Beauty in the Sadness of Ending

I once read that all beautiful things must have a known end, because their true beauty is found not just in desire, but in the knowledge of their fleeting impermanence and the impossibility of possessing them. 

I have no idea if that’s true or not. But I know I’ve been chasing birds and dreams across this same piece of ground for a quarter-century now, and it’s still as gorgeous as the day I first set foot on it.

I wish I could say the same about myself.

Time etches even the hardest of what we are, and this past year time etched me deeply, permanently. I dug graves both real and metaphorical, and I buried much of what used to be me in the cold earth of the past.

Every shovelful of dirt I tossed atop those ghosts hurt, as it always does, and so I mourned their passing in the only way I know: I fled, into the silence and emptiness and beauty of long walks in lonely country, never really knowing where, exactly, I was going, just following the meandering track of the dogs and my own wind-scoured heart, my life-scarred soul.

I knew it would end, of course. Maybe it is true after all, that to be beautiful all beautiful things must come to an end.

And now this beautiful, lonely, lovely poem of a season, a season of days and miles and months of running away and running toward, a season in which both the pup and I went from being one thing to being something else entirely, has brought me here, to the last day.

To the end.

Metamorphosis tends to happen quickly only if you are a caterpillar, and for both this little pointer and myself, that transformation has been much longer, measured in footsteps through grass, long runs across prairie and sand-sage, rimrock and cholla, in sunrises and covey rises, a warm sleeping bag on cold mornings, and triumphs small and large, leavened always with mistakes and the learning those mistakes bring, for both her and myself.

And on this precious final day; this last, fleeting, beautiful chance to walk and run and be — to touch one last time, if only for a moment, the essence of who and what you really are at soul’s deep core — I decide to leave the other dogs behind and bring only her.

We are raw, both of us. She in her wide-eyed innocence and puppy trust in the world, I in my life-battered lack of both. I know I may or may not shoot a bird over her, but that’s not why I brought her. If I wanted a veteran stone-cold bird finder, I would have brought her older sister.

I don’t need to kill birds today. I don’t need one last perfect hunt where everything plays to script like a well-written story. I’ve written many such stories.

No.

What I need today is the unscripted, unpredictable joy and exuberance of happy imperfection.

What I need today is not expectation, or some arbitrary measure of success, but a reminder that I can still smile, still laugh, still not give a damn about anything other than the moment I inhabit right now.

And for me, nothing accomplishes that better than being alone with a young dog in big country on a day such as this: A lonely, beautiful day that whispers of smiles before endings.

I have a theory that the real reason we hunt with dogs is not the pursuit of birds, but the opportunity to subconsciously — if only for a short while — live out the wildness and freedom of our dogs vicariously by watching them flow so fluidly across the landscape.

And she’s a runner, this one, with bigger wheels and a longer gait than her sister, and I want to see that spirit and speed and unchained joy on display. I need it.

 So I have brought her here, to this place of time and memory for me.

A long time ago I wrote an essay titled “Home Covey.” It was about this place and a long-ago dog.

I’ve been walking this ground since I was young and dumb enough to think of the age I am now as old. That’s how years work, I guess.

I’ve seen a lot here.

As a young man, I saw my first prairie chicken on this ridge.

As it turned out, that was an equinox of sorts, a hinge upon which the past and future teetered, because that was also the last prairie chicken I ever saw in this country, though I still hear the booming of their ghosts.

Each year in November I slip into the first light of morning to sit and wait, and I will quietly shoot a prairie buck as he walks across the grass-covered, gypsum-laced red clay soil walked by countless generations before him.

But killing is becoming more difficult for me these days, and I suppose that someday soon I will watch my last sunrise from this ridge with a rifle in my hand.

I once watched a harrier dancing in the sky above the grass, the slow, flapping cadence of its wingbeats no match for the quail it was pursuing.

And now I am here with the pup, hoping but not hoping to shoot a bird for her out of the descendants of the quail I once shot for that long-ago dog.

That dog is buried a few hundred yards away from here, her bones entwined in the roots of prairie grass so her ghost can still hear the whistle of those birds.

This deep into February I rarely actually shoot quail, preferring to let the dogs run and the quail fly. I like to believe they sense the promise of spring and warmth and redemption as much as we do.

That makes me keenly aware that with each bird shot, what I hold in my hand is not just a bit of feather and flesh, but a future denied, for both them and my own bird-chasing interests.

So I hunt them gently, these survivor birds, because I recognize something of myself in them. They’ve been through it. So have I. So have we all.

You leave a lot out there in the grass, and sometimes you have to turn your back on what you thought you wanted to be and instead walk toward what you know you are.

Because you find a lot out there in the grass, too.

Sylvia Plath once wrote that she didn’t know what it felt like to not have deep emotions. Even when she feels nothing, she feels it completely.

For a better or worse that has always been me.

And it has cost me much.

I never could reinvent myself without trauma. It builds and builds until something inside of me shatters, and what I become is what I can make of the jagged pieces of what I once was. I know I will never fit those pieces back into what they were, so I have no choice but to make them into something new.

And what I build myself back into, time after time after time, is this: A man, a dog, a place, and a moment. And sometimes — but not always — the promise of a bird to complete the arc.

We all dance on that knife edge between the darkness and the light. And life is never the story you think it’s going to be. But it’s your story.

And moments like this have always been mine.

Somehow, they put me back together.

Anxious to go, she whines at my side. I give her neck a scratch and lean my face into her ear to whisper what I have whispered to her all season long.

Then I release her, release myself, and in an instant, we are gone.