fund to send him to go train with Jarrett.
Superman, however—brown as a fresh deer turd, the same color as his four-year-old brother, Colter—well, let’s just say that I felt comfortable working with Superman myself. There was nowhere to go but up. Superman, like Colter, was the gangly runt of the litter. Unlike Colter, however, who metamorphosed into this strapping muscular brown stud, Superman has remained scrawny, puny, and goofy as well. He reminds me of that disturbing little boy (modeled after Truman Capote) who played Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.
He’s sweet, though, with luminous green eyes and long eyelashes and velvety ears, and he has this incredible kind of Mr. Magoo luck. Though he can’t find birds with his nose, he has an uncanny ability to blunder right across wherever they are hiding, often stepping on them, which terrifies both him and the birds. Already in the first week he had found a huge covey of blues in this fashion, as well as a good young covey of ruffeds. If you don’t get too picky about these sort of things, he has the ability to put meat in the freezer. Some days I had half a notion to try to convert him into a flushing dog, though I could never let Jarrett know about it.
I had permission to hunt five hundred acres of CRP down in the Missouri River country. A friend had assured me it was fantastic, though he’d never hunted it himself. So, dreaming of perfection, a full limit of a mixed bag—doves, Huns, sharpies, maybe even a sage grouse—we headed east toward the ocean of grass seven hours away. Colter and Superman rode in the front with me, nestled together, until Superman developed a vile flatulence and was banished to the back—I could tell the reasoning was incomprehensible to him—while Colter, the old veteran, managed to maintain a tight sphincter, and was allowed to remain in the cab.
The distance, the gulf, between a good dog and a not-so-good dog is vast and immense.
We drove through the night in the bouncy old truck, watching the stars. There were no other cars after midnight, and I savored the loneliness of the black night. We drove with the windows down, to feel the brace of cold air as well as to try to eradicate Superman’s lingering odor.
I don’t mean to bust on him so much, but sometimes his goofiness, his un-birdy-ness, takes my breath away. In his defense, I must say that there was never a happier dog in all of the world.
Once over the Divide, we followed the train tracks east through one small town after another, silo after silo, driving into the September dawn. When we finally stopped for gas, we were in a new country, country we had never hunted before, and there were trucks full of hunters and dogs all around us, also gassing up. The place I had been told to hunt lay another two hours south, and I wondered if all those other hunters were headed there too.
We nodded and said hello to one another, none of us daring to divulge anything more (was it this way for hunters in caveman times?). My dogs have the habit of riding for long distances with their noses smushed up tight against the windshield, squinting out at the country ahead like figureheads on the bows of the old ships. Their damp noses slide this way and that at every little bump in the road; over the course of a long journey, they usually succeed in painting, with smeary, waxy dog-mucus, their entire half of the windshield an opaque scum color. When I took the gas station’s squeegee and applied it first to the outside of my windshield but then, still dripping, to the doggy interior, I could tell that the other hunters were a bit taken aback, and when they asked where I was from, I told them the truth, “Yaak.” I could see by the way they edged away that they had heard of the place, and that they believed what they’d heard about it.
I finished gassing up, paid, and pulled out of the parking lot. Everyone else turned left—heading farther east—while we turned south. They all had Brittanys and Labradors and were grinning as if they knew something but weren’t going to tell us.
You know that a man who will hunt with a dog like Superman—if it can be called hunting—doesn’t really care if he shoots too many birds or not. And that’s what I was thinking, when I crossed the big Missouri, and rolled deeper into new country. A hen pheasant scooted across the road ahead of us, but then changed her mind and came scooting back; a bad decision, a mistake.
Feathers swirled everywhere. I stopped, pulled over, and went back and picked the bird up and put it in the ice chest. When I asked Jim, the owner of the land where we were headed, if there were a lot of birds this year, he said there were so many that people were hitting them on the roads, and I had envisioned using them, if need be, to help fill my limit. I really like the taste of wild game.
I met Jim and Pat, his wife, in town. When eastern Montanans meet western Montanans, we examine and visit with each other like distant cousins—friendly, but curious, certain that just as there must be inescapable similarities between us, so too must there be vast though perhaps hidden differences: all landscapes carving, as they do, with a unique blade, in a unique pattern.
Jim drove me out to the property. He and Pat were living in town for a couple of years, renting the farm out to a young family. It’s Jim’s grandfather’s homestead—an island of the last century hidden out here against the end of this century. Even if the dogs and I didn’t see one bird, it would be yet again an honor and privilege to hunt this old homestead. It’s the kind of place I want my daughters to know about, and I was anxious to bring them out here sometime to see it.
The corrals were ancient weathered wood and iron, pitted by a century of ceaseless, merciless wind, but neatly kept, and within them were well-cared-for sheep and horses and a milk cow. I had let Colter and Superman out to stretch and when two of the woolly sheep wandered over to examine Superman and touched noses with him, he sniffed them, trembled for a moment, then bowled over backward, as if snatched by an invisible stage crook, and scampered back to the safety of the truck. It’s strange how two dogs with the exact same parents can turn out so totally opposite.
Jim showed me the immaculate tack room—oiled saddles, bridles, and halters all in their place and at the ready—and I made the horrible mistake of referring to the little room as a “shed.” There was a pause, but he was courteous enough to say nothing, forgiving my deep-woods ways.
There was one stock tank on the property, and in warm weather—the forecast was for a high in the upper eighties—that’s where any birds would be. I thanked Jim and Pat and headed over that way. There were perhaps five hundred doves clustered around the tank, and the dogs and I stopped and listened to the flapping of their wings as they rose to depart. Colter was such a pro that he paid them no mind—his interest lay solely in the ground game—and neither did Superman, though in his case it may have been because he is constitutionally unable to take notice of any kind of bird.
There was a rusty old pump rising out of the field of CRP, and I worked the handle for a while, until finally a stream of rusty water gushed out. Even after the water cleared up it still had a yellowish tinge, and I looked out over the coulee at the big river below and realized that the water was coming straight from the Missouri. The dogs lapped it up as happily as if it were champagne, and, for some reason I couldn’t explain, it pleased me that my dogs were drinking from the Missouri for the first time.
I put young Superman in his kennel with water in the shade beneath the dropped tailgate of the truck. Carrying a gallon of water in my daypack, I set out across the prairie with Colter, who immediately lit out at greyhound speed, grinning his big grin. The slashings of his casts as he rocketed back and forth in front of me seemed capable of setting the prairie on fire: he sent up a long roostertail of cut and clipped vegetation wherever he went, cutting a swath. Maybe it’s wrong to look ahead to the days, years distant, when he’ll slow down sufficiently to be a good woodland grouse dog. His glory is in the wide-open throttle, and in the moment. I knew I should get over to this big country more often.
A flock of doves exploded from cover and I swung and shot—Colter was already far away—and I was surprised, as always, when one of the birds fell. It was the first time I’d ever hunted doves in Montana, and as soon as I shot I could tell I hit the bird—it swerved, faltered, then flew hard a short distance before settling back to earth, falling upside down like a poorly thrown paper airplane. I do not mean to be disrespectful of my quarry, and later, when I was plucking the scant light feathers from its body (it’s easy to see why the first frost pushes them south), the deep red chest meat, almost like that of a deer or an elk, bespoke a heroic endurance.
I called Colter back in and he helped me find the dove. He pointed it but wouldn’t retrieve it, wouldn’t even pick it up and mouth it, as he does with pheasants and grouse. As a puppy he used to retrieve, but as he has matured and gained more experience and had more birds killed over him, he’s done it less and less. For a long time it bothered me, but I learned to focus on his talents, not his shortcomings—and I have come to see that he considers retrieving beneath his dignity. Colter is so muscled, now in his fourth year—such a stud—that it would humiliate him to spend time ferrying the birds back and forth to me. His job is to find them and pin them; my job is to shoot them. All the other tasks lie somewhere between those two extremes, and if the birds are to be gathered up, plucked, cleaned, cooked and eaten, then that responsibility is going to have to fall to me. He has committed himself to the discovery, pursuit, and pointing of the birds, and to diversify into other aspects of the hunt would reduce the white-hot fury, the headlong nature of what he does best. I picked a pointer, not a retriever. People don’t bellyache because a retriever doesn’t point, do they?
It was too hot to run the bomb-machine more than fifteen or twenty minutes. I stopped and watered him—he was lapping water from my cupped hand, panting, yet impatient to get back to the birds, and I poured water over his broad brown skull and trickled it all down his backbone. The water pooled for a moment between the twin points of his bony haunches, then parted and slid off on either side. He shook enthusiastically, all floppy-limbed in that awkward hound dog way, then set off again, ceaselessly hunting, but I headed him back to the truck, where Superman was snoozing.
Because Colter was drenched and I did not want him nastying up the passenger seat, I made the mistake of putting him in the kennel with Superman. As we drove off over the bouncy road, searching for a new place to hunt, I heard a snarling and tussling, a thumping—a yelp—and when I stopped I saw that Superman had a slash just beneath his eye, from which welled a crescent of blood, bright red in the sunlight. I soothed Superman, but didn’t scold Colter; it was my fault, squeezing him in with the youngster like that.
We hunted again, into the sun, but still couldn’t find any upland birds. I was able to shoot another dove, and began to consider how it would taste fried, with cream gravy.
Back at the truck, I emptied the melt-water from the ice chest over Colter’s head and back. Then I took Superman out onto the prairie for a spin—more to exercise him and expose him to the vastness of space and sky and ground underfoot, than with the hope of finding any birds. Perhaps traveling this landscape will unlock some ancient, hidden message and he will blossom miraculously into even one-tenth the genius that his brother is.
We pressed on, into the heat, with blue sky all around us. Afterward, I hosed him off too, and, bleary-eyed from the all-night drive, we headed to the little town to look for a motel where we could check in and nap in the heat of the day.
On the banks of one of the wide rivers that flows into the Missouri, we found a tourist court kind of place, with twelve little cottages, stark white beneath the still-green murmurings of riverside cottonwoods, set in green lawn with sprinklers whizzing. Wild roses grew all around the cottages, and white picnic tables were set out on the lawn beneath the giant cottonwoods, and the whole place was vacant—we would be the only guests.
The lady at the counter said that the room would be twenty-five dollars, but that there was also an additional charge of five dollars per dog.
“Ahh,” I said, reaching for my billfold, “you’re killing me.”
There was a fan in the room. The windows were open. Superman pranced back and forth, up and down from the floor to the bed and back, like a kid on a trampoline: executing fancy twists and flips over the back of the infinitely more mature Colter. I collapsed onto the creaky old bed, which was so soft and ancient, so spineless, as to be more like a hammock. Colter hopped up and lay down next to me, with his head stretched out on the pillow, and Superman wriggled in and draped himself across both of us—this was clearly his favorite part of the hunt.
Colter sat up and leaned over and licked the wound on his brother’s face, tending to it with great concern, as if having no earthly idea of how it got there in the first place. He looked over at me then, and I studied him back, trying to see across that gulf between us—the one that does not let me understand the gulf within him: his placidness, now, versus his maniacal otherworldliness, when he’s pushing a pheasant, run-and-gun, tearing up the brush, or working his way like a missile toward the ripe scent of sharp-tails.
I cannot fully grasp how he can have two such different lives—one he spends waiting, and then the second, higher, supercharged life into which he ignites every autumn.
He laid his head back down on the pillow with a groan and began to snore. He had made it through the boredom of summer and now he had a partner who was going to take him hunting as much as he absolutely could.
“This is the best time of year, boys,” I said to them, just before I sank into unconsciousness.
Later in the afternoon, into the cool of the evening, we had only a couple of hours of light left in which to work, but they were good hours. Colter took me down into the cattails below the pond where he put up a gaggle of pheasants, one after the other, like a magician producing white rabbits from out of a hat. They were all hens, and it wasn’t pheasant season anyway, but it would be soon, and I could barely stand the wait, anticipating it. One more month.
Still no sharp-tails, and no Huns, either. We took another dove. I didn’t care if we found anything or not. It was just so damn great to be out in such open country with my dogs.
Closer to dusk, pheasants began flying into the CRP for the night—again, strangely, all hens—and when I saw a flock of six scoot across the road in front of us, I stopped and put Superman onto them. Colter wailed and shrieked his disapproval, but it was Junior’s turn. I took Superman right across the path where the pheasants crossed—he lowered his nose to the ground with some interest, as if he planned to dig a hole there—but then he moved forward into the CRP, moving for the first time with a little authority and purpose, though whenever he got too far out from me—twenty yards—he grew nervous and came scooting back in.
Gradually, though, the cones of scent drew him farther and farther out, and with greater strength. In some places he began to false-point—a problem I’d never had with Colter, and which might show a lack of confidence—and sometimes, after false-pointing, Superman would grow nervous and run back and hide behind my legs, peering out first around one leg and then the other, before I was able to coax him back out into the great wide world, and forward.
We pressed on. I could see him gaining confidence as it first began to dawn on him—like coals being kindled by a steady breeze—that the bird was running away from him, that the bird was supposed to be frightened of him, rather than the other way around.
It became a game. He followed the scent in quick, gluttonous casts—swinging hard left, hard right, as if possessed by some fevered vision—and it was a beautiful thing to see, as I ran along behind him. And beyond my joy at the beauty of the sight, there was relief, too. For a year and a half, as I had listlessly trained him on pen-raised birds, and Superman had showed little or no response to them (aside from sometimes stepping on them), I had been wondering more and more if there was something terribly wrong with him: if maybe, tiny as he was, his brain was somehow stunted or undeveloped, as well as his ambition.
Superman was flying above the CRP though, in foxlike leaps and bounds, so that if there were a cape attached to his neck, he would have looked like his namesake. I hurried to keep up with him—with them, dog and pheasant—but it couldn’t be done, and finally I just stopped and laughed and watched them accelerate as if into infinity, relieved that Superman was being born: that the bird, that one bird, was unlocking something in him.
I watched as in the distance he finally wearied and then pinned the bird with a tentative point. He held it, surely unconscious of what he was doing and completely oblivious of my distant, silent approval, doing it only for himself and the bird—it would take me many hunts to work myself into that equation—and from his imprisonment in the truck, Colter howled with indignation. He was not made to be a benchwarmer. I remembered that he, too, was the runt of the litter, but developed into a warrior. It seemed too far a piece of country for Superman to travel, but who knows? He too may get there yet.
The pheasant—a hen—flushed, and Superman held steady and watched it depart, though true to his nature, with an inquisitive, almost philosophical look, rather than the staunch mortal agony with which the Brown Bomber would have watched.
Dusk fell, and, feeling like the richest man in the world—possessing the finest bird dog in the world, and with new pups to train behind that great day, and plenty of years in which to hunt them, and plenty of country in which to hunt them—I called Superman in, and we headed back to the motel.
In the room, I fed and watered the dogs—Colter tried to show Superman the trick of drinking out of the toilet, but Superman was either too slow or too finicky to learn it. I went over to the little restaurant across the river, where I ordered a steak and eggs and pancakes. I could barely stay awake. I didn’t read the paper, didn’t read a book or anything; I just sat there, tired from the drive, and from the miles of walking, and getting older, but not minding it too much, not in bird season; and in terms of time available to me to hunt, and open country, and dog-power, I was flush. How could anyone dare quibble about a little advancing age? And it’s better today than it’s going to be tomorrow, or the next.
When I got back to the room, the dogs, brown twins, were overjoyed to see me. It was a quarter to nine. It felt good not to have spoken to humans almost all day. In five minutes I was asleep, with the dogs strewn all over me as if protecting me. I tried to remember if I ever had the fire about anything the way Colter does for birds, for hunting. There was a moment down in a coulee that day in the heat, even after I had watered and splashed him, he had been gasping so hard from racing up and down the near-vertical walls, that his lungs were pounding inside him like a bellows, and I knew that he would have gladly run himself to death, if I had given him half a chance, half a bit of encouragement to do so.
In two minutes I was asleep.
I dreamed no dreams.
I slept late in the morning. I had intended to be up at five and in the fields at first light, before the day began to warm, but it was almost seven o’clock before I was awakened by the sunlight through the curtains, and through the cottonwoods.
A piece of lemon meringue pie and a cup of coffee for breakfast, and we were out in the field, devouring the autumn. Less than a minute into our first morning run, Colter found a small flock of sharp-tails. He pointed them, one by one—my God, I’ll never get tired of seeing that, never, and as they got up, and flew away clucking and laughing, I had what I thought was a good bead on each one, they looked so large and slow that morning. But I missed, as usual. Colter pretended not to care. The morning was young and still cool.
We headed over to a forty-acre spur of CRP off to the east, where Jim had said we might find sharp-tails. I walked briskly to keep up with Colter’s bold casts. It was a beautiful, awe-provoking thing to see, the way he consumed that little forty: scouring it left to right—catching every molecule of cool scent—in less than ten minutes, maybe less than five. He was like some mythic beast that could eat the world. Two or three hundred acres of CRP would be just right for a warm-up. He ate this forty like a bonbon, and then we turned back into the larger CRP across the road, where, over a small rise, he pointed a rooster. I could see only the top of his bony head, holding staunch.
The rooster flushed, flew north. We turned south, back toward where the sharp-tails were, hoping to find a straggler. Colter stopped on the way and locked up on another bird—I stepped forward and flushed it: a hen pheasant. He held staunch, and I stepped closer, saw a second hen—still he held—and I came still closer, and a third hen flushed, and finally he relaxed his tail, wiggled it to let me know that he’d counted them, and that’s all there were.
While he had been on point, chocolate brown amidst the gold wheatgrass and the bright blue sky, a lone Canada goose had flown overhead, right behind him, looking down at him—not forty feet up and headed, I supposed, for the Missouri below. The goose looked huge in the sky, as large as Colter himself. I was tempted for a moment to direct Colter’s attention to the goose, so beautiful was the sight—Colter had never seen a goose up close before—but I let the goose fly on, silent and unobserved, and we turned and headed off.
Later in the day, once the heat had begun to bake the world, I let Superman out for another practice run, and though he started out tentative again, he warmed once more to the strange lures of scent, and ended up pointing a young rooster. At first I thought it was a false point—the bird would not flush—but Superman would not release. It was the first time he’d been staunch in his life.
In training, on the rare occasion when he’d pointed, he was usually hunched over, with his back arched and his nose to the ground—as if he were preparing to take a dump. Other times he would lie down on his stomach to “point”—but it seemed possible, from this one tensed crouch, anyway, that a style might have been trying to develop.
I finally spied the rooster—too young to fly— beneath the brush. I kicked at the brush, and it scooted. Superman trailed it to the horizon, where he finally lost it in that vast sea, and the heat.
He might make a dog yet. Already, stunted as he is, he was a better dog than I am a hunter. Which, thankfully, is not the point.
Goldfish swirled in the stock pond. Jim had said kids put them in there when he was in grade school, nearly forty years ago. I showed them to Colter, who seemed properly impressed, and we watched them for a while. A dove flew past, and I shot and missed. I never cease to marvel at how such a great dog as Colter ended up with such a dipshit of a hunter. I guess that whoever or whatever decides such things knew that I would love him.
Three more images, from that day:
A young girl, no more than nine or ten, riding a pretty rank horse around and around in a corral surrounded by sagebrush under that blazing sun, while her mother watched. The horse burdened with all sorts of heavy leather saddlery: the sun sapping and gentling the horse. Every time I passed by there, she was walking that horse around the corral under that blazing sun, taking a bit of the feist out of it. A beautiful horse, muscular as a titan, with that balding moon-face that can often mean too much spunk.
A water break, sitting on the tailgate parked out in the middle of nowhere, and kind of glazing out: staring at the ground, the dogs panting in the shade below me. I was watching a grasshopper and thinking how acutely aware I was of how extraordinarily content I was—how happy—and aware, conscious, of the great depth of the happiness. I was feeling the autumn and heat mixed together, watching that grasshopper, and thinking how short and irrelevant everything is: it doesn’t matter who or what you are, or what you accomplish, time is going to level it all to dust almost immediately anyway.
It was a calming, reassuring realization, and I was a little embarrassed by the simplicity of the thought, banal as a greeting card. But I was happy, and beyond happy; at peace. It didn’t matter if I ever did anything worth a damn. It didn’t matter if I ever hit another bird. It was all dust, but God, I was happy.
Colter pointed, then bumped, the biggest flock of sharp-tails I’d ever seen. Easily forty, maybe fifty birds. I thought he had gone over to the pond to get water. I was sitting on the side of a coulee resting. The birds flew right down the coulee past me, and directly overhead, like some kind of miracle. I stood up and started firing—click, click, no shells—fumbled a load in—birds were still passing me in clouds, laughing and cackling—and I swung and fired, missed, took my time and picked out a new one, and fired just as it disappeared over the top of the coulee; my shot struck gray dirt, raised a puff of dust.
More birds were coming. I reloaded, fired at one overhead—missed—then swung on the last passerby and hit it. The bird rose straight up—all the others continued east—and it hung there, hovering, wanting to go on, but unable, before finally settling down along the fence.
I called Colter over to hunt dead. He did, and soon enough found the bird. I had reloaded, and when the bird flushed again, healthy and recovered—flying hard—I shot, missed, shot again, and finally it tumbled. I sent Colter over to fetch it, which of course consisted of his mouthing a few feathers off of it, a kind of laying-claim to it, and then he galloped off to hunt anew.
Our first sharp-tail of the year.
The third thing. Our last run of the afternoon, down in a coulee. We bumped a big buzzing flock of Huns, which must have reminded Colter of his training on bobwhites in Texas. I drew a good bead, picked the bird I wanted to hit, and fired, twice, missing it cleanly—behind it, I supposed, though the shot had felt good and true, and I’d thought I was going to drop one; I’d been confident, for once.
I think Colter felt the same way—that unspoken communication between us so sure and developed that he felt my confidence, and shared, for once, my disbelief, that I had missed.
After I had fired, as we both stared down the coulee in the direction the Huns had gone, an autumn-weary grasshopper sprang up from the sage, rising slowly into the air. Its wings filled with light as the afternoon sun struck it, and strangely, it made no sound. So slow was its illuminated ascent that it looked for all the world like a stray, loose feather rising on an updraft. Colter saw the light-filled grasshopper and took three careful steps toward it—it was still rising—sniffing the air to see if it truly was a feather, wanting to believe it was a feather; and wanting, as ever, to believe in me, despite my many faults.