In the silence that came as darkness fell, the Old Man looked back on his time so far and could not suppress a smile.
As a rule, the Old Man didn’t spend much time picking over his memories. His experience made him who he was. It grounded what he knew to be true. He had plenty of stories he liked to share, most of them humorous, most of them self-deprecating, not one of them designed to brag. These he shared freely, but the memories from which they sprang, those he kept to himself. They were his, one of the few things life could not take away. He sheltered them like a hen with chicks beneath her wings.
He knew the land dividing shared stories and indwelt memories to be a slippery slope. Each does inform the other, after all. But too many of his friends lived only in the latter. He’d seen too many of his fellow oldsters forego their present to live only in their far-gone yesterdays. The older they got, apparently, the better they’d been. He didn’t want to be remembered like that. He found it obnoxious.
So he soldiered on. More slowly. More deliberately. Maybe even more delicately. But he didn’t stop for good to only look behind.
He carried a battered old shotgun and followed a bird dog who showed more than a touch of gray, and the three of them made a circuit of the community most afternoons between Thanksgiving Day and the opening of baseball’s spring training. He’d learned to hunt long before safety had been invented, and so his shotgun’s forearm bore the hideous marks of countless barbed wire fences pushed down as he stepped over, but he was careful and he was slow and he was alone, and he didn’t put his finger anywhere near the trigger anyway. Besides, he’d say if pressed, there were plenty worse ways to die.
In his prime, he’d hunted at a pace that was close to a sprint. As fast as a person could walk without running was the perfect speed he found for covering ground. Everyone talked about the merits of bird dogs that “hunted close,” but he always took that to mean the hunters preferred to slump along. His dogs cut great circles and arcs, sweeping acres by the score. They ran fencelines up and down with ease. They cut around cedar brakes and inspected culverts with precision and speed. Keeping up with them was all he had to do, and he’d done it well. He was the one who hunted close. His dogs just plain hunted.
The peak of those days lay 20 years gone. Birds bumped into the air with a thumping drum like small helicopters haunted his dreams. He and the one old dog that carried on with him didn’t find many anymore. Sometimes they went a long time without the thrill of a covey rise, or even the flush of a single. But every day during the season they went looking. And, in looking, they found the connection with the past they sought, both the man and the dog. It was a part of who they were. An important part. The distance they covered and the days they spent, they confirmed a connection with the rest of the world, both for the dog and the man.
As the afternoon waned and the sky turned red, he came finally to his last likely spot and, as he did, the bell on his old dog’s collar went still. He took an extra moment to catch his breath, but only a moment. The old dog had pointed four or five times in the past 10 days but, in each case, not much came of it. She’d pointed a rabbit twice and a box tortoise once. The other times, it seemed there’d been nothing at all, but it wasn’t in the Old Man anymore to scold or discipline. The shame on the old girl’s face had seemed punishment enough.
He walked up behind her saying, “Steady,” as he always had. As he drew level with her nose, three bobwhites exploded into the air with the concussion of a missile launch. A pair came up headed right and a single followed, lining straight away. His finger flicked the safety off as the shotgun rose, his eyes on the pair. The butt touched his shoulder and his finger touched the trigger at the same time and the pair folded in a cloud of feathers. As his eyes shifted to the single, a lay bird came up in front of the dog and angled left. His eyes went to the single straight away and his finger touched the trigger again as bead and bird met, the latter falling in another shower. He watched the lay bird fly away to the left as he swung his shotgun back into its comfortable carrying position. The fourth bird carved an arc around a cedar and disappeared.
“Dead,” he said on instinct and the old dog leapt to retrieve the first of three birds like a puppy in its first year afield. She ran out into the broom straw, circled once and picked up a bird, then came back walking, panting hard, the bird balanced gently on her bottom jaw.
The Old Man knelt and thought again of so many days and dogs gone before, then she dropped six ounces of white meat and rumpled feathers into his hand.
“Good girl,” he said, and he meant it.
Kevin Tate is the outdoors writer for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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