If We’re Being Honest: Questions from the Office on a Wednesday Morning Around the Conference Room Table

How was the hunting?

Still. With clouds and wild rose bushes and gusts of wind. Porcupine on the side. A rip in my favorite wool shirt. Bird vest as pillow: because I’m still ill and I take naps on the prairie with a frequency that alarms most able-bodied people. Hills reside in calves. My wind-chapped cheeks still burn. The dashboard is still dusty. It’s possible my heart is not fully present in this room.

Did you get (kill) anything? (And this, in Montana, is acceptable water cooler talk.) 

Roosters crowing at dawn. A fickle pot of coffee. Frozen water in the dogs’ dish. We walked upriver, hips leaning forward in a state of almost falling. The morning rousing, each stalk of sorghum, millet and wheat a work of hoarfrost art. Every step a thunder cloud of sparkles tossed into the air. My collar bones caught sweat and ice crystals as my fingers thawed. 

The bird dogs ran in arcs the shape of raindrops, navigating as though the fields themselves bent our path. A pale light and the quaking energy of a brown dog on point is the best kind of promise. A generous lead, adequate follow-through and a retrieve that makes my heart near burst every time. Yes, bird guts under my nails.

How many birds can you get? 

The way that section unfolds, you can cover two miles due south before the river bank escape. The roosters run under the cover of thorns and launch themselves across the water. I lost myself watching my dogs read the wind because there, everything depends on understanding the nuances of tail and wag and breeze and land. (And, with these two wirehairs, you must also know the nuances of side-eye.) 

We tell ourselves stories about why. For the views, for the dogs, for the birds, and our souls. I am beginning to resist the conditions attached: the number of miles covered (by boots, by paws), the tally of points and flushes, birds lost, birds missed, birds in the bag. Really, presence alone is the gift. I am learning my dog will hunt as slow as I walk. Some day too soon, we will have to reverse that.

Where do you go?

There is an ancient place between my sternum and gut that clings to the stillness out there, where time is measured in fourths and eighths. I hold for a few precious hours (days if I’m diligent) that static, that sunset, that delicate light and honest vastness.

The wildness slowly seeps out after we ride back into civilization. It leaves echoes behind in the chamber. And you have to wonder, in the silent gaps, if all that is broken in this world might benefit from the solitude of that place, if they could hold it for just a little while.

Do you have to train your dogs to find birds? 

When thick bunch grasses rise golden into thermal pockets, we have an obligation to work that field. Ice on the irrigation ditch will carry a dog’s weight but not a human’s. The Spanish olive trees at the end of the third field hold sharptails in the late afternoon, and if you wait long enough, they’ll circle back again and again. 

The dogs will check the buffalo berries every time, and they know how the leeward slopes are favored when the wind howls. When I crouch in the shelter belt to wait for a flock of geese pass overhead, my young pup sits and watches the sky with me. We learn together.

They’re good hunters? 

Barrell-chested through the tumbleweed. Tip toed on the huns. Locked up on the grouse. They tell it like it is - with a hint of sass and an eyelid flutter at the end of a many-mile day.

Breathe hitched to wind, thighs to hill, toes to the creek, my heart to that dog loping up the draw, pulling me westward into the scent cone with his whole damn heart.

That’s badass of you. 

(Because I’m a woman?) The space at my fingertips is empty today, and my chest warns of the fading essence of everything I collected out there on the prairie last weekend. All the dirt: sifted on to the dog beds and sheets. Birds: in the belly and the freezer. Wounds: healing. Inbox: full.

My sanity is a place where the wind sears sideways. Because wind is story, is stillness, is heart. And there’s a small swell of uncertainty in the logic of any this. We are a moving, dog-loving contradiction.

Illustration by Frederick Stivers