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 days seem not to have had a beginning nor can I, right now, imagine their end (especially given the forecast).
But with dogs, it can’t ever be all doom and gloom, no matter how determined the effort. Peat, despite — and, more likely because of — his characteristic pent-up-edness, entertains us at irregular intervals throughout the day and night, improvising doggy stand-up: stealing bras and getting tangled in them while trying to break their necks, nose-diving momentarily un-minded cupboards for Tupperware, getting the Cong stuck on his lower teeth while trying to keep us from picking up what he can’t quite drop, giving himself a massage by rolling ecstatically on the floor over his Nyla-bone and elk antler chews, growling maniacally all the while. It’s the Call of the Child-we-never-had. And Angus, obliviously enjoying the retirement of his hearing, seems simply to alternate between a textbook demonstration of contentment and manic hunger. We’ve been relieved these past couple of months that the only symptom of his cancer is the blood dripping sporadically from his penis.
Most people who’ve been touched by dogs like to tell stories about what it’s like. I like to hear theirs. Billy Collins has two poems I want to share. Enjoy.
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 the kindling splits I have laid on the ashes, and I must touch a match to them by poking it between his legs. Such faith, I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains.
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 I have to say it’s one of the most interesting, thought-provoking, connection-inspiring literary events I’ve been a part of, and it features a live brass quintet. If you’re in town, please come check it out.
If you can’t find a copy of Gray’s from August 2015 and want to see my piece on Angus, here it is:
The current issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal (Bird Hunting Edition, August 2015, available at Barnes & Noble) features a piece I wrote about Angus a couple years ago. The best thing about the piece is Rachel Teannalach‘s painting, which I wrote about in an earlier post. Still, the piece is heartfelt and makes a nice tribute to one of the most compelling souls I’ve had the pleasure of being with in this short life.
My first dog before she haunted me. Looking out my classroom window today, the view of the opaque winter sky obscured by piling snow, I had this thought…
[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 left my parents’ house after graduating high school. It was a small house, with a small backyard closed in with a white picket fence and a one-car detached garage. Six months after moving in, I’d skin my first deer in that garage, my experienced younger brother driving from five hours away to teach me how to do it. My right index finger bears a scar from one of my slips with a sharp knife. That night, we grilled some of the meat and ate it with his wife and two boys.
I shot that deer with a friend of mine who was also on his first big game hunting trip. We stayed at my dad’s cabin in eastern Idaho, which I’d visited nearly every summer since I was 10, and whose existence and setting served as the primary reason I chose to move to Idaho. I wanted to hunt birds and big game as a resident because it was much cheaper, and Idaho had lots of public land and our cabin. Boise was a big town and I figured I could get a job and make a living.
It was a big change for me, and scary. I was lonely at the beginning when I was trying to figure out what I’d done, and why. The frame made sense to me, but the canvas was still blank. I bought a bird dog puppy from a backyard breeder in Mountain Home, my first dog, a few weeks after arriving at my rented house. The girlfriend from whom I was slowly separating helped me move from California, she helped me unpack, helped me buy sundries from Target, helped me absorb the weirdness of moving ten hours northeast. But she left after a couple weeks, and I got the puppy to stamp some kind of seal on my new life.
Glenna challenged me. I read the book my brother had used to train his remarkable first dog of the same breed. It sort of made sense, but the puppy didn’t, and I wasn’t a good trainer. A scar from her baby incisor on my left palm, near the thumb, reminds me of her jubilant puppy play. A decade after getting her, during which time I rarely hunted with her because she ran too big and hunted for herself, she was buried in my brother-in-law’s yard in the mountains not far away. Dave dug the hole, which, empty, looked excessively deep and wide, but just barely held her and her first toy, a stuffed cougar the size of a burrito. Dave had lots of experience digging dog graves, with several interred nearby. I dropped dirt as gently as I could on Glenna while my three-year-old dog Angus ran around, seemingly oblivious. I didn’t understand what I clearly saw.
Those first new months here, I told myself that this is my new life. I still tell myself that, despite all that’s happened since. It’s been sixteen years. There’s still the fluttering in my stomach, and the questions. And the images. The one that haunts me, the one that is among the richest and brings back smells and shapes and a certain humidity, is the sight of Glenna, white and orange, sitting upright patiently and eagerly from young puppy to full-grown dog in the middle of the green grassy backyard, bordered by white pickets she could easily have leaped over but never did, late in the July afternoon heat, fragmentedly shaded by huge catalpa and silver maple trees, waiting and looking and watching for a glimpse of me coming home from work on my bike.
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” metaphorically rather than literally because it can represent a desire to achieve something great. Of course, as in Captain Ahab’s case, the merit of his quest was debatable, to say nothing of Jeffrey Dahmer’s. Still, absolute hunger is painful and real yet most of us don’t really know it.
But I wonder about my dogs. They might.
Peat, Angus, and before them Glenna, have all acted, all of the time, as though they were hungry. Because they never showed signs of being malnourished, I have always doubted them. Is it possible I’ve been wrong? To a dog, what is hunger? I’ll never really know.
My first dog, Glenna, began life showing no interest in food. It worried me. She was about two when that worry did a 180; a friend came to visit with his two dogs, who were very interested in their food. Glenna caught on and, soon, was food-obsessed. In her twilight years, she would stand in the kitchen, her neck sloping toward the floor, eyes raised and locked on us, and scream at us to feed her, even if she’d recently eaten. I often wondered if the megaesophagus that resulted in her early demise was some sort of cosmic payback. It’s awful to think that, but I did.
Glenna, about to yell at us.
Angus, I believe, learned his attitude toward food from Glenna, and then Peat from Angus, although Peat’s really ratcheted it up a few notches. Peat also picked up the coprophagy from Angus, who, maybe relatedly, is still the only dog I’ve had who drinks his urine.
Glenna teaching Angus how to eat woodAngus applying the principle to kibble
Before you yield to the temptation to offer me advice, I’ve tried for years to “solve” this shit-eating thing. The most comical attempt, looking back on it, was buying some very expensive powder from Drs. Foster and Smith that you sprinkled on the dog’s food to make its poop taste bad. If my reason hadn’t been clouded by my own hunger to stop Angus from this disgusting habit, I would have realized how funny the powder idea was. I mean, it’s shit. How can you make it taste worse than it already does? Needless to say, it didn’t work. Ha ha. Joke’s on me. And I didn’t learn from that, apparently: recently I purchased some (again, very expensive) probiotic powder to put on the dogs’ food, thinking it might help them more completely metabolize their meals and, thus, make the potential residual nutrition in their stools less appetizing. It didn’t work, and Peat might have developed a nasty rash from the stuff. If anybody wants it, the jar’s on top of our garage fridge.
Both dogs seem — except when hunting — glued to the idea that the world has food for them everywhere and their job is to find and eat it. Our walks are dominated by the poising of my thumb on the “tone” button (if it’s Peat I’m concerned about) or “momentary stimulation” button (if it’s totally deaf Angus I’m worried about) of the e-collar transmitter, hoping to distract the dogs from eating something I think they shouldn’t and which they think absolutely they should. It’s a perma-conflict. It makes me think of what someone once called golf: a good walk spoiled. It’s hopeless, too, because I nearly always have the wrong dog selected when one of them verges on an infraction. Peat stands on his back feet and scarfs chokecherries from overhead branches: I shock Angus. Angus stops mid-trail to inhale day-old turkey diarrhea: I buzz Peat.
Sometimes, we forget the collars when we’re home, which we always say we’ll never do again, and then we forget them again. As we did last night during happy hour, when it was 98 degrees outside and we thought we’d enjoy a beer in the shade. The dogs had had a long walk-run in the morning, gone in and out all day long, and seemed generally quite tired, and we had just fed them. Plus, when we sit around the table outside, they like to join us by jumping in the padded chairs and halfsnooze in our presence. But not this time. Clearly, they remembered something from the night before, and it wasn’t until we noticed they weren’t chillin’ with us (a matter of a minute or two) that we realized they’d headed straight for the quail nest they’d pointed 24 hours earlier. Leslie got there in time to watch Peat eat several of the eggs but somehow managed to shoo him and Angus off and recovered and replaced 9 of the eggs (we had counted 16 the day before). Leslie was more upset by this than I was (but then I wasn’t there, having chosen to remain in the shade with my new homebrew); I tried consoling her by reasoning that we can’t pick and choose which version of the dogs’ prey drive we approve of: we love and brag about Peat’s prey drive, which makes him a phenomenal hunter but which also, sadly, means we have to live with it when we’re not hunting. That very morning, Peat began the day with his usual pre-feeding charade of trying to out-cyclone a cyclone, alternating growling and attacking Angus with rapid-fire circle spinning from the bedroom through the dog door, all peppered with deafening coyote-like shrieks, and then gobbling his 1/2 cup of kibble in 4 seconds. Sometime after I’d gone back to bed (about 5:30), he counter-surfed a container of mini-cupcakes, took them outside, and ate all of them and part of the container.
Dogs pointing a quail nestPre-attack eggs…
So I guess I’m not sure where hunger ends and prey drive begins. How closely, if at all, are they related? If Angus hadn’t showed Peat his intense and nearly constant desire to eat or get fed, would Peat have limited his expression of hunger to the field? I’m under no illusion that we can change any of this (although I suspect some of you might disagree; as always, I’m open to suggestions). But, outside the annoyance of Peat’s daily insanity around feeding, I realized just the other day that I have spent the last 19 years worrying about whether my dogs are really feeling hunger. Because even just the feeling of hunger (and not actual hunger, where you’re starving literally) is painful, gnawing like heartbreak. I hope that’s not it. I don’t want my dogs to feel that.
