by Rick Bass
Eventually, I'm over the pass and sailing down the back side of the Divide, to the Atlantic. The plains are gold below me, bathed in sun, beneath pale blue windy-winter's skies, and the roads are scoured free of snow so that I'm able to make better time, quicker time—stopping only once, to give those cliff-tipped valves another transfusion of thirty-weight—and before I know it, the Sweetgrass Hills are in view on my left, sugar-topped above the gold stubble that surrounds them, and on my right, the incomparable Front Range, perhaps the grandest view in North America. Bravo to Senator Max Baucus for his attempt to protect it from being developed into yet another oil and gas field; bravo to ex-Lewis and Clark National Forest supervisor Gloria Flora for withdrawing these public lands from oil and gas leasing. How a damaged world needs heroes.
We drive right up to our honey hole of yore, visit with the rancher, Tom, his foreman, Steve, for a while, and their words are like a sweet and rare kind of music—yes, there are plenty of birds this year, but no, there haven't been many hunters, because the hunting was so poor early on that people just stopped trying.
Always, I have to run little Point first. He simply won't tolerate letting Superman hunt first; if I don't take him first, he howls, whirls in circles on the front seat, scent-marks the steering wheel, tears at the upholstery with his claws, then begins biting and tearing the door apart in an attempt to tunnel out to freedom and glory.
This year, the birds aren't there: no scat, no tracks, no scent, though it doesn't even really matter; it's great just to be striding the snowy fields, and for Point to be charging through them, scampering, casting left and right; and with such a modest goal as wanting to see only one bird, one rooster, sky borne, there's always the possibility that we can accomplish that goal at any moment. Just one bird, and no matter whether a cagey old veteran that holds tight, knowing the hunters and dogs sometimes pass on by, or a foolish young bird, believing that because he is hidden, he is safe.
Our next run, at another old-favorite place, is more productive. Superman's not scenting well—he's still got a couple of porcupine quills embedded deep in his gums, left over from an encounter earlier in the fall, and they've formed cysts right against his nasal passage that are temporarily disrupting his usually phenomenal scenting ability—but he manages to put me into a flock of Hungarian partridge, which, perhaps because of the cold—it's about ten degrees, with a stiff wind—are hunkered down in the cattails, just like pheasants.
Amazingly, I'm able to hit one, and while a hunt's success should never be measured by whether game is harvested or not, it's still a wonderful thing to see him go retrieve the bird, and to slip it into the game bags. Tomorrow evening, I think, I'll fix it on the grill—cook it over mesquite coals in the falling snow.
Maybe there's even another one out there.
There is, and Superman finds it on the next run, and then, running Point again, we find a lone sharp-tail—I shoot twice and miss—and then a big flock of Huns, which get up in staggers, sheets of bronzed birds rocketing away on clattering wings, and like Custer, I stand there and blaze away, missing and reloading, missing and reloading, as the waves of birds keep catapulting into the sky. I miss eight times in all without ever moving my feet.
Near the truck, hiking out, Point locks up in the heaviest thicket of cattails I've ever seen, and the two of us stand there for perhaps five minutes, with our tension building.
Every now and then I kick at the cattails, but no bird erupts. Still, Point remains locked up, with the widening flare of his nostrils the only movement.
I kick again, with my gun still on safety, and finally the bird scooches a little—we can hear it struggling to get out of the cattails in which it has embedded itself—and after what seems like a full minute of noise, the bird claws its way up from out of the cattail jungle, right between us, and it is a wild-eyed rooster, rising to eye level with me, close enough to catch in a butterfly net. My goal is achieved, my wish granted. As it peels away to the north, a straightaway lining out, I miss with the first shot, and then the second.
How many hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times have I rewarded the most stellar dog work with the most abysmal shooting?
What is a dog's concept of time, and of things ending? Hopefully it's as nonexistent as it seems, for Point pushes on as if it's no big deal; as if he's certain we're going to get at least one more chance, certain that the season is not ending. Or rather, unaware.
Already, it's the last run of the day; the afternoon, though filled and compacted with strength and wildness, suffused with anticipation and beauty, is still, after all, despite the many miles driven and then walked, only an afternoon. And the sunset over the Rocky Mountain Front—purple storm sky with sheets of Arctic snowstorm, copper and orange firelight piercing through just above that mountain-hanging storm, cold purple and white reefs sculpted by a force of grander design and order than anyone likely ever could have dared dream of or hope for— all I want is what I got, the sight of one rooster —reminds me of how precious few minutes the boys and I have left, an hour perhaps, before it's time to turn back around and face the music and head back into that storm.
Earlier in the afternoon, leaving the birdless honey hole of old, I'd seen an old farmhouse on a hill, in the yard of which there were what looked like a hundred pheasants strutting. Such sights are not infrequent, late in the season, as every bird in the area soon learns which property is posted and which is not, and though I was certain such bounty was protected, I'd pulled into the driveway to ask anyway. No one was home, and so I'd driven on; but because that farm is somewhat on the way home, and closer to those beautiful stormy mountains (it's still clear and cold out on the plains), I decide to swing by and see if anyone's in.
Miraculously—like some angelic being who's come down to earth for a few brief moments in that crepuscular hour, the owner is in, and is out in his yard, carrying buckets of feed out to a corral. He's a tall, older man named Ted, and when I introduce myself and ask if he allows hunters on his land—there's an immense swath of wild CRP land stretching beyond his house, traveling what seems like halfway to the horizon—he doesn't really answer directly but instead asks how many pheasants I've gotten today.
Well, I tell him, not that I'm really counting, but zero.
He looks at me, and the dogs in my truck, and at that last thirty minutes of light; at that big storm hanging up over the mountains, and at his big damn field, and he says, "All right, I'll tell you what. Why don't you and your dog go back in there and get your supper."
If you hunt enough days, enough years, sometimes it happens like this.
I thank him and am about to go grab Point when he adds a couple of stipulations.
"Don't shoot toward the hay bales, and don't run over my mailbox," he says.
It turns out he hasn't let hunters on his land in almost two years. The last time he did, one of them shot toward the big mound of giant rolled hay bales that was sitting out in the center of his field, and the heated BB burrowed into that tight-packed hay, where the heat and friction of it smoldered through the rest of the day, until later that night it started a bonfire that could be seen fifty miles away, and the heat from which Ted could feel even through the windows of his house.
The hunters before that backed over his mailbox on their way out, he says. They didn't mean to—they were just kids—but it was dusk, they didn't see it, and they came walking back up his driveway carrying the mailbox while Ted was inside having supper and asked if it was his.
"Whose else would it be?" he asks me, still fuming two years later. "There's nobody else out here for a mile in any direction!"
I commit a near fatal gaffe; I tell the truth. "I'm such a poor driver," I tell him, "it sounds like something I would've done."
His eyes widen, and in that instant, I can see him scrutinizing me, wondering how safe his mailbox really is, and then in the next instant casting back in his memory to see if indeed I might have been one of those hunters from years before.
> What is it that makes us say the wrong things at the wrong time? What perversity compels me to say, honestly, "That's interesting, about the BBs—I never knew they'd do that." It's all I can do to keep from adding, "I must've fired toward a hundred hay bales in my life—I had no idea!"
"Of course it'll happen," Ted says. "People don't think."
If I had more time, I'd try to explain to him what it's like, to be a dreamer—how it's not willful, but instead, as if you're often a stranger in a strange, albeit beautiful land; of how you become so enamored with the senses of the world that it's like being lifted up by some greater force and carried away some other distance, sometimes near and sometimes far: in the manner, perhaps, of a hunting dog first catching that rank and exquisite scent, or even the hint of scent, of faraway game.
But by now, because there are only about twenty minutes left in which to hunt, I don't say any of that. Instead, I shake my head and say something like, "I can't believe they lit your hay bales on fire," and then add, convincingly, I hope, "The numb nuts!"
Anything for my dog!
My last utterance is apparently enough for Ted to release me to the wilds of his fields. He wishes me good luck, picks up his grain buckets, and continues on with his end-of-day chores, while I grab Point and hurry on out into the field, past the hay bales.
The pheasants see us coming, hear us coming, feel us coming, and begin leaping up from the field in flocks, a hundred and two hundred yards distant, and flying toward the horizon. I've never seen so many pheasants in my life, and Point's never smelled so much scent. There's so much juice on the ground, fresh juice overlaid on more fresh juice, running juice and sitting juice and roosting juice, that it's impossible for a dog of even his abilities to weave any narrative, and instead we just hurry into the wind, toward the distant bat-flock of pheasants that are still getting up and flushing wild, flushing unendingly. And it seems to me, if not to Point or Ted, that perhaps this unrivaled phenomenon is like some secret, long-hidden gear works of the universe, one rarely if ever witnessed before, and that it is somehow the frantic departure of this near infinity of birds that is setting in motion the coming of darkness, the end of day, like the curtain coming down on some grand play or opera.
Point stops, then creeps, then stops, then creeps, then stops again, jarring me from dreamland. Then he accelerates wildly—the bird he's scented is running hard, and never mind that I can't see him, that he's like a ghost—this is the best part, or the second-best part, next to seeing him—and then Point slams to a stop again and whirls ninety degrees to the right, then is running again, and for the first time that day, I hedge on my earlier goal; I fudge, and amend it, there in day's last light.
I'd really like to hit one. I'd really like to watch one rise, then fall fluttering bright and stone dead back to the prairie, and for Point to retrieve it. When Ted told me to go out and get my supper, I'm sure he was envisioning the limit, which is three pheasants, but all I want is one.
Point's a little too far out, running a little too hard—all right, a lot too hard, and as such, I'm just out of range when the grain-fat pheasant, the lingerer—a rooster—gets up wild and flies.
But he is flying the wrong way, not in the gear works direction of all the other departing thousands, but toward me, pushed there, somehow, by Point, or luck, or choice, and whether the rooster ever realizes his mistake or not I cannot say, for I take him on the first shot—a pleasure infinitely cleaner and more satisfying than that of missing with the first and having to use the noisome second shot—and the bird falls cleanly, just as they do sometimes, in my dreams. Point bounds over to the bird, picks it up, and brings it to me, the two of us a team, and I pet him, rub his big stone head in the gathering dusk, and finally realize for the first time all day how truly cold it is. Why, it's mid-December, I realize—as if there has been some part of me, all afternoon, wanting to pretend that because it's still bird-hunting season, it must still be September or October.
I slide the big bird into my game bag, unload my gun, and rise and start back toward my truck, Point capering and whirling in front of me, and with my next goal so simple and elemental: don't run over the mailbox on the way out.
Marias Pass is grimmer than I even imagined it could be, with the road, illumined a couple hours later by my feeble headlights, in the whirling, hallucinogenic disorder of the blizzard so indistinguishable at times from the hills and then mountains around me that I could just as easily be completely lost, and creeping out across some forlorn pasture or meadow, as on a major U.S. highway. My speed slows to fifteen miles an hour, and then to ten, and then five, and then I can see nothing but snow howling against my windshield and must stop completely. I can feel it, hear it, piling up already, immediately against my truck, now as motionless as a boulder, and somewhat horrifically, even though my foot is pressed firmly on the brake and the speedometer reads zero, it seems that I am still moving, still driving into the storm—sliding into the storm, being swallowed into the storm, is what it feels like—and that furthermore my truck, and therefore the road, or rather the landscape beneath it, is tilted at a sixty-degree pitch, like the steep bank of an aircraft entering the final turn of its landing approach; and the snow keeps sweeping past, raging past, carrying me farther along into some strange place equipoised between dream and reality.
Point slumbers on the seat beside me, snoring gently. I press the brake harder, as if that might somehow still or dispel the horrific vision, or even the storm itself.
Sometimes, it seems that the storm has to pause to take a breath—to suck in air, as if in a bellows, if only so that it can blow harder on the out breath—and after a while, I learn that I can creep forward a short distance in those brief and erratic shifts between breaths; and in this manner, I'm able to inch up over the Divide, making the last two miles in thirty minutes. Once I'm off the face of the Divide and more fully into the mountains, things stabilize. It's snowing just as hard, but the terrible winds are more subdued, as if unable to get up much momentum among the icy crags and peaks.
The next several hours pass as if I'm in catatonia—if I see another vehicle on the road, other than in the big city of Kalispell, I don't remember it—and it's well after midnight when I finally turn up the thin mountain road that will lead ultimately into my valley.
Another hour passes like but a minute—it's still snowing—and I pass the trace, the legacy, of Bible man's snow burrow, almost completely obscured already by the storm.
I'm close enough to home to start some serious daydreaming now, and I remember something someone said, Hemingway, or maybe it was someone else, about bird hunting, which was along the lines of Whatever it ends up costing, it's not enough; and idly, and suddenly bone tired, I tinker with the math: two dogs, and one hunter, three birds; three birds in six hundred miles; three birds in twenty-four hours.
How do you break it down? You don't. It's a different kind of math. Less is more, and, as if in a dream, you become enriched by the sweet diminishment.
The children, thank goodness, seem fairly immune to the concussively long winters, as if there is some external light in their blood, some vigor percolating almost constantly, that serves as either a preventative shield or an antidote.
One weekend before Christmas, Wendy comes home with us after school and spends the night. After supper (spaghetti and venison meatballs), Elizabeth and I are sitting on the couch, sipping hot chocolate and watching a movie on the VCR, when we hear a tremendous thumping.
I investigate and find the three girls are playing tennis, or some wild variant thereof, in the utility room. They are wearing their bicycle helmets for safety, and the tennis ball is ricocheting in all directions—off not just the walls but the tile floor and ceiling and even the washer and dryer (when it hits either of these two appliances, it gives a pleasing and resounding bass drum). The girls are shrieking and giggling—it's more like tennis defense than tennis—and the unfortunate cat is in that tiny room with them leaping and scooting back
and forth like a flying squirrel.
They've got their bicycle helmets on. They're not hurting anything. They're having a good time. I close the door and go back to the movie. Where else are they going to play tennis at this time of year?
The way they hurl themselves at play and pleasure: leaping into snowdrifts for no other reason than to make snow angels—all three girls lying on their backs out in the yard, flapping and kicking, fanning one snow angel after another, until the yard is filled with them.
Ever thoughtful, Lowry runs over to Homer's grave and lies down on top of it and fans one for her too, remembering how she used to love to play and caper in the snow.
The older I get—and the more I learn from my children, learning even as I attempt to teach them some things—the more I remember that, for all my rhapsodic love of nature, and particularly the unaltered and uncompromising wilderness, it is, after all, always friends and family and community that make us most human, and most humane. Just because there are far more humans than there is wilderness, particularly American wilderness, does not diminish the sweetness of friendships, or childhood, or community, and indeed, from an individual's perspective, given the brevity of our time here in the physical world of rock and snow, antler and bone, fruit and meat, sky and sun, these latter pleasures are actually more ephemeral than even the fast-diminishing and beleaguered unprotected wilderness itself.