Mouthful of Feathers

You can post all the hashtags you want, but please knock it off with the geotagging and mapping bird hunting spots. Social media hotspotting is not cool man. Name a state. Name a region. Name a large city with a good BBQ restaurant. But don’t name spots. I know it’s not just hunters. It happens […]

A chickadee, somewhere off in the conifers. A light breeze from the west now, and the dog out into it, working atop old snow.Last week, he was here, a flash of gray like a fleeing thought, a mirage in the timber and the gun up, swinging. The sudden wham and waves of sound from down-canyon […]

It is not the knee, tender only occasionally now. It is not the ankle and the winces it brings. It is not, even, the depth-of-darkness night awakenings when I replay the points and misses, hits and retrieves. Instead it is the scent of sage on a setter’s coat. Perhaps only an olfactory memory. It is […]

You do not notice breathing until it is difficult. Then it is all you notice. Ragged breaths that come from the stomach up into a chest that once bellowed air as easily and reflexively as one might blink. The old dog nearly died on the bathroom floor of a Days Inn. Imagined carrying his cooling […]

By Blaine Peetso: http://www.theborealist.com Wanted: Easy Work Old age pensioner willing to work for cash/food under the table as long as the job is easy and hours are short.  No big wide open country or ultra dense bush.  Will need plenty of water breaks. Will not play games with the merchandise (keep away, tug-of-war, etc) […]

Up north of the house, tight against the highway to Opheim, it looked good last year. Tall weeds and snowberry in the gullies stringing off a patch of uncut wheat. A stackyard of old round bales and shoulder high kochia. You’d have to go easy in there, listening for the dog, watching out for hidden […]

One of life’s maxims is that poop is always worth a laugh. My 8-year-old stepdaughter wrote this to me on a card: “Remember Buddy, poop is always funny.” Consider Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Along Came Polly: “I just sharted.” Evidence of the claim. Funny at 8. Funny at 58. We have a dog that […]

In the early-morning silence of a Sunday morning, the slow drip of the coffee seemed loud. My fuzzy, pre-coffee brain tried to make sense of the computer screen.  $240? For a license? In my home state? That doesn’t seem right. It seems pricey. In fact, it seems ridiculous. It’s been a long time since I’ve […]

The last big trip is done. The take–a pile of roosters hatched and nurtured on Kansas mixed prairie–is aging in cool storage. There’s plucking to be done, but not for a few days, maybe a week. The strength of walking 12, 13, 14 miles in a day has not faded. The dogs have recovered and […]