To Skin a Cat

FLIGHT

During bird season, dogs circle each other in my kitchen, shell vests are piled in the mud-room, all drains are clogged with feathers, and hunters work up hangover remedies at the icebox. As a diurnal man, I gloat at these presences, estimating who will and who will not shoot well.

This year was slightly different in that Dan Ashaway arrived seriously ill. Yet this morning, he was nearly the only clear-eyed man in the kitchen. He helped make the vast breakfast of grouse hash, eggs, juice, and coffee. Bill Upton and his brother, Jerry, who were miserable, loaded dogs and made a penitentially early start. I pushed away some dishes and lit a breakfast cigar. Dan refilled our coffee and sat down. We’ve hunted birds together for years. I live here and Dan flies in from Philadelphia. Anyway, this seemed like the moment.

“How bad off are you?” I asked.

“I’m afraid I’m not going to get well,” said Dan directly, shrugging and dropping his hands to the arms of his chair. That was that. “Let’s get started.”

We took Dan’s dogs at his insistence. They jumped into the aluminum boxes on the back of the truck when he said “Load”: Betty, a liver-and-white female, and Sally, a small bitch with a banded face. These were — I should say are—two dead-broke pointers who found birds and retrieved without much handling. Dan didn’t even own a whistle.

As we drove toward Roundup, the entire pressure of my thoughts was of how remarkable it was to be alive. It seemed a strange and merry realization.

The dogs rode so quietly I had occasion to remember when Betty was a pup and yodeled in her box, drawing stares in all the towns. Since then she had quieted down and grown solid at her job. She and Sally had hunted everywhere from Albany, Georgia, to Wilsall, Montana. Sally was born broke but Betty had the better nose.

We drove between two ranges of desertic mountains, low ranges without snow or evergreens. Section fences climbed infrequently and disappeared over the top or into blue sky. There was one little band of cattle trailed by a cowboy and a dog, the only signs of life. Dan was pressing sixteen-gauge shells into the elastic loops of his cartridge belt. He was wearing blue policeman’s suspenders and a brown felt hat, a businessman’s worn-out Dobbs.

We watched a harrier course the ground under a bluff, sharptail grouse jumping in his wake. The harrier missed a half dozen, wheeled on one wingtip, and nailed a bird in a pop of down and feathers. As we resumed driving, the hawk was hooded over its prey, stripping meat from the breast.

Every time the dirt road climbed to a new vantage point, the country changed. For a long time, a green creek in a tunnel of willows was alongside us; then it went off under a bridge, and we climbed away to the north. When we came out of the low ground, there seemed no end to the country before us: a great wide prairie with contours as unquestionable as the sea. There were buttes pried up from its surface and yawning coulees with streaks of brush where the springs were. We had to abandon logic to stop and leave the truck behind. Dan beamed and said, “Here’s the spot for a big nap.” The remark frightened me.

“Have we crossed the stagecoach road?” Dan asked.

“Couple miles back.”

“Where did we jump all those sage hens in 1965?”

“Right where the stagecoach road passed the old hotel.”

Dan had awarded himself a little English sixteen-gauge for graduating from the Wharton School of Finance that year. It was in the gun rack behind our heads now, the bluing gone and its hinge pin shot loose.

“It’s a wonder we found anything,” said Dan from afar, “with the kind of run-off dog we had. Señor Jack. You had to preach religion to Señor Jack every hundred yards or he’d leave us. Remember? It’s a wonder we fed that common bastard.” Señor Jack was a dog with no talent, loyalty, or affection, a dog we swore would drive us to racquet sports. Dan gave him away in Georgia.

“He found the sage hens.”

“But when we got on the back side of the Little Snowies, remember? He went right through all those sharptails like a train. We should have had deer rifles. A real wonder dog. I wonder where he is. I wonder what he’s doing. Well, it’s all an illusion, a very beautiful illusion, a miracle which is taking place before our very eyes. 1965. I’ll be damned.”

The stagecoach road came in around from the east again, and we stopped: two modest ruts heading into the hills. We released the dogs and followed the road around for half an hour. It took us past an old buffalo wallow filled with water. Some teal got up into the wind and wheeled off over the prairie.

About a mile later the dogs went on point. It was hard to say who struck game and who backed. Sally catwalked a little, relocated, and stopped; then Betty honored her point. So we knew we had moving birds and got up on them fast. The dogs stayed staunch, and the long covey rise went off like something tearing. I killed a going-away and Dan made a clean left and right. It was nice to be reminded of his strong heads-up shooting. I always crawled all over my gun and lost some quickness. It came of too much waterfowling when I was young. Dan had never really been out of the uplands and had speed to show for it.

Betty and Sally picked up the birds; they came back with eyes crinkled, grouse in their mouths. They dropped the birds and Dan caught Sally with a finger through her collar. Betty shot back for the last bird. She was the better marking dog.

We shot another brace in a ravine. The dogs pointed shoulder to shoulder and the birds towered. We retrieved those, walked up a single, and headed for a hillside spring with a bar of bright buckbrush, where we nooned up with the dogs. The pretty bitches put their noses in the cold water and lifted their heads to smile when they got out of breath drinking. Then they pitched down for a rest. We broke the guns open and set them out of the way. I laid a piece of paper down and arranged some sandwiches and tangy apples from my own tree. We stretched out on one elbow, ate with a free hand, and looked off over the prairie, to me the most beautiful thing in the world. I wish I could see all the grasslands, while we still have them.

Then I couldn’t stand it. “What do you mean you’re not going to get better?”

“It’s true, old pal. It’s quite final. But listen, today I’m not thinking about it. So let’s not start.”

I was a little sore at myself. We’ve all got to go, I thought. It’s like waiting for an alarm to go off, when it’s too dark to read the dial. Looking at Dan’s great chest straining his policeman’s suspenders, it was fairly unimaginable that anything predictable could turn him to dust. I was quite wrong about that too.

A solitary antelope buck stopped to look at us from a great distance. Dan put his hat on the barrels of his gun and decoyed the foolish animal to thirty yards before it snorted and ran off. We had sometimes found antelope blinds the Indians had built, usually not far from the eagle traps, clever things made by vital hands. There were old cartridge cases next to the spring, lying in the dirt, 45–70s; maybe a fight, maybe an old rancher hunting antelope with a cavalry rifle. Who knows. A trembling mirage appeared to the south, blue and banded with hills and distance. All around us the prairie creaked with life. I tried to picture the Indians, the soldiers. I kind of could. Were they gone or were they not?

“I don’t know if I want to shoot a limit.”

“Let’s find them first,” I said. I would have plenty of time to think about that remark later.

Dan thought and then said, “That’s interesting. We’ll find them and decide if we want to limit out or let it stand.” The pointers got up, stretched their backs, glanced at us, wagged once, and lay down again next to the spring. I had gotten a queer feeling. Dan went quiet. He stared off. After a minute, a smile shot over his face. The dogs had been watching for that, and we were all on our feet and moving.

“This is it,” Dan said, to the dogs or to me; I was never sure which. Betty and Sally cracked off, casting into the wind, Betty making the bigger race, Sally filling in with meticulous groundwork. I could sense Dan’s pleasure in these fast and beautiful bracemates.

“When you hunt these girls,” he said, “you’ve got to step up their rations with hamburger, eggs, bacon drippings — you know, mixed in with that kibble. On real hot days, you put electrolytes in their drinking water. Betty comes into heat in April and October; Sally, March and September. Sally runs a little fever with her heat and shouldn’t be hunted in hot weather for the first week and a half. I always let them stay in the house. I put them in a roading harness by August first to get them in shape. They’ve both been roaded horseback.”

I began to feel dazed and heavy. Maybe life wasn’t something you lost at the end of a long fight. But I let myself off and thought, These things can go on and on.

Sally pitched over the top of a coulee. Betty went in and up the other side. There was a shadow that crossed the deep grass at the head of the draw. Sally locked up on point just at the rim, and Dan waved Betty in. She came in from the other side, hit the scent, sank into a running slink, and pointed.

Dan smiled at me and said, “Wish me luck.” He closed his gun, walked over the rim, and sank from sight. I sat on the ground until I heard the report. After a bit the covey started to get up, eight dusky birds that went off on a climbing course. I whistled the dogs in and started for my truck.