Not just for the birds
"The road to Neah Bay is serpentine, a thin twist of wet double-yellow-lined gray. It flirts for twenty miles with the edge of cliffs that seem to stand at the mercy of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and its wide swath of soon-to-be Pacific Ocean. Mapmakers mark it as scenic when it would be …
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 …
If you hike in the springtime, especially with a dog, you will get ticks. If you aren't vigilant in finding and removing them, you might pay a very high price.
I saw this on Facebook the other day and it made me cry. I'm not sure if that's saying much since I cry (when I'm not enraged) at parallel or crooked lines. I somehow developed a soft spot for Jimmy Stewart when I was a kid. I don't really know much about him, but he …
"Her name is Rosie", the old man that was camped near us with Florida license plates told me as his dog walked over to me. Rosie, was an overweight black lab with gray on her face and eyes clouded over with glaucoma. "Come on Rosie, don't bother her," he yelled in her direction. I yelled …
This final Sunday of a marvelous chukar season finds us all, for the first time this season, called to something other than hunting. Leslie and I, forced to take a sick weekend, are watching the growing covey of quail scarf corn while the dogs get an unprecedented seventh straight day of no exercise. These diluvial …
My dog does not care where heat comes from, but he cares ardently that it come, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical, for when I rise in the cold black pre-dawn and kneel shivering by the hearth making a fire, he pushes himself blandly between me and …
UPDATE 10/21/19: I'm participating in Boise's storytelling institution "Story Story Night" on Tuesday, October 29th, for its "Starry Story Night" event, which weaves together six storytellers' narratives on a theme related to hunting. My part is largely from the piece I published in Gray's about Angus and other things. We've rehearsed several times now, and …
[This is a re-post from 3 years ago; 9 years ago today I had to put my first dog down. Glenna changed my life forever.] When I was 37 I moved to Boise, Idaho, where I knew nobody and didn’t have a job. I rented a house, my first time living in a house since …
I don't know the people who will feed me... Frank O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died," from Lunch Poems (1964) Please, sir, I want some more...Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist Warning: This post is way less about chukar and more about culture, if you can call it that. We'd probably prefer to think of the word "hunger" …