RUNNING FREE
Young dogs are balm for the cynical soul
As all writers do, I have a computer file full of snippets and passages from stories that— due to any number of reasons (but mostly the dreaded word count limit)—didn’t make the final story cut. The passage below is from one such story I recently penned for the July/August issue of Shooting Sportsman. With a hard 2,500-word limit, these extraneous paragraphs had to go, but I liked them and so I saved them for re-write and inclusion in another story sometime. Until then, I thought I’d share them here as my belated offering for National Dog Day, which I missed a couple days ago.
“…Zuma had finally started putting things together earlier that season in Montana, and witnessing her performance that morning reminded me of why a dog in motion on the prairie is the most beautiful poetry in all of bird hunting.
And once started, I didn’t want that poem to end, so Zuma and I walked all morning amongst the cholla and prickly pear, the bluestem and fragrant sumac, hoping to get her first scaled quail, and my first of the season.
We failed to find scalies in any of the areas where I had found them in the past. It was a little surprising, but not wholly unexpected. They are here, but scaled quail densities are always going to be lower this far east relative to the heart of their range farther west and southwest. Some years you find them, some years you don’t.
But what we did find that day were bobwhites; more of those tough, ungentlemanly western bobs than I had seen in years past. And if there’s anything that can soften the blow of not finding blues, it’s the absolute joy of finding plenty of bobs. And finally being able to hit them.
My lousy shooting from the day before at least somewhat gone, we found birds low in the brushy flatness of the dry lakebed where once fish were hoped to be. We found them on the rugged slopes and benches of the draws above, and we found them in the riparian jumble of the long-dry creek, which had failed to ever produce a lake.
It is the moment just before the flush—when birds remain mere tendrils of hope floating across a dog’s nose—which I always seem to remember most vividly; that point at which dog and grass and sky merge into an achingly beautiful singularity that hangs in the electric space between anticipation and action as I walk into the moment, trembling expectation sharpening the air all around me. What magic it is.
By the time I put Zuma back in the box later that morning we had enough birds in the bag to call the morning a success. That afternoon Abbey, my grizzled veteran, got her chance, and—as she always does— she did not disappoint, but it was the memory of Zuma that day which will stay with me.
No, we didn’t get her that first scaled quail, but I have always found such immense solace in the unconditional exuberance and joy and happiness of watching a pup hunt, and come into its own. It is infectious, a balm against the crust of cynicism that life invariably forms on your heart.
Watching a young dog I love so dearly running across the prairie free and wild, or bouncing through a meadow of tall grass in the golden light of morning makes me realize that—for all the hurt and pain and disappointment and lies and dishonesty that people can inflict on each other as naturally as we breathe—the only time a dog will ever hurt you as deeply as a human is when they die.
Tomorrow we would break camp and head west, but that night, under an impossibly brilliant, starry night sky, I sat in my camp chair with a gin and tonic, contemplating the absolute rightness of such moments as these, in such places as this.”