Not just for the birds

Blog

  • Gyre

    Gyre

    A year ago we said our final goodbye to Angus, stroking him as the pentobarbital dimmed his eyes, sweet boy reposed in the back of the Jeep now owned by the man and woman who bred him. A few weeks ago, on our final day as residents of chukar country, knowing later that evening we’d be mired in the chaos of packing a 26-foot moving van and saying goodbye to people and landmarks ethereal, we rose early and took one last drive along 71 to Brownlee Summit and up our favorite road leading to the ridge we’d spent a decade marveling at Angus’s prowess as our partridge partner. With Peat scampering across biscuitroot and the 9-week-old Bloom, Angus’s great nephew, romping obliviously through greenup that — long before the season opens without us in a few months — will shine gold, we released Angus’s ashes into the biting southeast wind.

    I still haven’t cried. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

    Now, when it’s almost dark I look twelve miles across the Strait at a lighthouse whose beacon seems on a 4-second circuit. I need to learn about lighthouses. In addition to the beach, we’ve been walking on logging roads behind our house, seemingly endless miles of meandering, extremely well-maintained gravel corridors mostly through dense stands of alder, fir, hemlock, and cedar. Steep mostly, and the occasional clearcut. In places ferns. Salmonberries about to form. Occasionally a spot looks briefly walkable off-road, but mostly it’s either impenetrable vegetation or the nuclear winter of stumps, dirt, roots, rocks, and slash that define a clearcut long after the blinds go up.

    The other day some big birds flapped a startled retreat near Peat, who got electric. I saw one land in a tree, and it acted like — and was big enough to be — a blue grouse. Without binoculars, though, I couldn’t positively ID it, and it bugged me for the rest of our walk that it might only have been a giant pigeon. I need to learn the birds here.

    So yes, you could say I’m missing some things about the high desert. I feel for the dogs, but today — finally — we finally fenced (mostly) our yard so we can all sigh relief to forego the dozen daily team roping outings with tangled leashes in a vain effort to monitor Bloom’s bladder. I think he’s pissed inside more than 50 times. Just now he puddled his crate, again. Follows my slow learning.

    Adjustment. It will take time. And patience. We feel blessed but need a little reminding which isn’t hard when we look up. And I’m thinking about Angus more these days for some reason.

  • Peat Won

    Peat Won

    Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita…

    About halfway through his life, Peat has finally realized his incessant hope for a sibling who’ll play with him.

    It took less than a week. In Peat’s five full years with Angus, Angus rarely deigned even to humor Peat’s attempts to play. Peat never stopped trying, but whether it was self-respect, a religious devotion to his own dignity, or simply disinterest, Angus wouldn’t give Peat the time of day.

    Peat treated Bloom that way for a couple of days. Then, each day I could see the ice melt a little. This morning, Mothers Day, the dams are down. Peat and Bloom have been playing for several hours now, the older dog adjusting his energy and speed to cater to Bloom’s littleness. It’s beautiful to watch. Just a moment ago, Leslie put Bloom in his crate for a rest. Peat found me in the office, packing stuff for our impending move. He rubbed his head on my face, hard. He was telling me something.

  • Bloom One

    Bloom One

    Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

    — James Joyce, Ulysses

    Related by blood both to Angus and Peat, Bloom, finally, like the spring, has arrived.

    It’s amazing our capacity for forgetting. The sudden shift of frame a puppy brings: Peat’s now the mature, even stately, one. I expected the butt-hurt, but not so much the kindness. He wants to, but isn’t sure he should, dote on Bloom. He’s on his way. But just the day before we got Bloom, Peat, age six, snagged and ate an entire extra-large Meat Lovers pizza.

    Sioux is Peat’s father, and also Merci’s father, and Merci is Bloom’s mom. Custer, Angus’s nephew, is Bloom’s dad. Bloom is calmer by several furlongs than Peat was, and that I still remember. Leslie is doing her damnedest to be Bloom’s mother, and I’m trying to take a back seat. It’s wonderful to glimpse in Bloom the distant memory of Angus. He has that steady, rocking gait, already discernible in the rotund germ of his body. We weren’t sure it was such a good idea to be getting a puppy right now, but he’s been a welcome distraction from the horror of packing for a major move. Small packages. Goodness.

  • Sea Change

    Sea Change

    appointed places set in motion like seasons. We are like salmon
    swimming against the mutation of current to find
    our heartbroken way home again, weight of red eggs and need.

    — Gloria Bird, (Spokane), from “Images of Salmon and You”

    I grew up on the Pacific. 21 years ago I moved to Idaho. I thought I’d work and live to a riper age here than it appears I will. We’re moving closer to the salt, lucky to have found work, but leaving the easy access to chukar we’ve enjoyed for so long. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sad to imagine next opening day far away from the high desert. It’s been the best part of each year for more than two decades now. I won’t get nearly the same number of days in the field bitching about medusahead, seeking jouissance through the sight of a pointing Brittany’s ears barely visible above the bunchgrass just below the ridgeline. Inflections or innuendos? There are lots of ways to look at this. Most of them are good.

    So we have to move, sell the house and shop we’ve caressed and the soil we’ve cursed while praying for sprouts (let me know if you’re interested!). Never in my wildest dreams, before I moved to Idaho, did I think I’d live on 5 acres with a view of 5 mountain ranges, where I could hit a 4-iron across my property, or where we could let our dogs run around and eat all the horsepoop they could and not worry they’d get flattened by a Hummer. We’ll miss the nearby Weiser River Trail where our dogs’ pads get an almost year-round, traffic-free conditioning, complete with quail and grouse and turkeys (and the occasional bear, mink, and otter). The brewery will get packed up, too, and I’ll miss that until we can — at some unknown point — take it out of storage.

    A good home for a bunch of years
    The sky’s the thing here, even though it’s only Idaho
    We’ll miss this view
    So will Peat

    Chukar Culture will continue. I keep thinking of Frank Zappa’s gem, “Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny.” I don’t know how that connects, but it does. Maybe it means what I want to post here will smell funny for those who’ve enjoyed (or tolerated) our weird diet of chukar-scented prose. Fishy, maybe? Leslie hopes to head east with the dogs often to look for birds (hopefully not in the same way seen in Guterson’s East of the Mountains). And we’ll have the new pup, Bloom, to work into the mix, which is very exciting and promises to provide some interesting narratives.

    Bloom?

    In the meantime, we pack and strategize and plan and hope and argue and make up and hike and walk and run and fret and eat and drink and look for places to live up there (there aren’t many, sort of like here). Just so you know.

  • Dreams

    Dreams

    I can’t imagine being an insomniac; sleep has never been a problem for me. Almost every night like clockwork Bob wakes up around 2:30 or 3 and turns on the bedside lamp and starts reading a book and will read for at least a couple of hours. Most nights, I’ll wake up, glance at him and roll over and go back to sleep, but last night I woke up and stared at him in the glow of the light. I squinted to see what he was reading because it’s usually something different each night. He was reading a book of poems by Wallace Stevens. He turned off the light and said, “I remember the poem.” I said “What are you talking about?” He then started reciting the poem out loud and it ended with the words:

    Of the January sun; and not to think
    Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
    In the sound of a few leaves,

    Which is the sound of the land
    Full of the same wind
    That is blowing in the same bare place

    For the listener, who listens in the snow,
    And, nothing himself, beholds
    Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

    I whispered to him so that I wouldn’t wake up Peat who was nestled in between us still sleeping. “That’s a really lovely poem, thanks for sharing.” I tell him goodnight for the second time and I toss and turn and try to get back to sleep and start thinking of frost, the boughs of pine-trees crusted with snow and junipers shagged with ice and spruces rough in the distant glitter. I start thinking about how much I miss being on the mountain, so I start retracing my footsteps, my path up and down, one slow step at a time, the upland version of counting sheep I suppose, and think about a season that went by so fast that it almost seems like it never happened. I turn over one last time and reach over to stroke Peat on his back. I can hear him sigh, and then I fall asleep and start dreaming.

    I dream of zigzagging through miles of golden bunchgrass, lichen covered rocks, and dense Antelope bitterbrush and sagebrush forests so thick where sometimes I’d lose track of Bob and Peat. I dream of traversing huge wide open landscapes and the unknowable vastness of it all, and creeping across steep scree slopes while trying not to slip, and how it always seemed that Peat would point on just the other side of a barbed wire fence that I’d have to cross over or crawl under. I dream of those hot and smoky and super dry early season conditions where I ran out of water a couple of times and that covey of chukar that busted wild over my head and we didn’t even know it until we got home and saw the photo. I dream of borrowing beautiful young Custer and how much fun and exciting it was to hunt with two dogs again and also to hunt with Peat’s dad, Sioux, the Mouritsen family, and other Sunburst Brittanys.

    I dream of trudging through knee-deep snow covered with hoarfrost just to get to the top of the ridge and not finding any birds after all the hard and painful work just to get there. I dream of those staunch points and retrieves, and missed shots because my fingers were so bitterly cold to the bone that I couldn’t take the safety off when the birds busted. There is also in my dreams that somber exhilaration when everything finally does come together. I dream of Bob finding a matching set of deer antlers that are such an amazing part of nature, and on another hunt seeing a Peregrine Falcon cruising overhead just before it swooped down and carried off that chukar Peat was pointing. I dream of hunting in late November when the sun sets so early and seeing the pink alpenglow on the distant mountains and how I was so happy and relieved, still over a mile from the pickup, that Bob was the one who’d packed a headlamp in his hunting pack .

    I dream about busting through the thick brush in a deep draw and being tripped, tangled and caught by brambles and branches, and on so many hunts in December and January sliding on my butt on the icy, slick, and muddy slopes and watching Bob do the same thing.

    I dream about the old rattlesnake skins on the mountain left behind like ghosts. I dream about those yellow shotgun shells Bob so lovingly made for me with just a wee teaspoon of Angus’s ashes carefully put inside each one so I could spread his ashes in all of my favorite hunting spots. And the favorite thing I dream is how, just before going to sleep after a day on the mountain, the sweet but spicy and bitter smell of sagebrush lingers on Peat’s fur and which I inhale when I kiss and bury my face in his head and neck.