Colter by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass [Bass, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

There are robins up here in the north woods, not the lazy puff-breasted suburban lawn robins but gaunt, harrow-eyed, dive-bombing shadows that veer away with such suddenness that at first I think they are hawks—northern goshawks, their natural predator. The long shadow’s distance of twilight, and half a second, one second, two seconds at most, is all that separates the robin from the goshawk: and in that moment I can see how the swerve of wings, plunge and plummet of escape, has been carved and sculpted by the pursuit.

Though I love to hunt with friends, these parallel, sometimes overlapping lines of grace, where shadow and object merge and become for some few moments indistinguishable, have come only when Colter and I have been alone in the field. I hate trying to capture these moments of grace with paper and pen—with drying ink on paper. It is like trying to drop a fleeing sharp-tail by throwing a pen at it, or an apple. They usually come on the second or third day of hunting. We’ve both made mistakes. Colter has misbehaved just enough, and then some, to show that he still has spirit, and that it is a partnership: that he is not a mule hitched to a harness. And I will have missed shots.

The moments come in big country. The visual imprint, visual palate, is gold wheat and brown dog, or brown bush and gold dog. The dog is ranging big and steady into the wind, head up, charging, in perfect casts uninstructed by any trainer, and dependent upon the terrain—and the hunter is also moving steadily forward into that wind—walking briskly. The dog has adjusted his casts to fit the hunter’s steady progress.

There is nothing ahead of them but more country—no borders. Everything is behind them: everything. There are two lines of movement—the north-south stride of the hunter and the east-west stitching of the dog—both wanting only one thing, a bird, and wanting it so effortlessly and purely that they come the closest they will ever come to shared language. For several minutes they travel across the prairie like that, indistinguishable from one another in heart, in desire—until finally the scent cone is encountered, and the dog must leave that place in time, that striding harmony, and accelerate, super-charged, into his own greater, vaster capability to desire that bird... The hunter feels a charge of excitement as well, but much of it comes from the dog—the shadow, now—rather than the subject itself, the bird—and the hunter hurries forward to the completion of things, with the dog dashing and darting now, chasing the bird, running it, trying to capture it as a tornado perhaps tries (in flinging up trees and houses and people) to capture the soil.

These are the moments you remember, after the season is over: not whether you got the bird or not, but the approach: the process. The shadow of the thing, more than the thing itself. It’s very strange, very beautiful.

Nothing but prairie, sky, wind. Nothing.

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