…I went hunting wild,
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour…
—Wilfred Owen, from “Strange Meeting “
Hunting’s beauty lives wildly between control and chaos. What do you control? How do you deal with chaos?
We have expensive, complicated electronic devices that tell us where our dogs are and track a ridiculous amount of data. They give us a sense of control. We got them because we disliked the chaos of hunting without them. I might argue they allow us to focus more on the beauty of hunting. The liminal.
The dogs are licking their wounded paws. We failed to notice Bloom’s abrasions and Peat’s broken toenail at the quick until it was too bloody late. Both are on the DL now, in the best chukar country I’ve ever seen. It just seems endless. I don’t want to hunt without a dog, so we’re going home early. Spoiled stupid. Poor dogs. We should have done better by them. Running on a golf course every day, we now realize, has not toughened their pads the way the gravel trail we used to live near did. Good to get that learned.
Peat too is a control freak. Bloom’s still figuring out how he feels about retrieving. Rough and labyrinthine at best. I know Peat notices. I winged a bird that both dogs saw hit the ground running. They competed in catching it, which Bloom did, besting Peat in that rodeo, then beelined past me toward Leslie, then away from her, bird clamped hard in his mouth, and then dropped it minus a massive mouthful of feathers and some back skin. Peat watched. A few minutes later Leslie knocked one down and Bloom quickly found it. Heading back up the hill toward Leslie with it, he dropped it a couple times, took it behind a big rock. Soon Peat emerged with the bird, ran straight past Leslie, and brought it to me.
As a pitcher, I could appease my need for control of the game but always failed to realize and appreciate the supreme irony of struggling to throw strikes, which an external force (the freaking ump) controlled. This little nugget of life has, of course, stayed with me. All of it, especially the illusion. Rarely still am I able to see its beauty.
The place we’ve been this week, whose exact location naturally I will not specify, is magical. But most chukar terrain seems that way to me, especially when I’m in it, and it varies dramatically. There’s a lot of beauty in that. But even more, the beauty seems to lie in what all those places afford, with or without lots of birds: a setting for an activity that “mocks the steady running of the hour.” We choose the place but have no idea what will happen, where we’ll go, or how long it will take. It’s the wildest.
