Winter Run

by Robert Ashcom

  Charlie’s gray eyes were wide. “That’s what happened. She pulled her head back … That’s all … It was time to go.” The three of them stood still then, in the August heat with the mourning doves’ incessant cooing.

  Until Luke burst out, “Where the hell do you reckon the Plotts got to? They’re the ones must of dug out. Do you reckon they went off toward Whitehall on a deer? Come on here! We got to get these hounds home and go after them Plotts.”

  He was already heading for the truck.

  Bobwhite

  The problem began with Sarah. The black-and-tan bitch would wiggle all over and lick his hand when he came to the hound pen or approached the hound boxes and called her name. In the open she would actually come to him when he called. Even Luke had to head the other hounds off before he could catch most of them. When the hounds were loose, they wanted to hunt, not stand around with humans, but almost from the beginning Sarah would come when Charlie called. The men actually referred to her sometimes as “Charlie’s bitch,” but she wasn’t. After each hunt she loaded up in the hound boxes with the rest of the pack and went home to Owens Mountain, to the pens next to Luke’s log cabin.

  Charlie mentioned this to Matthew only once. His answer was short. “She belongs in the pen with the hounds, Charlie. If you had her home and loose, she’d hunt twenty-three hours a day, only stop to eat a little. In a month she’d be skin and bones and ruined.” Charlie knew what Matthew said was true. He never brought it up again. But he had that look in his eye that he had when an idea got hold of him. This conversation took place during the fall after Charlie had seen the gray vixen in the swamp.

  Casting around for alternatives, Charlie began to look at Uncle Dan, the old English pointer, with different eyes. After all, in his own peculiar way the old pointer also had the gift of scent.

  No one knew where Uncle Dan came from originally, but he came to the Lewises from out of their garbage barrel. The handling of garbage was primitive in those days. Most people had a fifty-five-gallon drum with holes in the bottom and sides punched with a cold chisel for ventilation. This barrel was usually kept somewhere out behind the house. The garbage was burned in the barrel. Actually, little else but the paper really burned, so every once in a while the barrel had to be loaded on a pickup and taken to the edge of the mountain behind Quail Hill and dumped right over. Eventually, as the population increased, this solution became a problem. But like a lot of things, we didn’t really know any better, so that is what happened. The Lewises kept their barrel in the old cattle chute halfway to the barn. It was convenient and you couldn’t see it from the house.

  One Sunday morning that fall, Charlie’s father took the trash out to the loading chute to burn it. To his surprise the barrel was on its side and protruding from it was the hind end of a dog. Mr. Lewis let out a yell at the mess, and the dog backed out of the barrel. At this point Charlie, who had heard the yell and was coming to find out what was going on, rounded the corner of the loading chute just as the dog turned to look at them with apprehension, aware that they would be furious. One look at the dog told you that hunger’s pull had overridden fear, and he was in that barrel for better or worse.

  This was no mutt. He was white—or had been—with liver spots and the square, domed head of the English pointer. It was also clear that this dog had been through hell and high water. The last six inches of his tail, which had no hair on it, gave him a certain possumlike aspect. His feet were splayed out with age and wear and tear, and his ears, while not exactly shredded, were certainly not intact. His hipbones stuck up in the air. We never did find out his story.

  Charlie crouched to the ground, put out his hand, and made a crooning noise in his throat. The dog looked at Charlie and through some deep understanding of human nature realized that his ship had come in—that his nights in the cold and days of too little food were over. He had found Charlie.

  His name was Uncle Dan. Charlie’s father named him right then but could not for the life of him figure out why. He just said the dog looked like an Uncle Dan and that was that. So by the time the old dog got to the house that Sunday morning, he already had a name and Charlie had that look on his face. Gretchen tried to put her foot down. She was not going to let that awful dirty creature in her house. But she was too late. The men in her life had become silent conspirators. She did require, however, that the dog have a bath. This event took place in the old-fashioned bathtub in the Corn House’s one bathroom. Uncle Dan took one look at the tub full of water with steam rising from it and tried to put his foot down. He turned out to have amazing reserves of strength for an animal so skinny. When the washers and their subject emerged from the bathroom, the dog was clean but every square inch of the bathroom was wet. So were the washers. So were all the towels. And so on. Gretchen allowed as how it would have been easier for her to have done it herself. It sounded like trying to get Charlie to do certain chores.

  Could the dog stay in the house? Of course not. Who knew whether he was housebroken? It turned out he was. Matthew opined that the old gentleman had too much dignity to make a mess in his living space, and after only a few days it was clear that the whole Corn House was Uncle Dan’s living space.

  But there was the matter of food. Not the dog’s, the Lewises’. The following Sunday Gretchen put a cooked roast on the counter and went to the porch to ask Charlie’s father to come and carve. By the time they reentered the kitchen, Uncle Dan had the roast on the floor and had miraculously consumed half of it. The dog looked up with not a trace of guilt on his face and was in fact outraged when Mr. Lewis heaved him out the door. A discussion ensued about whether to eat what was left. In the end the remaining roast was washed off and put in the refrigerator for sandwiches and the Lewises had macaroni and cheese for Sunday lunch. The logic of this compromise escaped everyone but Gretchen. But from then on, food—particularly, but not exclusively, meat—was never left alone with Uncle Dan. It just never crossed his mind that it was not fair game. And if you smacked him, his dignity was affronted, and none of the Lewises could stand to do that.

  Uncle Dan showed no inclination to wander from his newfound heaven. It was as if the old boy had suddenly grown roots right out of his splayed feet. He would accompany Charlie to the barn but not on expeditions around the farm with the pony. When Charlie started away in any direction, Uncle Dan would go home to his place under the porch. His sailing days were apparently over.

  But on one occasion that October Uncle Dan showed his real colors, his true vocation, the occupation of his youth. He and Charlie were crossing the overgrown garden patch on the way to the barn. Uncle Dan was flopping along behind Charlie. There was nothing out of the ordinary. It was just an October afternoon in Virginia. Then in an instant it all changed. The dog floated forward two strides, fluidity and power in his movement. He stopped and went rigid all over—with his nose held level and his possum tail straight behind him. It was an electrifying moment. Charlie later said he was so startled that for a second he was almost afraid. Something utterly new had entered his world. He knew what a pointer was, but he had never seen one do it before. The world slammed to a halt. There they were. Now what? The dog gave him no clue. Charlie had the feeling that he could have gone home and come back the next day and the dog would still have been there. Charlie felt the burden of action shift to him. He realized that the dog was waiting for him to do something. Charlie knew the birds were in front of him. But they were invisible. How could the dog have known? He never even put his nose to the ground …

  Charlie walked forward a stride. He knew what was going to happen, knew that when the covey rose up it would be like an explosion, that the beating of the wings would feel almost physical, knew that when it happened, he would be as surprised as if he hadn’t known the birds were there, even though he knew they were there. The dog didn’t move until the quail flew. But when they were gone and there was nothing for him to retrieve, the dog turned to the boy with a look of disappointment, as if the boy had let him down
. The covey was never again in his little territory, so Uncle Dan didn’t point again that fall. He showed no interest in hunting for the birds.

  • • •

  Charlie was determined to hunt on his own. But fall was upon them and there was hunting with Luke and Sarah, so he didn’t pursue hunting with bird dogs until the following spring. In the meantime Uncle Dan seemed to have found the fountain of youth. Everyone agreed that he had blossomed. He gained weight and his coat became shiny. The idea was even put forward that he had grown back some of the hair on his tail. Certainly many of his scars had filled in, or at least Gretchen thought so. He was an amiable presence at the Corn House. He greeted everyone with dignity and became in his own way a landmark. But even in his newfound youth, he showed no inclination to hunt. On the rare occasion when he walked up on a covey, he was dynamite, but he deviated not one inch from his route in search of the quarry that he had been bred for generations to find.

  Charlie’s idea was that he would go hunting on horseback—like the mounted foxhunters. Uncle Dan would be his pack. So one Saturday the following April, he saddled the pony and started up the hill behind the barn, calling Uncle Dan. The dog followed to the edge of the creek—the creek was a convenient place to get a drink on a warm day, so it was part of the old dog’s territory. From the other side Charlie called. The dog looked at him with his tail swinging slowly back and forth and his head held low. Charlie—or, more accurately, the pony—took a step. The boy looked back and called again. This time in a more commanding tone of voice.

  “Uncle Dan, come behind.” He used this command because he had heard the huntsman say it to his pack when he was ready to move off somewhere. It had no visible effect on the dog except that he stopped wagging his tail. So there they were: Charlie on his side of the creek with the pony and Uncle Dan on the other, with the latter categorically refusing to move, no matter what tone of voice or actual words Charlie used. Uncle Dan’s look was downright quizzical, as if he couldn’t imagine what Charlie could possibly be asking of him. For Uncle Dan, Charlie’s side of the creek just didn’t exist.

  “Then what did you do, Charlie?” asked Matthew in a serious tone. They were standing around in the store that evening. Everyone was smiling except Charlie.

  “I went back across the creek and tried to chase him across the way the whips chase the hounds to the huntsman when he calls them.”

  “Well?” Matthew asked, still in his serious tone. “What happened?”

  Here Charlie again became aggravated just thinking about it. “That old dog is stubborn as a mule. All we did was go around and around in a circle like a cat chasing her tail and the pony getting mad and me, too. And that dog looking at me like he couldn’t imagine what I wanted him to do when I knew he knew perfectly well what I wanted him to do which was to follow me …” Charlie had to pause to catch his breath.

  “But Charlie,” said Jimmy Price, the kid from whom they had bought the pony, “you need a hound whip to make that old dog mind.” Jimmy was an all-around aficionado when it came to horses and hunting.

  Matthew turned to him sharply. “What you talking about a hound whip, Jimmy. That wouldn’t do no good without a huntsman to chase the dog to …” He turned back to Charlie. “Anyway, if you going by yourself, you got to get the dog coming to you when you call. You need to see old man Jared Pugh. He’s a bird-dog man, he’ll know what to do.”

  The following afternoon after Sunday lunch, Charlie walked down to Jared Pugh’s funny little house next to the depot. Charlie thought of it as a gingerbread house because Mr. Pugh had built it himself over a number of years from various mismatched bricks and cinder blocks that he picked up at sales. It started out a cinder-block house. Then Mr. Pugh started adding bricks of many colors. It was a strange, multi-colored cottage just below the train depot. Behind it in the tiny back yard were two pens where Mr. Pugh kept his two bird dogs. Unlike the hounds who lived together, the bird dogs were kept separately.

  Jared Pugh managed the depot. In those days the mail still left on the train in the morning and evening and freight was loaded and unloaded. Water from the spring next to the Corn House came a mile through a two-inch metal pipe to the depot. In the old days the water had supplied the steam locomotives that stopped to top off the tanks before they went through the cut in Burdens Mountain to the valley and then to West Virginia. The steam locomotives were long gone—there were diesel locomotives now. They lacked the comforting sound of the big drivers on the steam engines. When Charlie was eight his father had taken him to the depot and arranged to have him go aboard one of the huge, hissing locomotives while it was taking on water. The engineer had even let him ride in the cab the hundred yards from the water pipe to the depot building. Charlie’s father in his most solemn voice had made very clear to Charlie that he was witnessing the end of a chapter in American history. Charlie was wide-eyed when he described the heat and noise of the engine’s cab to Gretchen. He said that the floor plates were so hot you couldn’t have gone barefoot in there even in winter, and the fireman looked like a devil in a picture book what with all the grime and coal dust streaking his overalls and the heavy cloth cap almost covering his eyes stark white in contrast to the coal blackness.

  Jared Pugh and Charlie’s father where waiting on the platform when the engine arrived at the end of the hundred-yard journey from the water pipe. Jared caught Charlie’s hands as he jumped and lowered him to the heavy creosote-soaked boards of the platform. The locomotive hissed itself back into movement and started westward to the long grade up the side of Burdens Mountain. It was not the last steam locomotive to stop at the depot for water, but it wasn’t far from the last one.

  For once, Charlie was without words as he stood between the two adults and watched the train slowly move away. Just watching the huge wheels make the steel track move up and down was a little frightening.

  “How much longer before they start hauling the mail on trucks, Jared?” asked Charlie’s father.

  “Three, maybe four years, Mr. Lewis. I’m waiting for them to stop picking up freight any time now. Time’s coming when the trains through here won’t be hauling nothing but coal. Don’t need a depot for coal trains.”

  Jared Pugh lived alone in his many-colored house with his two bird dogs. His wife had died years before from cancer and Jared, who had never been talkative, had gotten so quiet that except for the business of the depot he might not say ten words a day. He was a short, kind of pudgy man with thin red hair, big feet and long arms that hung out too far from his shirt sleeves and ended in large red hands that were amazingly precise for such an otherwise awkward sort of man.

  Charlie was tentative about going to Mr. Pugh’s house that Saturday. It wasn’t that he was afraid of Jared, it was just that there had been little contact between the two—no thread to connect them, until now. Once Charlie got going it was fine. The thread was the bird dogs. Charlie explained his problem with Uncle Dan.

  “He just won’t come with me at all, Mr. Pugh. No matter what I do. I even tried some meat scraps to coax him, but he won’t cross that creek. That dog is just totally lazy. What can I do?” By this time Charlie had worked himself up into a state, and Jared Pugh, no matter how quiet he was, couldn’t help being amused at this blond boy all wound up about an old bird dog who wouldn’t cross a creek to go hunting.

  “You need another dog, Charlie. Maybe that would make your old dog come along, when he seen another one going.” There was a long pause while Mr. Pugh looked first at the ground and then at Charlie as if making up his mind about something. Finally he looked up and said, so slowly that his mouth was actually open for a while before the words came out, “I need to go over to Mr. Winthrop’s to pick up a dog he’s giving me. I wasn’t going till next week but I reckon I could go now if you want to come along.” Here there was another long pause. “Just let me call over to his house to be sure he’s home. Be right back.”

  Mr. Pugh emerged from his cottage in a few minutes, nodding his head y
es. Charlie helped load the dog crate onto the pickup. The Winthrop’s were rich and their farm was called an estate. It was a ten-mile drive, and because Mr. Pugh drove nearly as slow as he talked there was plenty of time for Charlie to get the story on the dog they were going to pick up.

  His name was Donald and that’s what everyone called him—Donald. Not Don or Donny, Donald. Donald was a champion field-trial English pointer. Mr. Winthrop had grown so fond of the dog that when his field-trial days were over, Donald came to live in the house with the Winthrops. The problem arose when Mickey—an asthmatic, and therefore evil-tempered, sixty-pound English bulldog, who was also Mr. Winthop’s pride and joy and who also lived in the house—was introduced to Donald. Their hatred for one another was instant and implacable. After the first battle, it took the veterinarian close to an hour to sew the two of them back up. A plan was devised to introduce them to each other slowly but to no avail, and the second time the veterinarian had to sew them up, he suggested to Mr. Winthrop that this just wasn’t going to work. In this second battle Mickey had gotten one of his ears split absolutely in half and to every-one’s amusement, except Mr. Winthrop’s, appeared to have three ears.

  Because of Jimmy Price, not all of this story was new to Charlie. Jimmy, who shod the Winthrop horses, said that he thought that Mickey and Mr. Winthrop looked alike at least until the advent of the third ear. Then Mickey became something bizarre beyond imagining. As an illustration of Mickey’s bad temper, Jimmy related the time Mr. Winthrop was driving his new Jeepster with the top down out the lane past the stable to get the paper with Mickey sitting majestically in the backseat. There were weeping willows hanging over the lane that had never been pruned and therefore hung down below the level of the windshield. As they passed under the trees, Mickey let out a growl of aggravation, reached up, and grabbed a mouthful of the branches before they could whip across his face. And being a bulldog, he refused to let go. Mr. Winthrop glanced over his shoulder at the growl just in time to see Mickey snatched bodily from the Jeepster. Without another glance, Mr. Winthrop continued on his way, leaving Mickey’s huge bulldog body bobbing up and down in the air in complete defiance of gravity, still growling in aggravation. Jimmy swore the dog hung in the air for a full minute, but nobody believed him. Finally Mickey let go, dropped squarely onto the driveway, and didn’t move. On the way back Mr. Winthrop, who was nearly as jowly as Mickey, stopped the car and the two of them glared at each other. Finally Mr. Winthrop got out of the Jeepster, opened the passenger door, and beckoned to Mickey who grudgingly hopped back into the car because he was so lazy he wouldn’t walk across the lawn to the front porch when he could ride, even if his dignity had been hurt. As the dog jumped into the car, Jimmy distinctly heard Mr. Winthrop say, “Well, I hope you learned something from that, you hardheaded bastard.”