Mouthful of Feathers

In the flung-out.

It is the land.

This place of bitter winds west, then north, then south, then east. This place of sagebrush taller than the running lights on a diesel one-ton. This place of clattering shale. This place of cold stream in a thirsty land, clear water that nurtures cutthroat left over from a great inland sea. This place of high mare’s tail clouds and thin blue tint. This place of rawness where the land itself is the lure, the challenge, the reason.

You go there for the land. It reduces your old knees to pain. It reduces your herd of dogs to hide and bone and sinew and honed muscle and bleeding pad. It tears the paunch from beneath your forty-thousand dollar four wheel drive. It grinds the heel and toe from your three hundred dollar boots. It abrades and scrapes and lacerates the stock of your one-thousand dollar shotgun. And you go.

This is the place you dream of when, at long last (for some) and too soon (for you) the season finally closes. This is the place that you have captured on camera and put on computer so–late winter–you can see those haunts again and again as the screen-saver at your work place folds through an autumn’s memories.

Only part of why.

You remember the stealthy creep of Sage in the sage, birds ahead, heart racing, finger at safety, waiting, waiting for that flush. You remember thinking: swing on one bird, pull the trigger. You remember one side of your face turning raw and frozen in that tear-jerking west wind. You remember the music of dinner-plate shale. You remember the taste of Kentuck bourbon, Dominican cigars. You remember laughter around the wall-tent woodstove. You remember the sound of wind stroking the desert stream willows and the pop of juniper on the fire. You remember the “whit too, whit too, whit too” of a fleeing chukar with the wind at his back and the Rebel rally cry from atop the far canyon wall. The smell of sage beneath boot and tire. The feel of an artifact from another time and another people in the palm of your hand. The deep glossy shine of obsidian. The hope in your heart when you cut new chukar tracks in old snow.

But most of all, you remember the land.

Dance floor of the Devil.

There is a game I play not far from where I lay my head each night. The game is the game of dogs and birds and big canvas. It is a game of otherworldly noses that belong to some higher order, and shotgun shooting that gets no better than my own, for my own is the only gun in the game. The noses pull the dogs, the dogs pull me. Sometimes, on the state piece, I take all four setters. Other times, I take just one. I never play this game alone, for there is always a canine in there, always one of the partners.

I load the old yellow Ford with a dog kennel or two, jugs of water, a dog dish, gun in the gun rack. There’s something special about driving an old F250 out hunting, something antique and retro, something 1970s 8-track, something manual, and honest. We (it is always we, not I, when I hunt with the Setter People) park near the old Van Sant place. Sometime in the previous century, the Van Sants looked out across a hard-bitten Montana mountain/prairie and said, Screw it. Can’t pay the taxes. Let the state have it. So, now, being a Montana tax payer, I have it.

And the setters follow their noses into the wind, pivoting and loping, metronoming, and wind-drinking. For a while, it is this rhythmic gambol, with a fluidity as practiced as the hand of a house painter on brush. Then, en masse, as if they share one nose and not four, they turn to the wind, noses high, tails a bit stiffer and they pull in one direction, forgetting the side-quarter, zeroing in on something only they know, something that exists only in their order, their rank, their world. Not mine. I can only follow, walking fast, then trotting, watching. They sneak now, tense muscle, setting down, slinking, as I imagine their kind did when the weapons of take were the nets of peasants, not autoloaders or double guns. And there it is, that minute, those precious seconds of memory-burn: all four dogs on point, a picture in the mind, burnt deep with the excitement slamming through my soul and right to the very tip of the right index finger that will push the safety off, and pull the trigger. All in one motion.

In a burst of chirp and wing, the entire covey is aloft and I swing and swing and swing. The wind carries the birds and the gun barks twice and two Huns go down and two of the dogs are on them, playing their own game of keep-away from the other dogs and I have two at hand. They are spun of soft feather and autumn hues, their feathers rippled like the brush of an autumn wind on a desert tank, the orange of old pumpkin at their beak and dome. I heft their soft warm in hand, thinking maybe I’ll keep a skin for tying soft hackles, and praise the dogs.

They are already gone.

Out in it, following the wake of the covey, the remaining dozen or so birds. The game must go on.

–TR

We do this dance each year and not often enough: a trio of gaited fast-moving horses, a brace of gun dogs, a sprawl of wide country. Shotguns in scabbards, bird dogs out in it, horses mounted. We ride.

The first point is right near the truck and trailer and she is on them, with her male partner backing. She is always on them first, it seems. Ninety-five percent of the time, it is the female, that rare talent. And when she doesn’t find them first, she always honors, always. But to the first covey, a burst of Huns and a bark of shotgun. Over the next hill they flew and after the shots, we mount again and ride over that hill, searching blind.

Where did they go? They were cupping their wings like teal stooping to decoy when last we saw them, but where they went, we do not know.

We grid the grass, sweeping one way, then another, for horseback your energy does not get exhausted by the endless plod of boot. Instead, you can cover the country, turn back, and cover it all again. And there they are: the covey and this time it is your turn to watch and hold the horses and the shotgun barks again.
You decide to find another covey, giving this one a break, for you have taken enough and one must always leave some “for seed.”
So you ride. In your saddlebags you carry old orange juice jugs filled with water and you stop occasionally and water hard-panting canines and then you ride on. The dogs vacuum up the country, running big, running hard and you cover it all and then there’s another point, and it’s your turn to shoot.
“Here give me the reins.”
And you walk in, loading the gun and moving to the point and the birds get up and you single one out and pull the trigger, then move to another as that one falls and then it’s “Dead bird. Dead bird.”
The dogs find the birds and bring them in and you mount again and find a new covey.

As the day draws down and the dogs with it, you have found four big coveys over a reach of wide ground that it would take you two days to hike across. Afoot, you would maybe run one covey down and then be done, spent. Ahorseback, and you are fresh.

You are out of dog though, for their lope has slowed to trot and their range has gone from the horizon to just a few hundred yards. Except for her. She keeps going. Somehow. How?

Drive. A lust for the wide open. A beckoning to know what is over the next hill. A whispered promise of game before bird dog and joie de vivre. That is how.