IN THE RAIN, I took Point out into Colter’s cover, a tiny little swamp pocket of aspen and cottonwoods, so dense with mulch and scent that even I could smell birds in there: a place so perfect for grouse that it seemed I could hear them scampering ahead of us across all those leaves. Rotting stumps, pools of water, mushrooms, frost-burned strawberry leaves, pearls of snowberries hanging ripe, autumn red globes of kinnickkinnick, and always, in Colter’s cover, the near-hallucinogenic golds and yellows of the aspen and cottonwood, with their elegant white bark.
When I had first gotten Colter, Tim had taken me into this cover with his great dog Maddie. (Colter had still been too young to make the hunt.) Without meaning to insult the gods of the hunt, or grouse, I had foolishly proclaimed it the most beautiful cover I had ever seen, that the only thing missing from it was a liver-colored pointer, and I told Tim that I could already see brown Colter on point amidst this perfect yellow blaze of foliage. “Colter’s Cover” we always called it, after that: and it was one of only two covers—two out of several dozen—where he never took a bird, and I accept the blame fully, for having mouthed off to the sky.
Point made game quickly, scurrying into the dense brush, and blew a bird out. Running through the upper part of the copse, he was beautiful, flashing young and square-headed through the autumn colors—and then I heard him yelping, caterwauling, as if he was being murdered with an ice pick, but the wails were racing into the distance seemingly at the speed of light, so that I knew he was following another flushed grouse to the horizon.
No yelling. I yelled myself out on Colter. After a while I traveled down into the cedar bottom to retrieve my lost dog and headed back to the truck, heart-whipped.
Walking out, going back through Colter’s cover, we passed a scene of such breathtaking beauty that I had to pause and stare down at it, though it was with a strange and unfamiliar distancing, a disassociation from beauty observed. Amidst the black charcoal of an old burn crept the bright frost-red leaves of wild strawberry plants, tangled up with the rain-wet yellow leaves of cottonwoods. It had finally gotten here, as it always did: autumn. Without Colter, though, the beauty was only skin-deep, and I realized how addicted I had become to him, and his talent, his burning heart. I could still recognize the beauty, but there was that kick missing to it, an electricity. I was not wired to Colter anymore, nor he to me, and I had never realized so fully—or rather, so consciously, so analytically—how much the beauty of these woods depended on him.
I stared at the beautiful colors on the surface—red, yellow, char-black—and breathed the autumn scents, but I could not dig deeper, by myself. It was simply and only beautiful—nothing more. I called to Point and we went on home.