North Dakota duck hunt.

In the beginning: Darkness. We drove into the vastness of pre-dawn; truck headlights a tunnel in the void. Down a frozen-hard gravel road, arrow straight with 90-degree turns; farm country. Gravel to grass; two barbed wire gates; snow covered two-track along the edge of a field of standing corn. Dashboard lights show time; oh-dark-thirty, and temperature; eleven degrees. We do not speak much. Darkness.

Past the final gate we unloaded decoys and shotguns, gear bags and extra clothing; the big black lab ran into dark shadow, returned. We were on a high bluff; below us, flat gray of a long lake; to the east a lightening of the sky over North Dakota prairie. A steady breeze off our left; north wind.

“To be of the season you must be in the field, in the wind, in the cold. You need to suffer a bit”

We hauled gear to the lee side of a small point that sliced into the lake, a sliver of sand and marsh grass. North of us big water stirred under a restless wind; to the south and west, calm. We pulled on waders and tossed decoys into the dark water, kept them close to shore for we did not have a boat and would need to retrieve them by wading. It was lighter, not by much but enough to see a small band of ducks flying fast from north to south.

“Bluebills,” Ted said.

Shooting time near, we hurried. It was purposeful effort, moving quickly but with control, no frantic flailing of wasted motion and frittered away energy. We moved to the task. When we finished and the crude blinds were built, excess gear stashed under dead grass, the shotguns loaded and the small stools in place, then and only then did we become still. Only then did we draw a deep breath of November air, turn our backs to the rising breeze and settle into silence.

It was, by our measure, a fine morning. The sky deep in cloud and daylight came with cautious steps, a tentative shift of grays. The day prior we had hunted the same lake, farther north, on a day with thinning cloud and the sunrise sky was tinted with rose, faded orange and lemony yellow; citrus colors in the cold November dawning. We saw ducks that day. It was a good day.

But this morning was different. This morning held promise of change with the chill that had not been there a day earlier. The breeze was gentle at daybreak then grew in power with the rising day, flexed its muscle, showed off its strength in an angry wind that tore gray water to white capped turmoil in barely implied violence and menace. The sound of the wind never ceased.

We saw ducks riding the gale, rapid wingbeats of a determined flight; birds in hurried flight. They were in their element in the November storm, as much a part of the landscape as the wind and the waves and the sky above. They are the spirit of the storm, the essence of the season, the pulse-beat of the oncoming rush to winter.

Some pivoted off the main flow, turned to our decoys, toward calmer water. We would wait, motionless, eyes moving to track the birds and then one of us would say, “Now,” and we would rise and lift the shotguns to shoulder. We took what was given, a mixed bag.

We were waiting for mallards. The currency of a North Dakota duck hunt is measured in the verdant green of the head of a mallard drake, the rich orange of the webbed feet; bonus awarded for a double curl of the tail feathers. The big birds fattened in the agriculture fields north of the Canadian border where the big lands of North Dakota merge with the waves of grain in Manitoba and the border between the two is a line on a map but not a real border for the green headed mallards bent for southern waters.

We had our shots; we got our birds. We took some mallards.

But there was more than the hunt on that day. There was, on that ragged morning the titanic shift of season, autumn falling behind, winter rising above. There was no mercy to the wind, there was no touch of the golden warmth of October, there was, nowhere on that day, any hint of easy times ahead.

You can do many things at the turn of the season but you can do nothing of worth from the comfort of lounge chair and warmth of house and hearth. To be of the season you must be in the field, in the wind, in the cold. You need to suffer a bit. You need to give up comfort. You must feel the chill reach for bone, you must know the power of storm that brings trepidation to your gut, you need know the dark threat of deep water turned to froth by the wind. You must know big weather and you must face the stinging wind and the cold spray. And in it all you must find hope and optimism in birds on the wing as they defy the bitter day. That is the true bounty of the hunter.

We were done by 10 o’clock, limits taken. The ducks still flew, November birds on the storm of season change. We gathered decoys and gear, loaded the truck, turned the heater to high.

Birds were on the move; skeins of geese etched the sky, great V’s overlapping other V’s and wave after wave against the tattered gray cloud and everywhere the sound of their wild calls. On the drive out I wondered why a field was snow-covered while the adjacent one was brown. Then the realization; what I’d taken for snow was in fact thousands of white geese come to ground.

We pulled up at the battered old farm house where we were staying, still chilled from the hunt, walked inside to the heat. Sally called out, “How was it?” And I told her it was wonderful.

Sunrises...

The break of day: Darkness to half-light to full daylight. Night fades; the new day dawns. The span of the new day comes in the time when dark night lifts, slowly, a magician’s cape pulled back to reveal wonder and majesty. In darkness lies mystery; in full light, awareness. The time of dawning spans that gap, unveils all, does so in the steady drift of time from full dark to full light. Daylight rises in October as the last leaves fall; the leaves to the ground, the light of day to the world.

Such is the treasure given to the early riser, delivered to the dawn walkers, offered up to the denizens who find their way to the outdoors in the waning minutes of dark night. With the rise of the curtain of the new day comes the gift to those who are there with the darkness at their back as the eastern sky cracks a thin line of light and that thin line expands into a ribbon and into a band and, in time, into the full span of sky overhead.

In October it comes to the hunters who wait for daybreak, comes to the deer stand sitters or the waterfowlers for such is their sport that they are in the blinds come the end of night and the beginning of the new day.

October is the best month for sunrises; the time dawn comes is reasonable, seven o’clock now. The temperatures are moderate, the leaf color holds treasure unique to that season only. A month ago there was no autumnal color; in another month there will be cold air and bare trees. Now, on the cusp of the seasons, October dawnings give us the alchemy of season and vivid color and a fleeting, all too fleeting, time of dawns best spent afield.

When I leave the house the dark sky is sparked with the glint of stars flung across the darkness like a handful of diamonds tossed above. It is still very dark. It is quiet in the peace and restfulness of a world with the night in slow fade toward the dawn that will come. I drive the requisite distance, park the truck, stand down. There is light smudging the eastern sky. I load the shotgun, walk down the hillside and sit behind a spare screen of spruce branches on the edge of the lake.

My breathing comes slowly to normal. I sit and wait in the shadows of the night.

Ahead of me is flooded backwater of swamp; beyond that the lake. It is still very dark but the lake is silver gray and the sky above is not as dark as it was 15 minutes ago. In my life I have sat in duck blinds at the break of day more times than I can count. Not a one has been wasted.

The world in front of me is dark with shades of black and gray. It stands as an ink drawing where the world is pared down to basic shapes and forms and where shadows have substance. The darkness has a softness to it, the black is not a hard black but more of a blue/black.

The lake is the color of drawn pewter. No wind moves the water to waves. In time the color of the lake will match the color of the sky; in time the oak trees will glow to gold; in time the darkness will lift. But now none of this shows. It is a world of shadow and dark and only the hint of what is to come. We know what will come not because of what we see but because of what we remember. Memories can be as elusive and as nebulous as morning fog but in the time of dawn they give us guidance.

I sit. I wait. My heartbeat slows and I take in the moments of the early day when the dawn is near and time seems to move more slowly and the air more pure. I take in the time of the dawning.

There is a rush of wings that shears the silence, a flash of movement against the gray of the lake. Ducks; two of them. They land out in the lake then turn and swim toward shore to where the oak tree stands and where acorns fall and where the ducks will feed. To where I wait. I see the dark silhouettes of trees, the smudged color of marsh grass, the calm waters of the lake.

The two ducks animate the landscape as they swim toward me. Wood ducks. I can tell that from their shape and their quick-moving manner; wood ducks not mallards. I look at my watch; five minutes till legal shooting hours. I watch the ducks on the water.

They grow wary, hold steady; the ripples they make cease. They have seen me or sensed me or whatever it is that game does that gives them pause. They are motionless. The crucial moment; decision time. Then they swim out, away from me. I ease the shotgun down. I look to my right.

There are three more ducks and they are very close. I stand and raise the shotgun and they take wing. I kill one of them and it falls to the water and lands heavy.

The ripples of water from where the duck has landed spread from the center and then fade to nothing. I walk to the water and pull the bird to shore. It is lighter now and the sun shines on the trees across the lake. There is light coming to the land and the sun light brings color and definition. Gone now the mystery held by darkness; here now the light of day.

The special time has passed. Night has given up to dawn; dawn has yielded to daytime. The sun rises higher. The new day is at hand.

Old dogs...new hunts...

I never had dogs. Always liked dogs; never owned one. Hunted ducks and hunted grouse and never owned a hunting dog. Hunted for years, for decades, for near a lifetime; never owned a dog. Walked the October woods for grouse and hunted the November storms for ducks and never used a dog. Never was tempted. I hunted and I loved hunting and I never had a hunting dog.

Then I met Sally who had never not had dogs. Had them and raised them, trained them and showed them in the ring, lived with dogs all her life and made it clear she’d always have dogs. Would have dogs ahead of me which drew a line in the sand when we were dating and things were heating up, relationship-wise. She owned two dogs when we met and there was never any misunderstanding about where I stood in the hierarchy of her affections.

She loved collies, sweet-mannered dogs, tender and mild and loyal to her and her alone. They were good dogs. They were wonderful companions. They were not, in no stretch of anyone’s imagination, hunters.

When her old show dog champion Jake died it was time for another dog. We got Riika and in that pretty much cemented the fact that Sally and I would stay together. Funny how things work out.

We hunted an old logging road. He started out slow and never got any faster. We walked at his pace.

Riika was of a breed little known in America, a Deutscher Wachtelhund. We were introduced to the breed on a summer evening in a crowded bar in a raucous German restaurant in Pelican Lake. What are the odds of that happening? A longer story there but we’ll put it on hold for another time.

Riika. Where does one start with Riika? Hard-wired to hunt; start with that. Wild as an October wind. Sweet and devoted. Independent of spirit, indomitable of will, smart as a whip, crazy and quirky and willful. Riika could drive me to distraction and swell me with pride and do it both on the same hunt. I could write a lot more about Riika. For now, this will do.

Two years later, Thor, of the same parents but of a completely different personality. Handsome and goofy, long legged, born for distance. I’d run the old logging roads with him and he’d keep up, breathe easy as I gasped. Treed a sow and three cubs on one run and the potential for disaster left me in a panic.

The two would be my loyal hunt dogs and in tandem we’d scour the woods for grouse and woodcock and when need be they’d retrieve downed ducks. I’d fill the freezer with the bounty of the harvest and the twosome would lie at my feet, content, at the end of the day.

It rarely worked that way.

Riika was driven to hunt in a manner that suggested addiction. Thor liked to hunt, loved to hunt, but never lived to hunt as Riika did. We managed, the three of us. We hunted. We had good days and the good days added up to good years. We put up birds; I shot some, missed far more. Neither dog cared; they just liked to hunt.

We hunted for 16-plus years, the three of us. Hunted when the dogs were young and fit and we could go for hours and miles and come back for more the next day. We did that in the prime years.

They got old. They slowed down. They lost their hearing, went stone deaf. They’d get lame; they’d get achy. Between the two of them they survived Lymes and porkie quills and cuts. Riika shrugged off a cancerous tumor, ran like a pup after ACL surgery. But they hunted. We had our days and our days became our seasons and became their legacy.

Riika died in June. It gutted us, it really did. She left a hole in our lives and a gap in our days. The house is emptier now, our lives not as full. Funny what a dog can mean to you. Funny what they bring to your lives.

I did not know if I would hunt Thor again. He’s aged. When he lost Riika he lost his bearing. There is a sadness to him now, a somberness. Maybe it’s just age but I think it’s loss. I watched him all summer and into September. The grouse season opened and we did not go out. We did not hunt the first week or the second or the third. I’ve never gone that late into the season without hunting.

Last week I took Thor to the woods. I hoisted him into the truck and we drove the backroads to where the blacktop turned to gravel and the road widened to a parking area big enough for one truck. I let him out. He seemed good.

We hunted an old logging road. He started out slow and never got any faster. We walked at his pace. He’s old now; so am I. It was near peak color and the sky arched in blue overhead and the old roadway wound through the woodlot. We did not see a single bird.

We walked from the highland to low areas along the creek bed. It was cooler there, darker in the shadows to the side, thick with tag alders and balsam. We worked slowly. Thor did well enough, moving off the road to the thick stuff. But we did not see any birds there.

He was slow on the uphill before the parking area, his stride labored and heavy and he looked at me with tired eyes. I waited for him. We walked across the gravel to the truck and I lifted him up and we drove home. He slept in the passenger seat.

We’ll go out again, Thor and I. We’ll hunt as best we can. We’ll go slow. We’ll go steady. We’ll hunt for the day even as the memories rise up, memories of the seasons and wild birds and days now passed and of Riika.

On wild ducks and contemplation...

If I had a schedule I’d have been running behind. But I did not. I had no firm timeline, only a comfortably vague mission: Get to the lake to hunt ducks around the time the season opened. The season opened at a very specific time, I simply did not care if I was there at that minute.

So I took my time, made coffee, loaded the truck, checked the house, then drove out under the early morning city lights. The dark cab of the truck was lit by the soft glow of the dashboard lights. Radio played; I did not pay it much attention. I sipped the coffee and drove.

It had been one of those weeks and I was tired. My old boy Thor has not been sleeping well. Fifteen-and-a-half years old and he’s showing the decline of an old dog. He wakes frequently now; sometimes midnight, other times at one o’clock or two o’clock or three in the morning. I get up and let him out each time. He’s had a bad week. I felt it. I was dog tired.

I feel anticipation but not the electric hot-wire excitement I did when I was younger. I hunt the opening because of the sense of ceremony that comes with such things. I will hunt without urgency, I will hunt with respect for what I am doing, I will hunt because it is a fall day and the season is about to open and I would not choose to do anything else.

The sky is mottled with cloud as I park the truck and get out. There is no hint of light to the east; dawn will come without fanfare. I carry gear to the lake; load the duck skiff with decoys, eight of them, push the boat out and for a moment I drift free.

There is enough light to make out the shoreline and the trees and to see the gauze of cloud above. From the west comes a kaarump, kaarump sound that on another morning would be thunder of distant storm. Today it’s the muffled bump of shotgun fire; the season has opened, another lake has ducks, another hunter has shots.

Hurrying now at the sound of the shots, I toss the decoys to water, turn the boat to shore and pull it up into the backwater that has flooded the swamp. I have never seen water as high as it is now on this lake. The swamp held spruce and the tamarack for as long as I have known it but the trees drowned in the high water and the trunks stand stark and defeated and will never again bear green.

I wade into knee-deep water, shotgun in hand, gear bag over shoulder. I settle in to a primitive blind, load the shotgun, lay it across my knees and finally sit in the grayness that is slowly giving way to a wan light of a dreary day.

Less than 10 minutes in, a wood duck banks sharply and lands twenty feet from where I am sitting. I never see it coming; the wooded shoreline is dark and shadowy and the bird came from there. There is simply a blur of winged motion and then a splash as the bird lands. It sits on the water. The water is the color of the sky, the color of pewter.

The bird is alert; does it know that it has made a terrible mistake? We share the moment that all hunters know, the moment of decision for an act that cannot be taken back: hunting is about finality, about actions that cannot be undone. There is only the shot or the decision not to take the shot.

Watching the bird across the short span, I consider shooting then say to myself, “There is no sport in this,” and I do not raise the shotgun. In another moment the bird takes wing in a panic and a flurry and it is lost into dark smudge of the distant trees. I do not second guess myself.

I hunt for two hours on the morning of the opening. I see ducks on the wing over distant trees and some come close to the decoys and I kill one of them, a wood duck, and I have other opportunities that do not lead to a shot and I accept that for that is all part of the hunt. There are no certainties in the hunt, there are no guarantees. One takes what one is given, makes the best of that.

The woods and the water and the sky; I sit that morning and take it all in. Fall color is coming on and across the lake I see splashes of orange and yellow, colors crisp and well-defined. But I find my gaze drifting to the water where the colors are reflected but in the reflection they become blurred and shifting. The reflections devolve from the sharp shapes on the trees to smudges of color on the water and I am reminded of the art of Claude Monet, an odd departure on a morning on a northern Wisconsin duck pond.

In art can be redemption but no more than in nature.

There were times in my life when the quality of the hunt was measured by numbers in the game bag at day’s end. No more. On a limit of 6 ducks I take one on that day, a pair the following morning and am good with that. I have enough for a meal. That is enough.

But there is more to the hunt than the kill and on the heavy gray morning of late September the act of the hunt is enough and the weighted game bag is less important than the weight of fatigue and wear that is lifted from me on the day gray sky and wild birds on wing and an opening chapter of another hunt season.

Warmed by firewood, time and time again.

“A big tree standing holds potential and optimism and renewal. A big tree fallen holds loss and history and a finality.”

We never take standing trees. In a standing tree there is wonder and beauty and wildness. There is majesty and history and timelines and bloodline. We let them be, the standing trees. We wait for the windfalls. We wait for the storm-fallen oaks. They will fall, given time.
Given time and given storm and given wild winds trees will fall. We will take those. We will take them for firewood. We will take the big oaks that have stood for the years, which have grown stout at the base and wide at the heights. The big trees define the woodlot, give it substance and might, rise tall and proud and firm, grow mighty and stand in grandeur until a crazy west wind charged with power and chaos comes on the rise and then, in a terrible moment, the tree falls.

Why they fall after years – no, after decades, why they fracture and fall on that one wind, that single storm, why they fall at that particular time we will never know. For a tree to grow tall takes time, takes years, takes a generation and in that span of time the tree sees storms and feels the push of wind and it stands, stands and grows and reaches higher. For a tree to grow wide at the base and tall in the trunk takes decades and in that time the tree does not crack, does not yield to countless storms.

Until it does. Until the howl of storm on a given afternoon or night comes in a fury and a force and then, only then, does the tree falter and fail and fall. It falls in the darkness of day turned to night, falls in the flash of lightning, falls in the scream of the gale, falls, falls, falls to the earth from where it came.

I walk my land in the days after storm and look for the oaks come down. I hope I do not find them for in their fall I feel a sadness. A big tree standing holds potential and optimism and renewal. A big tree fallen holds loss and history and a finality. I do not want to find them but when I do I mark the spot; firewood.

A year ago an August storm rose as in anger and fury and raged across the land and in the aftermath I walked the hills and found oaks downed; six of them, then two more and over the rise another three. Red oak, big at the stump, heavy in the trunk, tangled now at the fallen crown. They were down a slope; it would be a chore to move them up and out.

I made a liar of the man who said firewood warms you twice, once when you cut it, another time when you burn it. Those big oak warmed me when I hauled the chainsaw from truck to downed tree. I was warmed when I wrestled saw to tree trunk, warmed when I carried the oak bolts up the hill to stack them over winter. I broke a sweat when I loaded the truck, again when I unloaded them and piled them up.

I was warmed when I turned the cut bolt upright and swung the splitting maul in an arc that started high as a sapling stands and thundered at the downside of the arc into the circle of the upright oak. Warmed again when I stacked the splits, one by one, into the firewood shed I’d built (warmed with that effort as well).

The Swedish-built maul cleaved the wood; the air held the sour scent of damp oak, russet brown/orange in the summer light. The grain was straight and pure and each split piece held a beauty of wood.

I never did what I thought I should do which is to study the cut trunk and count the rings and tally up the years it stood. I never did that. It would bring only a sterile number to a ledger. Better, I think, to consider the tree that stood in strength and majesty that is not measured by numbers but by heart.

I split the wood. Maul met wood; the whole of log sheered, became fragmented. The summer breeze cooled the sweat on my brow. It was good work.

In time the splits will dry. In time the wood will lose the life blood of the sap that held it. In time the wood will be ready to burn. And at that time I will be warmed again, by the heat of burned oak, well seasoned, aged and dried and ready for the spark. I will sit by the wood stove on a chill November night and the fire will crack and hiss and the glass door of the stove will show ruby red embers.

Outside snow will fall and the wind will sound but inside the fire will comfort me and the oak again will warm me.

In the cold of November I will be warmed by the fallen trees of August storm. One more time.

Summers passage and more...

“The passage of the nighthawks carries the passage of summer and so I wait for them as the evening sky fades in shades of blue toward the darkness.”

I sit in the dusk and wait. The back yard is shadowed; the sky holds early evening light. It is the time that leads to sundown, the transition when late afternoon becomes early evening; then full evening; then darkness.

I sit in the back yard and wait for nighthawks to fly. This is the time they move on the high thermals, swooping and arcing, flocks of them moving inexorably south. I wait for them; surely they will come. This is the time of their migration and with their flight, summer ends. The nighthawks bring the closure. When the nighthawks migrate summer is no more, it is gone with their flight.

So I wait for the nighthawks on late summer evenings when seasons hang in balance and the nighthawks will tip the scale. I wait for them. I wait for the changing.

They come in the evening, a solitary bird, then another, and more. They stream across the sky and late day sun will catch them in its glow. The sun will set and still the birds will fly. In time the sky will go dark and I will not be able to see the birds. I will not care. By the time of darkness I will have seen what I need.

I wait. I sit on a small bench with a backrest that is angled back and my eyes lift to the sky. I wait for the birds. I wait one evening, a second, a third. The birds do not come.

A friend tells me, “I saw them over Lake George last night. They were so low I could see the white on their wings and throats.” But I do not see them. They do not fly over the houses and the streets of town. I wait.

I wait in a sense of sadness for the season passing, a season too short but one that must pass as all things in life pass. I feel a loss at the passing of all seasons.

I pity those who live where the seasons merge into a sameness and the only change is heralded by the sound of pages flipping on a calendar. I would rather feel the sorrow of a season passing for only in that can one truly appreciate the season, know that it is transitory; best to treasure each day for it will not last. In this land of northern woods one knows the seasons, knows them with an intimacy when they are here, feels a longing when they pass. I would rather feel that than not.

The passage of the nighthawks carries the passage of summer and so I wait for them as the evening sky fades in shades of blue toward the darkness. This week the birds do not come, not to me.

The season will flow past whether I see the birds or not. I know that. August will give way to September and with that summer will pass into autumn. I know that. I know also that we have our traditions, our markers of the seasons. I know that one of mine is the flight of the nighthawks on evenings of late summer. Summer will fade no matter that I see the birds above. But I want to see the nighthawks. It is my tradition. So I watch the evening sky.

But there is more. I know that the melancholy I feel in the shadow of August is not simply for the season that slides to memory. I know in the coolness of the August night that it is not simply for the passage of nighthawks and summer that I feel somber. It is for now distant days and times now long gone.

It is, the sadness and a sense of loss, for the nights of summer times decades gone now. When I was younger the nighthawks were part of summer nights in this town. They were part of the hot evenings of July and August when I grew up. In those nights the nighthawks soared overhead in the summer heat. They would sweep and dive and their flights would crisscross the dark sky as if they were tending the warp and weave of the fabric that made up the crazy quilt of my youth.

We would watch them in flight, young kids with upturned faces, wide-eyed in wonder. The white feathers of their wings gave every appearance as if a gap in the feathering and until I knew better I assumed they had feathers missing. They would appear out of the darkness over the light of the city then bank a sweeping turn and disappear in to the dark night again.

But more: there was the call of the nighthawks in flight and in the darkness of the summer night I would hear their cries and know that the birds were there. They would ride the night and their calls would echo.

Now they are gone. I don’t know when I last heard a nighthawk in summer.The nights are quiet save for the humdrum sounds of a small town in Northern Wisconsin. The nighthawks no longer fly and call and define the nights of summer. They are no longer here except in silent m igration.

It is for that I feel the melancholy of late summer and wait for the nighthawks. It is in that passing of those now long-past summers that I feel a sadness. Those days are gone and the time when nighthawks found a home here is gone and kids today will never know their calls. It is a different world now.

So I sit in the backyard in the evenings one more time waiting for the flight of nighthawks. In the gathering darkness I sit with the memories of summers long gone. I wait for birds. I wait for the sign of summer gone. I wait for the memories.

I wait for the call of the nighthawks but I know it will not come.

Bicycling the endless road...

I have ridden the roads so often that I can close my eyes and see them in my mind; the rise and fall, the turns and the corners, the blacktop and the dusty gravel. The roads of summer are etched in memory in fine-lined calligraphy that writes the tale of summer bicycling in the same way that the ragged old two track lanes define my memory of bird hunts and the white-frosted ski trails bring cool memory on hot summer days.

The trails and roads are all connected in my life’s storyline. The autumns written in frosty mornings behind Riika and Thor; the winter days of bitter cold etched in sinuous ski trails; my time on all the trails no longer measured in years but in decades. All memory now but all connected; there is no gap in the spool of road and trail, only a single continuous thread.

No idea why that thought rides with me on a hot July morning. I have no reason to wonder why my mind goes there, it simply does. That is a fact and a feature and a joy of meditations on days of long distance effort where the clutter of day-to-day is lost and the mind is freed to flow and go where it may. One never knows what pathways the mind will follow.

I pedal the blacktop, swing a right-hand turn and ahead of me see a road grader: road work. The blacktop is ripped to gravel and rock under the blade and I head to the far left where there is a narrow lane of firm dirt and I ride there, pass the grader, up the rise of hill.
At the top of the hill the soft mix of gravel and stone has been packed firm and I ease the bike to that, relax and pedal smooth and easy. Ahead is a flagman, yellow safety vest gleaming in the greenery, and I pull even with him and stop. I ask him when they might lay down blacktop and he tells me maybe the next day.

We talk of the weather. I tell him that every day I’ve wanted to ride this month I’ve been able to; it has rained mostly at night. He tells me that he’s not missed a single day of work in July; the weather has been perfect for road work. He seems a bit miffed by this, not having had extra time off. I, on the other hand, am pretty satisfied, not having missed a ride. The glass half empty or the glass half full.
Then we go our separate ways, he back to work, me to the ride that I know from memory and time and my mind wanders on the long roadway of rides past.

The bicycle I ride is essentially unchanged in operation since the century before I was born. Put power to pedal; rotate the front gear ring; pull chain and connect to rear gears; wheel turns and bicycle moves forward. Basic. Simple. A system; all connected, one part affects all others. Nothing has changed, only modification of basic design.

Nothing of the soul of the ride has changed from the days of my wobbly attempts on a two-wheeled kids Schwinn; nothing of consequence that is. The bicycle is still the magic carpet come to fruition in clear air on summer days.

I ride on the same roads from when I was a kid, ride on a bicycle the lineage of which I first knew on Keenan Street with my dad pushing me and telling me to pedal, pedal, pedal and then letting go and there I was, on my own, riding the bike!

I rode the sidewalks to the corner and then around the block and then across town and then to country roads. I rode to feel the wind and to feel the road and to feel the freedom.

I rode at college in Madison and I lived for Friday when I had only one class and the class was Spanish Language and I hated it, hated every minute. It was supposed to be easy; it was not, not for me. But on Friday I’d wake up and if it was sunny and mild I’d cut class and ride 40 miles or 50 miles or longer and leave the wasteland of Spanish class in the dust.

If it was cold or rainy I’d slink off to class, to the dreaded morass of foreign language and hope I could manage to make a passing grade. I took four semesters of Spanish and decades later visited Spain and remembered one word. But I remember the rides.

Now I ride a modern bicycle and wear a modern helmet. On the helmet is a tab about the size of my thumb and in the guts of it is a GPS and it links to the cell phone in my pocket. Every couple minutes it sends a signal that shows up on the computer Sally works on and an orange dot blips on a map and with that she can tell where I am riding. If I take a hard fall and don’t respond the little unit sends a signal to my phone which then calls Sally with a message that I’m down and not responding and links a GPS location so she knows exactly where I am.

I wear the helmet with the GPS device which costs all of fifty bucks and I ride a modern version of the original bicycle design which cost a lot more. I like the bicycle and the helmet very much. But I ride today as I rode as a kid, for the feel of the wind in my face and the joy of freedom on old roads on the long winding path that goes back to the sidewalk on Keenan Street when my dad pushed me off and said “Pedal!” And I did. And I have never stopped.

Summer heat; summer storm

In times of summer heat the margins of the day are when we can find comfort and solace. The hours after daybreak bring a renewal; sun rises but heat does not match its arc. You know it will; you will not escape it. But at daybreak when the morning sun holds promise but not the burden of swelter, that time the day is at its best. The freshness of the early hours of a summer day will be the richest that the day will bring and you know that as you stand in the backyard and breathe air that seems more fully charged with life-sustaining flow.

Come evening and shadows cover the yard; come sunset and the heat of the day cracks and lifts its heavy blanket off the land; come evening and you move again toward coolness and as darkness falls there is hope for better times.

It is the middle hours of the day that bring oppressive heat, humidity and despair. One is limited in what one can do, energy drains and enthusiasm with it. In oven of midday the fire of summer burns hottest and the glory of the morning is parched.

Last week the heavy weight of summer came down as if a penance for who knows what transgression we had committed. Heat shimmered a mirage; humidity simmered as if a pot brought to a near boil. The sun pretended no mercy.

But that was midday, that was the afternoon; the mornings still breathed life into the world. I rode bicycle in the coolness of morning shade on back roads and gravel fire lanes. I rode easy in deference to my discouraging lack of fitness. I rode slow because I could not ride any other way. I rode easy and told myself it was a choice.

It was not a choice, it was the stark reality of where I was on that day after a season of precious little time in the saddle and no power in the legs. I did not care. One gets out of riding what one puts in. Too few miles equals too little power in the wheelhouse.
I ride every July in the shadow of the flickering images on TV coverage of the Tour de France where riders spend 21 days in efforts that defy logic, climb mountains indescribably steep, ride mile after mile, day after day and in so doing accomplish the most basic magic trick of the elevated athlete no matter the sport: They make an impossibly difficult task look easy.

Those riders and the images of those riders are in the shadowy corners of my mind in July as I bear down on the pedals, drooped over the handlebars and searching for power that is not there. My legs feel as if they will shatter and I sit up and ease off and know that the hill that I have just crawled up amounts to a wart on the endless road the Tour racers travel.

In the evening as the night comes down and the temperature seeps from the air I watch the TV replay of the Tour even though I view it now with a cynic’s eye after the years of the sport so sullied by the cheaters and the dopers and the Lance Armstrongs of the cycling world who cheated their way to false glory and in so doing made pond scum look like an elevated life form in light of their craven ways.

I watch regardless, watch and file away the images in my mind until the next time I am on the bicycle and put my puny power to the pedals and make my sluggish way along the back roads on a July morning when I know that I am out in a best part of the long summer day and no matter what, I’d not trade places.

I sulk during the heat of the afternoon and wait for evening and the coolness that it will bring, wait for the shadows to cast across the yards and the sun to drop below the trees. I wait to trade afternoon’s heat for the comfort that the evening will bring. That is the way it is supposed to be.

Until last Friday when the sultry heat and overbearing humidity built all day and dusk did not bring absolution from the day’s fever. When the shadows of evening did not fall to the parched ground but instead rose to the sky and darkened in as if building layers of gray, one layer over the other, building and building to charcoal darkness above. When clouds dipped and rose and formed the odd shape called mammatus, a formation so striking and so rare that one lifted eyes skyward to marvel at it. In the gathering under the bruised sky someone looked at the clouds and said, “Those clouds mean trouble.”

Then lightning flashed and thunder roared; hail pelted down hard like birdshot and rain fell in torrents. But in town, no wind. The rain and the hail fell under a night dark and air dead-calm. There was not a hint of breeze as rain lashed the city streets of Rhinelander, a staight-down falling deluge.

We were fortunate, those of us in the city. Not far away the wind roared like a dragon and trees snapped and fell and in the blackness of the storm the only sound was the train-engine howl of the wind unchained and without mercy and the air was filled with the scent of rain and raw wood of downed trees and the night held primal fear.
It passed.The storm passed as all bad times do.

It was cooler in morning; the air fresh But that July morning brought not redemption and hope, dawned instead for many on a new reality and a world that had forever changed in the fury of the night storm and the ancient howl of wind untamed on an evening when a best time the day became the worst.

On summer and Germany...

The Eisbach is flowing full on a Sunday morning in downtown Munich, surging under the bridge, a whitewater torrent under the rising sun.  The river is narrow and fast moving, frothing white.  Just off the street it rises up into a standing wave, the crest turning back against the current, spume filling the air.  Everywhere is the sound of moving waters’ unmistakable throaty roar.

Along the sides of the river stand black-clad men and an occasional woman, short surfboards under their arms as if commuters waiting for a bus.  One at a time they step from the bank onto their board and ride the wave, back and forth and back and forth, cutting inside the crest, edging the short boards into the rush of water.  When they have had their ride (and nobody is hoggish about taking too much time) they relax, give up their boards to the rush of water, and the wave lifts them and their boards up and over and they fall into the water as if a baptism.

The next surfer takes their turn.

“Ice brook”, someone answers when asked with Eisbach means.  “Ice brook. The water is very cold.  It comes from the Alps”.

We are on the first day of a visit to Munich.  It is early summer and all of Europe is sweltering under a heat wave.  It is cool next to the Eisbach but by afternoon temperatures will top 90. We watch the surfers in their neoprene wetsuits, jet black and wet and I am reminded of penguins albeit tall and thin penguins.  The surfers do not speak or if they do their words are lost to the thunder of the rapids.

Then we are back into the car, a small group of us, and the driver heads to the edge of town where a European outdoor trade show has opened for its first day.

The show is the reason we have come, Sally and I and a handful of others from the United States, an opportunity to view the European outdoor sports market.  The show, Outdoor by ISPO, is held on the grounds of the former airport where terminals and service buildings have been converted to exhibition space.  This week the old airport, where once travelers took flight, is home to flights of fancy for travelers for whom hiking or boating or bicycling are their wings.

 We ease into the show like cautious drivers on foreign roads.  Two weeks earlier I worked a similar show in Denver, familiar turf for me though the show was larger in terms of number of vendors (about 1400 vs 1000 in Munich) and attendees (estimated at 25,000 vs 22,000).  The Denver show was busy and crowded and had the feel of walking the midway of a bustling county fair, a jostling crowd, a slightly fevered pitch in the air.  Munich was different.

The show floor was roomy and relaxed, business to be done, make no mistake, but a calmer, more genteel feel to it.  We walked the show where we saw a mix of European brands not available in the States along with brands with worldwide distribution, familiar names and faces.  If the Denver show pulsed with a mix of enthusiasm and unadulterated hype the Munich show flowed easy and smooth.  It was an enjoyable contrast.

Come evening we were back in the heat of Munich, walking along the banks of the Eisbach in a 900-acre parkland, the English Garden, where late afternoon shadows reached out over crowds that had taken to the park to avoid the heat on the city afternoon.  Swimming in the river is prohibited, a ban ignored by dozens who took to the waterway to beat the oppressive swelter.

We walked to a beer garden located, improbably enough, near a tall Chinese tower, built pagoda style, that loomed over the garden as darkness fell.  On Sunday evening the beer garden, one of the most famous in Munich, was packed.   The convivial crowd downed towering mugs of beer, tore into pretzels and dined, some of them at least, on pork knuckles. There seemed no end to the beer nor, when one thinks of it, no end to the capacity of the assembled to drink it.

The days of Munich fell into a routine; some time at the show, some time wandering the old Bavarian city.  World War II was not kind to Munich; aerial bombing destroyed much of it and the city that stands today is mix of old and new. We found the German Hunting and Fishing Museum, struck up a conversation with the man at the desk, found we had common ground: We have both owned German hunting dogs, the Wachtelhund, our Thor and Riika. We finger-flip through cell phone photos, compare photos, tell tales of hunt dogs.

The museum houses dozens of mounted animals, a collection of ancient rifles and spears, all under the high rising antlers of elk and deer and a full skeleton of a massive Irish Deer with antlers spreading high and wide on a huge frame, a colossus of a long-extinct deer lost ages past to the fog of time.

In a back corner an oddity; several Wolpertinger, Bavarian fictional animals best described, after all is said and done, as a German variant of the American Jackalope, fantasy creatures of a taxidermists crazy dreams; winged rabbits bearing fangs and antlers.  They are vaguely unsettling, creatures of nightmare and mystery.  They are, after some contemplation, not dissimilar in their creation to our Hodag.

The high temperatures break two days into our stay under a hard rain storm that brings thunder and lightning to the city. The morning air is cooler. We work the show for two more days, wander the streets of Munich, hear the peal of their historic Glockenspiel; eat good German food.

We leave Munich on a July morning before the town wakes. From the passing car window a brief sight: The Eisbach gleaming like quicksilver in the morning light.

On Dogs and Memories...

Where does one start? The beginning? Or the end? In the early days or with the long fade come late? There seems no middle ground: Beginning or end?

I will start at the end; Riika died. Our old girl of wild heart and crazy soul, of passion and love, of independence and devotion and all that a dog can bring. Riika died.

Seventeen years and three months old nearly to the day. How could we have been so fortunate?

Now to the beginning, now that the end has been told.

Seventeen years ago Sally held Riika, gray and white with startling blue eyes, held her up and made sweet talk to her. Riika locked eyes with her and then growled at her! Sal, wide-eyed with surprise, pulled back in shock, said, “This one’s trouble.”

She was going to be our hunting dog, born and bred of German stock, a breed virtually unknown in the United States: Deutscher Wachtelhund, which translates roughly to German Quail Dog. Descriptions note they have the nose of a bloodhound, a hunting capability for all game. They live, according to the book, 12 to 14 years.

She was a beautiful puppy; she really was. I wasn’t the only one saying that. She set her independent path from the beginning with a deliberate determination to ignore any instruction. Our feeble entreaties to come went unheeded. I was despondent. She went her wild way for two full years as if to show us who was in charge and then, only then, did she begin to obey us.

In the early years I said, “I never want another dog” because she drove me mad with frustration, left me weak with despair, with her independent spirit and willful disregard for my pathetic commands. I’d come home from a walk in the woods with a splitting headache from being with her, and say, “I never want another dog.”

Now I think, “I never want another dog” because they could never measure up to Riika.

She was to be our hunter. She became so much more.

She hunted at six months, nose to the ground reading scent. She found birds older dogs missed, ran wild as a November storm, chased after rabbits and deer. My vision of a finely paired team, me and my loyal obedient dog, was left blown to the wind on the clear October air like a fallen leaf once blazing in glory now turning to duff.

I had no ability to train dogs; she had endless talent. We worked it out. We worked it out in the glory of autumn woods and on wind-blown cold water lakes. I stood aside and followed her lead. We worked it out.

We worked it out in the woods of September when she got scent and ran to the next zip code, ran out of sound and sight and reason. She always came back. Came back on a bitter cold New Years Day when Sally and I stood in a stand of solemn trees that offered no judgment and heard her bark fade away, stood there for a long time in wolf country. She came back.

Came back always, panting hard, blooded from brambles and brush. Came back to us until the next time scent’s siren call reached to her soul.

The stories we could tell. The times we could recount. The memories she gave to us.

She was never subservient. She did not beg for table food; to beg was beneath her. Riika would barter with us. She’d walk the house looking for something to give us, a shoe, a toy, a sock. But not just the first thing she’d come to. She’d tip over the box of dog toys, paw through them and finally, only when she found the special gift that was right for that day, would she pick it up and carry it to us and offer it up for food.
It was not an act of begging, that was for lesser dogs. It was a transaction carried out between peers: I will pay for my food by giving you something of value. I will not beg. That was Riika.

Some dogs like to hunt, and some love to hunt. Riika lived to hunt. In that, there is a world of difference.

She came to love the fall days when frost etched the grasses, the oppressive heat of summer gone to ghosts. She loved chill mornings in crystal Wisconsin air with the sweet scent of fern and leaf underfoot. She would run ahead of me into the glow of the rising sun, and the sun would backlight her silhouette, and for that moment, it would seem as if she was afire, a blazing star in the shadowed woods.

We could have lost her years ago. We could have lost her to wolves during her times of wild flight. We should have lost her to the cancer the vet removed. We should have lost her to age.

She had ACL surgery; they said she was too old but she ran like the wind that fall. She tangled with porkies, six, eight, ten times in surgery. She went stone deaf and taught me how to hunt in her silent world.

We could have lost her. Now we have.

She went on her own terms, a slow fade as kidneys failed and perhaps the cancer returned. She went when it was time; we never had to call the vet for the needle. She died in peace on the floor next to the bed.

We had a routine. Sally and I would have dinner with Riika under the table. After dinner I’d go to the living room to read. She’d follow and lie next to me. A month ago, she walked easy. Weeks ago, she limped. In the end, I carried her.

Now I sit to read, but the book slides to my lap, and my mind turns to Riika, to Riika and seventeen years we had, so many memories. I sort through them in my thoughts in the dark night.

It’s going take some time.

Mishaps large and small in Boundary Waters.

Driving north out of Two Harbors on a long, sweeping downhill curve I take a causal glance at the speedometer; it is holding steady at 115 mph, give or take, which seems odd.  I have a long-standing indifference that borders on irreverence for motor vehicles to the extent that the ones I own are rarely capable of excess speeds.  At 115 I’d be fearful of hardware falling off; wheels, trim pieces or, on this trip, a 17-foot Kevlar canoe headed for the Boundary Waters.

I pull the truck to the side of the road and turn the engine off.  The speedometer needle stays locked at 115, at a dead stop.

What to do?  Seventy five miles more to Grand Marais and times a’wastin’.  Sally says, “I think I can download a speedometer app.”  She fiddles with the phone.  I start the truck and ease onto the blacktop and point it north.  The speedometer quivers like a dog’s leg during a dream, flickers to life, seems to catch itself, then bottoms out at 140 mph.

We limp into Grand Marais, cell phone on the dash, the speedometer app showing speed.  I find a motel, turn off the truck and we settle in for the evening.

In the light of the new day the speedometer inexplicably returns to normal.  We dine at “South of the Border” which for some reason I associate with Mexico (the old song refrain, “South of the border/down Mexico way” spinning in my head).  Sally says, “How about Canada?” that border only 40 miles to the north.  Oh, right.

I have fresh Lake Superior herring (“They were wigglin’ yesterday at this time” the waitress assures me) with eggs. We leave town and drive an hour on the Gunflint Trail and pull into a parking lot.

There are only four cars in the lot, and as we load the canoe, a solo canoeist paddles to the landing heading home.  He’s from the Twin Cities area, been out five nights.  I ask how the bugs are. “Bad enough, “ he replies. He’s wearing a full head net; I probably did not need to ask that question.

We clamber into the canoe and push off, Sally paddling in the bow, me in the stern.  It is a mild, late spring morning.  We paddle south, portage once, paddle, portage again. We will portage the canoe six more times that day, and we will see only two other canoes.

Sally has been nursing a bad back for over a month; she moves cautiously, picks her path carefully on the portages.  We did not know until that morning if she could paddle and portage at all, did not know if she could even make the trip.  We find a rhythm that all paddlers look for, the steady metronomic rise and fall of paddles to water.  Her back loosens up. The canoe under load moves smoothly.  We make good time.

We reach Long Island Lake mid-afternoon and make camp on a high rock outcrop that faces west, into the breeze.  We have had swarms of gnats most of the day, non-biting but annoying; the wind will keep them at bay.  We set the tent, gather firewood, cook steak and asparagus.  We sit in our folding chairs and look over the lake. We do not see another person.

Sally sips a tumbler of sake; I do the same with Scotch.  Sun sets, loon calls; then darkness falls, and silence.  We sleep in peace.

We paddle north to start the second day and then cut west toward Snipe Lake. The portage path is nasty, steep, rocky and unforgiving.  I carry my pack to the end, return for the canoe, puzzled I’d not seen Sally. I find her moving slow on the path. She drops her pack. She had lifted it off balance at the portage landing and her back has given out.

And that, as they say, is that.

We sit on the ground on the rough portage trail and have a heart-to-heart talk.  Go on, rest up, see how things look in the morning?  Or cut our losses and head out?  We talk it over.  Then I pick up the pack and we go forward to Snipe Lake.

Snipe Lake is a charming lake, small and lovely with massive rock faces and walls hinting at ancient drama and fury as the earth formed and rock heaved in tumult upward to the sky. It is early afternoon and the lake is empty of people.  We take the northernmost campsite on high, stony ground.

We lounge the afternoon, fish an hour later in the day, catch a handful of small but spirited northern pike.  We cook dinner and watch the sun go down to a red horizon.  In the dark of the night, my inflatable sleeping pad fails and leaks and I lie in discomfort on hard ground of rock and root.

At sunrise, the lake is mirror-calm; blue sky and mixed clouds reflect on the water.  A pair of loons swims close; inspects us.  The wooded shoreline shows the seasonal tint of spring green under early morning sun.

We have breakfast and talk over coffee.  Sally’s back is not better, not even close; my back aches after the bad night’s sleep.  It is a short discussion; the answer obvious.  We load the canoe, paddle east and find the portage.

It is a fine morning.  Small mayflies take wing; painted turtles bask in the sun; three goldeneyes fly over, wings whistling in the spring air.  We paddle slowly; there is no hurry.  We are back at the truck by noon.

We’d waited a year for this trip, planned on five, maybe six nights; got two.  In hindsight, maybe Sally didn’t have a chance; the Boundary Waters are an unforgiving place for therapy on a weakened back.  But this as well:  better to try than to stay safe at home; better two nights in the company of loons and wildness than none at all.

Solo paddling in the Boundary Waters

A thin plume of campfire smoke rose on the far shore, arrow-straight, gray-white against blue sky of morning. Campers; late breakfast. I paddled southeast and found the portage trail. I unloaded the canoe, shouldered the pack and turned away from the now distant smoke and walked into an area remote and wild.

Frost Lake was behind me; the Frost River ahead. I had a canoe and camp gear. Nothing else. I was alone.

I had started out a day earlier and paddled south, crossing half a dozen lakes, portaging over narrow rugged trails, setting up camp in the evening on Frost Lake. It rained in the late afternoon but the weather broke by evening. The skies cleared; the temperature dropped. I had frost on my gear at daybreak. I drank coffee, watched the smoke rise across the lake then loaded the canoe and paddled to the Frost River.

I was in the heart of the Boundary Waters, the unspoiled wilderness that sprawls across the north country of Minnesota. I was in country I’d never seen before, paddling waters I’d never set a paddle to, making my way in a long loop through lakes and rivers and woods. I had no idea what to expect. It was rough country, wild and untamed, land of hardy spruce, boggy lowlands, sheer rock outcrops and water, everywhere water; lakes and rivers, swamp and flooded lowland.

Spring had come late to the northland. I found remnant patches of snow and on one portage trail struggled over 100 yards in rotting snow, boot-high in places, slippery and unforgiving. The trees were just beginning to green up; the land was stark, the colors muted.

Late snowmelt and spring rains left water levels high. The lakes were full, the portages sloppy with muck and puddled water. Short sections of river connected many of the lakes and the portages skirted the edges. The rivers between lakes were charged with runoff and rushed like wild broncos unfettered and free and running for the horizon that only they can see. The sounds of the rapids rose into the air and the current surged, heady with foam and fury. I could paddle the length of a lake and then pause and listen; the roar of moving water would tell were the portage would be.

The Frost River flowed on a meandering course broken only in short sections by the fast-moving water. Beaver thrived in the river but the floods of spring had washed away most of their dams. They were busy, the beavers, and new dams broke the flow, six or eight or ten of them along the daylong stretch I paddled. Each was small enough that I could hold the canoe straight, dig the paddle deep and paddle over them. Later in the season they will be fully built and far less accommodating for paddlers.

This is wild land, wilderness in as true a sense as we can find today. This is land where unbroken forests reach the horizon, where lakes and rivers dominate the landscape, all under the high, boundless sky. This land is special, it is unique, it is rare. Which is why, of course, we go there. To paddle the lakes of the Boundary Waters is to take more than a canoe trip, it is to take a journey to lands the likes of which we know only from history books and wild dreams in nights of restless sleep. If George Mallory climbed Everest, “Because it’s there” there is some of that in the paddlers of the Boundary Waters as well.

I paddled the Frost River, crossed lakes of all sizes, portaged time and time again, nearly three dozen over four days. Each portage became routine: land the canoe, unload the packs, shoulder the big pack and carry it to the end, then return and repeat, this time with the canoe. The portages were rock-studded and slick with mud, climbing steep hill and crossing rocky outcrops. They were tiresome. They were difficult.

Once I heard the low howl of wolves. I saw sign of wolf and moose; an occasional warbler and jay, mergansers and goldeneyes. But never another person. I was truly alone.

I camped the second night on Mora Lake, paddled the third day from Mora through Little Saganaga, through smaller lakes to camp on Gillis Lake. I made camp on a high pitch of rock facing east. I unloaded gear, set the tent, cooked over a small stove; fire blazed orange, pot steamed and water boiled. It would freeze that night, temperatures dropping near 30, perhaps high 20s. I would not sleep well. The next morning there would be frost on the canoe and the gear; the puddled portage trail would be covered in skim ice. When I walked through it it cracked like crystal.

But I did not know what the morning would bring as sundown came to Gillis Lake. I knew only that I was alone in the wildness of the Boundary Waters. One cannot feel full of himself when sitting on the shore of a wilderness lake after not having seen a living soul all day and without even the remote sound of humankind. It was me, a speck of humanity, loons my only company under the shadow of sundown and in the sweet scent of cedar.

The near-full moon rose over the mirror-calm lake. The wind had gone down with the sun; the lake calm; the silence profound and real. A pine stood tall, a spire in the sky; the moon seemed caught in its branches. Loon called, the sound rose like a spirit then fell away; the night silent once again. First stars showed bright in the growing darkness of the sky.

I sat motionless as night fell. There was nothing to say, nothing to do, nothing except to take in the vastness of it all. I went to bed early and slept well, woken only by the crazy call of the loons.

Listing into action...

I am a keeper of lists. Mundane lists: a “To Do” list, one on my work desk, one at home. Day-to-day stuff: “rake the yard;” “dogs to Vet;” “pay bills.” Lists of the piddly little stuff that’s easy to overlook. I keep them handwritten on small paper tablets and take no small amount of satisfaction from lining them out as I complete each task.

When the list is fully lined out or, more often the case, dog-eared and worn, I tear it off, transfer any unfinished tasks to a new sheet of paper and start all over again.

The “unfinished tasks” parts of the lists are the ones that nag at me. They generally start with the word “clean” or “organize” as in “clean the garage” or “organize the office.” Those get carried over to the extent that if I were to go to a print shop and have To Do lists printed up in a standardized form I might was well have them as part of the form.

Each form might be numbered or use bullet points to delineate tasks and the first lines on each page may well read: “clean the workshop”, “organize the basement” or “clean the basement after you organize it.” They’d stand as reminders both of tasks to accomplish as well as a mocking notice of things undone, a run-it-up-the-flagpole-for-all-to-see sign of failure.

Those are the small lists I keep, minnows in the big pond of true lists. The big lists, those are another thing altogether. The big lists deal with the deep water of life. The Deer Camp List. The Birkie List. The Travel List. The Boundary Waters List. Those lists have some heft to them.

They all started small and then grew over the years in a manner almost organic as with a garden planted and nurtured that matures over the seasons. I tend to those lists as a gardener coaxes life from thin, hard dirt; carefully, patiently, filled with optimism. The big lists take life, grow, branch out, bear fruit.

The big lists never stop growing and changing. I modify them, prune them back if need be, add more when the need arises. I stare at them on the computer screen where they live in a digital mulch. I consider each line on each list; what to keep, what to trim back, what new to add.

The lists are never finished. They are alive and germinating. They stand in boring black and white columns on a computer spreadsheet until the day when I need them and they rise up like a spring flower pushing skyward through mud and leaf.

The week of the deer season I open the Deer Camp List and its first cousin, The Deer Camp Menu List. I print the lists and spend days digging into my storage area digging out blaze orange gear that sees the light of day for nine days of the entire year. [Memo to Self: Add “Organize Hunt Gear” to my To Do List.]. I parse each item, pack it, line out on the list: Choppers; Big Boots; Blaze Orange Kromer. I smile in satisfaction.

Each list brings memories of hunts and canoe trips and ski times. The Boundary Waters List has several columns and one of them is labeled: Solo Trip 2017. I went alone that year and the list addresses that. But it also brings back the memory of that year when Fenway was younger and stricken with Blasto and very sick and at the eleventh hour Sally said, “I need to say home with the pup. Go alone.” And I did.

Solo Trip 2017: the list brings memories of those days with a critically ill dog and a determined vet and Sally and I awake at night with worry.

The Birkie List is more than a simple ledger. For years, after each race, I’d add notes of what the weather was like, what I used for skis, how the race went. So I know that in 2004 I was at a buying show and flew home on Friday night; got in at 10:30. I was on the road at 5:20 the next morning to make the race on time.

In 2007 I overdressed and was too warm. In 2011 it was 12 below at the start; I never warmed up. I had slow skis in 2013; a cold day on new snow in 2014; had fast skis in 2016.
Big Lists. Big memories. Both.

The past week deep was spent in the world of a Big List: the Boundary Waters List. There is a new column on the list: Solo Trip 2019. I’ll go it alone this time, not because of sick dogs, just to do it. I worked on the list all week. Old lines carried forward, new ones added; the garden of the list trimmed back some, filled out with new growth, changing.

I printed the list, looked for each item [Memo to self: Add “Organize Camping Gear” to To Do List]. I piled the gear on a table, put a neat check mark next to each one on the list. I found everything I needed.

I packed it all up; the down sleeping bag and jacket in a waterproof bag; cook gear and food in separate containers; rain jacket and camera gear in a day pack. I used a yellow highlighter for each piece of gear on the list. The list is four pages long.

Then I dumped everything out and repacked it, double checked the list, wrote a small “OK” next to everything on every line. I stood back, list in hand: Solo Trip 2019. Ready to go.
The lists are a foundation on which I build. The lists are a link to the past, a nod to the present. My lists are my tree; a solid trunk with spreading branches lifting skyward toward dreams, the fruit borne in memories rich, full and sustaining.

Of treasures large and small...

The famous cherry blossoms of springtime are two weeks gone when our plane touches down at Reagan Airport in Washington, DC, over two hours late after high winds tossed asunder any predictability in travel plans to the east coast. We stand 20 minutes in line to get a taxi, the midnight air damp with spring humidity.

We catch glimpses of historic buildings on the taxi ride, bone-white in the darkness of urban night. The taxi stops at a small white house with a red door in a neighborhood that looks more small-town than big city. We pay the driver; carry bags inside where my sister waits. We have come, Sally and I, to visit my sister’s granddaughter, my grandniece, a five-month-old who carries my mother’s name, Nettie, and in that the lineage of my family.

We sleep late, weary travelers that we are. We will meet the child later, on her schedule; a five-month-old being fairly predictable in terms of sleeping (they do that a lot) and eating (they do that regularly as well), not quite like the workday routine of punching a time clock but not that far off either. But first we will walk, bumpkin tourists in the big city.

The capitol building rises high into the late April sky, a massive structure of white stone, stately columns, a rise of stairs that seem endless and a glistening dome topping it all. It is busy on this spring day; families and groups of school children, a small gathering of people who are concerned with happenings in Korea (they seem wary and distrustful of entreaties between North and South); they carry placards and listen to speakers. A lone man in a blue sports coat and tie carries a sign suggesting that the president be impeached.

Nobody pays much heed to either the Koreans or the man with the sign, focusing instead on selfies with the grand building of the capitol as background. The sky is very blue and the alabaster dome stands starkly against the sky; the image is striking.

I feel vaguely detached from it all. Perhaps the magnificence of the capitol building is dimmed by the prevailing cynicism of the modern congress that plies its craft within; current polls show only 20% approve of their machinations.

Or perhaps it’s the grounds. I would expect that the environs of the capitol would extend as a verdant carpet of bright greenery, an unblemished expanse that would bring to mind the emerald richness of a baseball diamond or a classic golf course. Instead it looks unkempt, a mottled mix of grass and weed that brings to mind a casually neglected lawn or the shabby outfield of a small town ball field with a limited budget for landscaping.

We walk away from the capitol along the edge of a reflecting pool where any reflections are dashed on a breezy day that leaves the water in a mild chop; mallard ducklings paddle frantically under the eyes of passing crowds. Electric scooters, the bane of many cities, dart silently like swallows come to ground. I find them somewhat unsettling; they seem too swift and haphazard in their travels; the likelihood of mishap seems high.

We find refuge in a museum. Our pace slows; traces of political discontent fall away; rocketing scooters a memory. We move slowly through the rooms, works of art stunning in their quiet magnificence. I stand, struck to silence before works of master artists, images of power and life, of conflict and beauty; paintings and sculpture and photographs. I find works of familiar artists; feel like I am connected with an old friend. Find work by artists I do not know; newfound treasures. In the presence of art I feel renewed.

Is it odd that I can stand in front of painting and feel a greater sense of wonder than I do in the lawn of the capitol looking at the looming dome? That blocks of color or images both vague and impressionistic bring more to me than the stone buildings outside, noble and magnificent in their own right but not moving me in my heart? In the rooms of the art comes inspiration and wonder both though I suppose one can say the same of time in the woods under the shade of the ancient trees with the scent of duff in the air.

[A side note: Washington offers a stunning array of museums, a lavish smorgasbord of art and history and all that is reflective of the nation. And most of it free for the viewing: Your tax dollars hard at work.]

The afternoon warms. We walk back to my sister’s place, foot weary but renewed. And then we meet Nettie, my mother’s namesake, my grandniece and in that a new strand in the fabric of family history and heritage. She was born in November on a chill day in Wisconsin. I was in my deer stand and the sound of texts dinging on my phone broke the reverie of the hunt. I dug through layers of clothing to the phone, read the text; the baby was born.

Now on the late April afternoon we meet. She is, of course, radiant and perfect in every way! One need not be a parent or grandparent to realize that. I hold her on my lap; my hands seem enormous in comparison. Her tiny hands curl and unfurl like a spring flower. Her eyes look at me; big and blue and trusting. She smiles and babbles and does what infants do and of course it is all amazing to me.

I think to myself: I have seen on this day the stone cold buildings of man; I have felt the heat and the passion of art; and I have held in my hands the spirit of my past and the hope for the future.
Nettie looks at me, blue eyes meet mine; the world settles and narrows to the two of us.

Riika at Seventeen.

“In a year you’ll be old enough to vote and the world will be a better place for it.” I tell that to Riika who regards me with her amber eyes over her gray muzzle. She’s stone deaf, has been for a couple years. She still pays attention, head up, ears cocked back, eyes showing cloud but still sparking with life.

She lies on the seat of the truck feeling the rhythm of the road in her old bones. The day is sunny but there is chill in the air. It is a Sunday afternoon. We are going, her and I, to the woods.

She meets my eyes across the short span of the truck but on this day the span is measured in years. It is her seventeenth birthday. Against all odds. Against all odds of a dog her size and breed living that long. Against the odds of surviving cancer surgery, ACL surgery, multiple tangles with porcupines, of years of running unbounded in wolf country. Seventeen years of a wild heart and a drive to hunt and a loyalty to us that is beyond words. Seventeen years.

Now we drive out of town on a late winter day to the fresh air of pine woods and frozen lake and field, our birthday celebration. She and I; just the two of us. Sally stays home with Thor and Fenway; barking at the door, the two dogs, as I usher Riika out and into the truck. Riika and I go to the woods to walk and to honor her birthday.

I don’t know how she does it. At home she is always slow, often achy, limping on a bad leg, moving slow up the stairs, no longer able to jump from floor to bed (we put a footstool next to the bed and she uses that to go from floor to stool to bed). She is tentative in the backyard, unsteady on the ice of winter. In the house she looks old.

In the woods it all fades away. In the woods and in the field the years fall like leaf off November tree and she moves with energy and vigor as if the air itself is a balm for age, a restorative that makes an old dog shed the years.

She hunted this past fall, against all odds, hunted with enthusiasm and vitality, hunted the mild days of September thru the chill of November to the last day of December when the grouse season closed and we could hunt no more. She hunted with the passion and the drive that has marked her days for seventeen years. We saw few birds, shot none.

I never had a more rewarding season.

Now we pull to the side of the country road and I lift her from the truck. I ease her to the ground, let her get her feet set and then take my hands off. She stands, takes in the air and the scent and then turns to the woods. There is a snow bank too tall for her to climb so I pick her up one more time and lift her to the top the bank, put her to the snow.

The snow has crusted over and it bears our weight. We walk away from the road, across a small opening and then down a steep slope to the lake. She moves ahead of me and I think to myself that if you did not know her age you would never guess it from the way she moves, light on her feet, confident and bold.

We spend an hour on that afternoon, my old girl and me. We walk the edge of lake ice, push into the swamp along the shore, Riika ahead of me, passing through sunlight and shadow, fully engaged in the scent she alone can sense. Silent trees stand as stark witness to our efforts.

In the field she is a different dog and I am at a certain level amazed that she can still do what she does. And on another level I find in her inspiration; it cannot be easy for an old dog on achy legs to move as she does.

She has failed this winter. She has gotten finicky in her diet; one day she wants chicken, the next bacon, the following morning no appetite at all. Her weight slides lower, a gradual attrition of age and the simple reality of a very old dog that is on the long slope down. Where once she had thick muscle across her haunch she now has bone. The firm muscle gone now to a hard line of bone beneath the skin, a jagged ridgeline that marks the outline of her back. To run your hand along her back is an exercise in skeletal design; vertebrae stand proud, muscles receded.

But in the woods she comes to life, in the woods she can run, she can hunt, she can return to what she is; her old eyes bright with life force. Against all odds.

We spend an hour on the snowpack in the high sun of late winter on a day that is not memorable except in our eyes: Riika’s seventeenth birthday and in that a modest celebration is due.

We climb a gradual slope to the road and she begins to lag. I wait for her. She is tiring. She turns to face the west and the afternoon light catches her and she stands in the glow, head lifted to the breeze, looking regal in the golden light. Then we turn and walk the remaining distance to the road and I lift her from the high bank to the roadway.

She turns to look at me and I point to the truck. She walks to the door, l lift her up and on to the seat. She sits, looking out the window then settles and curls up on the seat and looks at me. Birthday girl. Seventeen years old. Against all odds.

Time change...season changes.

I flew to St. Louis on the early flight. Or tried to. There was a “mechanical issue” they told us, the term that haunts modern travel, wording as nebulous as low hanging cloud; impenetrable, mysterious, slightly ominous. We got off the plane, a long, single line of pilgrims delayed on the trip to whatever Promised Land envisioned.

The last off the plan, I passed the two pilots who stood with causal indifference, chatting. I asked what the nature of the problem was and they described hydraulic fluid pooling on the tarmac under the plane. They used the same deferential tones as if telling of an early morning rain shower; nothing special.

With the impression that flying an airplane that had bled copious amounts of hydraulic fluid would not be a good idea and I asked them, “This plane isn’t going anywhere, is it?” They did not dissuade me nor encourage me.
I drove home, had breakfast and four hours later flew to the Twin Cities and made a connecting flight. I landed in St. Louis and took a cab to the motel.

Air travel is as if traveling through time and in the magic of this flight I was transported back in time, back a month, maybe six weeks, to late fall. Some trees in Missouri still held leaf, brown and dried but holding fast to branch. Lawns were muted green or turning dead-grass brown. The roadway was damp from rain, held a metallic November-like sheen to it now in early December. I’d traveled back in time.

I checked into the motel and did not leave the building for the next two days, walking from motel room downstairs to convention center and back, spending the days looking at the wares of near six dozen manufacturers and taking in the sales pitches for winter boots and hunt clothing and accessories that we’d sell next fall and winter. I wondered: Will we have cold weather then? Will we need warm boots and heavy parkas? Of the gear I saw, what will people like?

Unanswerable questions. No answers, only educated guesses.

Two afternoons later I walked into the chill air, took another cab to the airport and flew home. The time machine reversed itself and I went from late fall to early winter; magic! The Twin Cities were white with snow cover. I changed planes and flew into town at midnight to frozen lakes, snow-covered woodlands, crisp night air and a breeze that had a bite to it. The time machine had landed and lurched to a stop. It was December in Wisconsin; winter was at hand.

A day off mid-week, I headed to the basement. I found the clutter of fall seasons lying about as if leaf fallen to the ground. Hunting boots; some unlined, some insulated, hip boots and waders. Hunting jackets and vests, caps and hats, gloves and dog collars. Shades of camouflage clashed with blaze orange hats. Shotgun shells glowed in yellow and green and red, like lights on a Christmas tree.

I packed it all up. I loaded the old plastic storage containers as per their labels marked on each, “Deer hunt,” “Camo.” Smaller boxes: “12 ga steel,” “20 gauge shot,” “Accessories.” Put the big tubs on storage bins along the floor, the smaller ones on narrow shelves. I stood boots in their proper place, hung shotgun cases from rafters, put compasses and dog collar controls and multi-tools in their place.

Blaze parkas and down jackets; camo shirts and duck-hunt parkas were hung on hangers and slid onto clothing rods. I worked for several hours. When I was done the time machine had sputtered and spit and moved and then stopped; fall was over. The season of the hunt was done.

The calendar can say what it will but when hunt gear is put up the season has changed. Period.

I looked at the leftover gear, the mismatched gloves and random shot shells and baseball caps. There were six leather work gloves of indeterminate age, some showing the tawny yellow-brown of clean buckskin, some the worn and dirty dust color of a glove well used. I had the six of them laid out on a shelf like a limit of fish or a display of random found objects. Each one of the six gloves was left handed. The missing mates all rights.

What are the odds of that? How does it come to be that all the gloves that had vanished were for the same hand? I considered it, then put the lefties in a box of their own, labeled it “Left” and put it on the shelf.

With that it was as if a door had closed, the certainty of an autumn now gone. Memories remain; nothing more.

Other storage tubs were pulled out; “XC Clothing,” “Winter Gloves,” “Hats.” I put them on the shelves where I could find them all. Ski jackets, winter coats, insulted pants were hung in front of the hunt clothing. I laid out gloves on the shelf, fronted heavy pac boots and lighter snowshoe boots, arranged ski boots, packed the bicycle helmet, gloves and shoes away.

In short, I made ready for the season now at hand. When I was finished the time had changed. The basement area was no longer a fall gear storage area. It was now holding winter gear and in that change far more than a simple rearranging of gear and clothing. Simple acts can, at times, portend far more than mere housekeeping. In this was an acknowledgement of time change. It was as clean cut as getting on a plane in one place and landing hours later in another. It was, in its own manner, a flight of time, a trip out of one season and into another. It was a finality. It was an ending. It was a beginning.

I walked up the basement stairs, looked outside. It was snowing.

North Dakota duck hunt

Wind moaned in the darkness; predawn North Dakota; sunrise a broken promise. Windows rattled in the old farm house. The big lab whined, restless, his toe nails clicked on wooden floor. Coffee brewed; the only optimism in the air.

“How cold?”
“Wind chill’s eleven.”
“Above or below zero?”
“Below.”
“Oh…”

The lake where we’d hunted ducks the past two days would be frozen. The air temperature was four, maybe five above. The lake had been open last night but showed the flat sheen of water making ice. Surely, it would be locked up.

“More coffee?” We drank coffee; daylight showed in pale shades of gray. We gave it an hour then left the house. It was still very cold and the wind was strong from the north. We drove four miles on rutted and frozen gravel two lane as the wind blew snow across the road.The farm fields rolled off in gentle rises and were lost to the falling snow.

We crested the hill and Ted stopped the truck. The sun had broken through the haze of snow and the lake ahead was sheathed in rising steam; it was very much open. We reached for binoculars. Geese and ducks and swans showed like spirits through the clouds of steam, spectral birds that seemed part of the air or the snow as if dream visions of birds not flesh and feather.

We backed off, moved down the road, parked. We’d hunt pheasants in a low slough where the wind might not be as bad.

We walked the cattails and thick cover next to the frozen wetland; corn stood nearly. A perfect setup for pheasants.

We hunted an hour and never saw a bird.

The day prior we’d walked a mile along a similar area; cattails and marsh to our left; cut corn for 30 yards then standing corn. We’d had birds go up, dozens of flushes; three dozen? Four dozen? We did not count them only saw them; big wild pheasants rising over the marsh.

The big lab worked like a machine, a black fur-clad reaper in the thick of it all driven by pheasant scent. He is a long-legged powerhouse of a labrador, driven to hunt. When we rested him he lay still, his chiseled head showing the stoic nobility of black labs, his face nicked and raw from pushing through the heavy, coarse cover

Ted shot well; I shot abysmally. I missed textbook-easy shots at big roosters, the heavy gun pounding my shoulder as if in rebuke of my efforts. I felt, standing on the frozen ground, that I could easily take a step backward in the evolution of the hunt, go to bow and arrows or spear or just thrown rocks and have no discernible difference in my success.

I thought to myself: For all the years I’ve done this, I’m still not a very good shot and to expect otherwise is to expect nothing less than an act of magic or a miracle on a par with the parting of the seas.

But that was a day past and time was running out. The third day, for me, of a three-day hunt in the center of North Dakota, duck and goose heaven where birds were plentiful and game bags heavy. We gave up on pheasants and drove back to the farmhouse. The truck’s thermometer showed 9 above. The wind seemed to mock us.

We hauled decoys and blinds, shotguns and shells and a canoe and settled in on the lee shore of a small point that jutted into the lake. There was very little natural cover. We used layout blinds, a somewhat diabolical but very effective blind in which the hunter lies flat on their back on what is essentially a reclining lawn chair but low, only a few inches above ground level. The blind has sides and a hinged top and the entire contraption resembles a camouflaged coffin. When birds draw near the hunter lifts up, tosses the top aside and blazes away.

I did not do well with the layout blind. Ted would rise with little apparent effort and shoot with uncanny accuracy. I flailed mightily, fighting to fling the cover aside as if trapped inside a human-sized taco. I rarely got shotgun to shoulder. Once my camouflage hat caught on the side of the blind and forced down over my face effectively rendering me blindfolded.

In the darkness of such state I heard the sound of Ted’s shotgun and when I pulled the hat from my eyes saw a duck fall. “Did you shoot?” he asked. I mumbled something about feeling like a jack-in-the-box and sunk back down.

Ducks moved; mallards and redheads, canvasbacks and bluebills, goldeneyes and buffleheads. We had steady shooting. It never got above 12 degrees. When we quit late in the afternoon the decoys were sheeted in ice.

The day before I arrived the wind had blown a gale from the north and the ducks and geese and swans had flown. “Twenty years of hunting and I’ve never seen so many,” was one report. The wind never stopped and the birds flew every day, high and rapid-winged, flock after flock, tens of thousands for three days.

On the afternoon of my final day their numbers were dwindling. The migration had passed, the ducks and the geese and the swans. Swans are the last to migrate. When they’re gone it’s over.

We loaded the truck on the high hill overlooking the lake. I stood and in the chill air came a wild call, the sound of swans, one more flock. The afternoon sun angled low and caught the pure white of swans against the blue sky and dark cloud. In that moment all was caught as if a photo; the swans and the sky and the land and water. Then the swans were gone and the sky was silent and empty. The hunt was over. We started the truck for home.

Thor: A dog, a hunter, a puzzle...

At times I wonder of Thor, of what he is and what he was and what he left undone. I wonder what moved him, what held him back, what spirit drove him, if drive is a word that can be applied to Thor; he seems, for most of his life, to have lacked even a sliver of drive. I wonder, at times, if it was all too easy for him, the hunt, as if he was a gifted athlete that never seemed to reach their full potential and left questions ahead of answers.

Maybe Riika, in some ways less gifted, runt of the litter, maybe Riika used that as motivation to push harder, to run farther, to hunt better than any other dog. Perhaps Thor was content linger in the shadow of her blaze of drive and passion. Perhaps Thor simply did not have anything to prove.

Who knows? They are both dogs, they don’t have much to say about the matter. It is left to us, to me, to ponder on it all in the nights of waning October when chill comes with sundown as if part and parcel now of the early darkness which falls not as a blanket but as a knife that cuts away all pretense of warmth.

Thor had it all over Riika, he of long legs and easy stride, a distance runner’s build. She, shorter and stocky, she had to work. And work she did since the day she felt dirt and fern beneath her feet and the scent of bird jolted her system like an addict’s rush. He never felt that. She had drive; he never did. She’d work the thickets and the brambles; he’d stay on the roads. She’d come home tangled and matted with sticks and burrs, laced with cuts from the blackberry canes; he’d look ready for the show ring.

But he had a nose and when I turned off the old logging roads into the brush he had no alternative except to follow and when he did he’d find birds. He’d follow the invisible threads of bird scent for grouse, sense woodcock in thick cover where I could not go.

He loved to hunt, no mistake, but she lived to hunt and in that is all you need to know.

We hunted, the two dogs and I, hunted the autumns for a decade. They both contracted Lymes. They both took on porcupines, about half a dozen, maybe more; the results were predicable. They both hunted, she with passion, he with seeming indifference. They ran through woods and marshes, upland and low lands, in open areas and thickets as dense as a bad dream. They ran crazy after rabbits and deer, breathed deep the intoxicating scent of woodcock and grouse.

They grew old. Riika took it the hardest. She would come home tired and achy, limping and in discomfort. We’d dose her with meds. Thor would come home tired. He never limped but his bright eyes showed cloud. I started to take out one at a time while the other rested at home.

In his tenth year he changed. Gone was Thor as an acolyte to Riika. He began to hunt as he never had and his hunter’s heart beat faster and the river of hunter’s blood surged. He was as if a new dog. He was, that autumn, without cause or explanation, a wonderful hunter. Why? I wondered. What metamorphosis he emerged from? What now moved him?

He worked the thick cover, flushed birds with enthusiasm and, dare I say, passion and desire. He was a changed dog at an age when one could only expect the first steps on the long slide down. He hunted that season as he never had hunted before.

On a day in late October we hunted along the Wisconsin River, pushed the thickets dark with shadow and alive with grouse. Eased through aspen and balsam. I killed one bird and then another. Thor flushed a grouse and I dropped it, my third, in briars and fern.

I looked for that bird. I could not find it. I marked the spot and searched at times on hands and knees and I could not find the bird. All the while Thor ignored my entreaties to “come” and wandered off and I cursed him and kept looking for the bird. I never found it. Thor did. Thor found the bird 40 feet from where I’d dropped it and he brought it to me, eyes alight.

We killed a fourth bird and I missed a drop-dead-easy shot that would have given me a five-bird limit. It was the best day we’d had. Ever. The best season.

And never to come again.

The next year he was going deaf. I didn’t know it even though Riika’s hearing had failed a year earlier. It was in the woods that I could tell. I could see him looking for me but the whistle would not turn his head and my shouts did not reach him. More often he’d go away from me. I’d watch, helpless to stop him and see him fade into the dark underbrush. Gone.

I’d stand in the silence and I’d be sick with fear. He’d come back, scared, fearful; I could tell it by watching him. It had all changed. One great season; then only memories.

We still hunt, the two of us. He is fourteen-and-a-half, stone deaf but he loves to hunt. He has the loose, easy stride of a distance runner still. But at times he ranges too far away from me and I stand and I do not see him and I know he feels fear coming on with our separation and I feel the fear and I do not know what to do.

In time he leaves the shadows and the fear and comes to me with eyes happy and my stress fades away. I tell him he’s a good boy. And I mean every word.

The time of silence for a waterfowler.

Black night; steady rain, rapping at the windows like birdshot, rattling on the roof. I stoked the wood stove, sipped a Scotch and read an old book about hunts now long gone. The radio was background noise; football and thus of small consequence.
In the dark of the night I woke to more rain, harsh and unsettling. Embers glowed in the stove. I added another oak bolt, locked the stove door, lay back in the blackness to the sound of storm.

I hunted ducks at daybreak in light drizzle and fog that drew down the world. I saw very few ducks, missed badly on the one shot I had. The wooden decoys floated, gray and unconvincing. They did not inspire confidence. I sat for an hour and a half then pulled the decoys, stored them away and went back to the shack for coffee.

Two nights later the wind blew hard and there were no stars, only the sound of the wind in the trees. I read from another book; the stove beat down the chill in the shack; the temperature outside had dropped nearly 20 degrees. I stood on the step before I closed down for the night and felt the wind and on the wind was an excitement, a promise of change coming in. On the wind was a wildness. I closed the door firmly and went to bed.

In the night the wind blew with muscle and anger as if a spirit was riding in from a land of ancient fable. It was blackness all around save for the red glow from the glass door on the stove.

The next morning the wind blew and I said to myself, “There will be ducks moving on this,” migrants come from northern regions, from Lake Superior, from high lakes farther north. I set the decoys and waited. Dawn came slowly on the wind under thick, fast-moving cloud. I saw one flock of ducks, a few pairs, a few singles. That was all. I did not fire a shot and left wondering how I could be so mistaken; it seemed a day made for duck hunters.

Perhaps it was; perhaps the day was made for hunting. Perhaps, though, it was not a day for shooting.

The color was near peak on this day, a gorgeous world of wonder and glory. Golds and yellows and red, glowing as if the world was made of stained glass windows. All around was beauty and splendor.

I pulled the truck to the side of the road, left it running, loped across the blacktop to an ancient apple tree and reached up; took two. Back in the truck I ate the apples, fresh and chilled and sweet. The heater blew hot and I thought to myself, “This is not a bad day at all.”

On the third night stars blazed bright under the clearing sky, white-hot against blackness and I stood, mouth agape, head tilted back to better look at them. Wondered, when was that last time I saw stars in this week of leaden gray and rain? I took them all in.

The Brewers were playing; the radio was scratchy and the signal came and went and I thought that is the way to follow baseball; a radio with a bad signal and your imagination left to conjure up the images. I listened to the game until I was tired then turned if off; would see in the morning if they won.
Come the dawning the lake was calm, dark as the sky is dark for all water reflects the sky.

There may be no more meditative time in sport than the minutes in a duck blind waiting for the day to start. A calmness comes; a contemplation; a peacefulness far too rare in our lives and far too uncommon in our sport.

I sat on an overturned bucket with my life jacket as a cushion. I leaned back against the spindly spruce tree at the back of the crude blind. I sat as motionless as the lake in front of me, as restful as the far off tree line.

Coyotes yelped over the hill on the far side of the lake, startling, unexpected, as if a fresh breath of cool wind or the fall of rain. Then quiet. Meditative time.
It did not brighten at daybreak, only shifted slightly toward daylight as if thin layers of shroud were peeled back to reveal lighter layers of gray.

Leaves fell; floated on the air; settled on the water. Ripple rings spread.
I saw a handful of ducks that morning. I did not kill any of them. I settled, on that October morning, for the time of mediation a duck hunter knows in the still hour of dawn, when the world seems motionless and the mind finds peace and all else falls away.

New seasons; old dogs.

Riika woke early, restless, wanting to go out. I felt for clothing in the dark room, pulled on a pair of pants, a shirt, more from memory than from intent. I was still near sleep. I walked with her downstairs, across the inky living room and kitchen to the back door. I turned on the outside light and opened the door.

She paused, sniffed the air as if tasting it, then, having approved, stepped off the stoop and into the yard. After a moment I followed.

I walked barefoot across the patio. The air was fresh and pure; there was a faint smudge of pale light to the east but dawn was a time away. I looked to the sky; it was hazy, as layers of gauze; nothing seemed real, there was no definition, just gloomy shades of gray without stars.

The trees were smudged against the dark of sky; black on near-black. The trees were massive in the darkness as if a cliff, a steep pitch of hillside or foothill.

The air felt good. I had the fleeting image of a spring morning but no, not today. It was mid-September and spring was a long time gone or a longer time coming; take your pick.

Riika moved in the darkness at the edge of the yard, a shadow that came to view then faded, as indistinct as the sky above. It was very quiet.

It was the opening morning of grouse season.

Time was that we would hunt the opener, come what may. Time was we’d go without question. We’d go, Riika and I, or Thor and Riika and I. We’d go to the woods; we’d go to the hunt; it was what we did.

But not today. Not this time around.

Time was when Riika was young and she’d hunt wild and free. She hunted crazy when young; more reasoned with age; slowly, achy in the latter years.  She hunted through briar and bramble; belly and face a web of scratches. She hunted after a cancerous tumor; she hunted after ACL surgery; she hunted against all odds and overcame them all. Overcame all save for age.  Age is the ailment from which she cannot recover.  Age is the distance she cannot range. Age the thicket that she cannot bust through.

“We could do a short walk … bust out a grouse or woodcock and I’d miss the shot but I wouldn’t care…as long as Riika had bird scent one more time.”

She came to me out of the darkness, my old hunt partner, 16 ½ years old now. I led her inside and turned off the lights and we went back to sleep for another hour. When we woke again dawn was a pale blossom and the sky showed dim light. But we did not hunt. Not on that day, on the opening, the day of significance that borders on spiritual as all openings do.

I found reasons for the not hunting, rational thoughts on the ledger. It would be too hot and Riika never liked the heat. There were too many leaves and the woods would be heavy with cover; a clear shot would be rare. The grouse numbers are down, the reason still a mystery, as mysterious as a dark sky at daybreak. Reasons all not to hunt.

But in years past I’d have gone out, taken one dog or both, gone out for an hour just to do it, simply to hunt the opener and start the season that has defined so much of who I am and who Riika and Thor are.  Not that long ago we’d have gone to the woods.  It would be our private ceremony, the dogs and me.

Instead, I went to work. In the afternoon the temperature reached to record highs and why not?  It’s been that type of a year from the 90s of late May to the near-90 in September and the novelty of high heat, the oddity of 90 degrees in the Northwoods has long since faded into the drudgery of another too-hot day that breeds ill temper and drains resolve.

Riika never did well in the heat. The only way we could hunt would be to find cover near water, a backwater elbow of a small stream that she could wade into and lie down and let the waters wash over her. She’d lie in the waters and look up at me. Then, cooled, she’d be ready to go.

Thor was better at the heat. But Thor never hunted with the passion that burned hot in Riika and part of what the hunt brought to me was seeing Riika and her unbridled desire to hunt that inspired me beyond any satisfaction that killing birds would do. I did not care, do not care, about a full game bag. Watching Riika work was a full measure of satisfaction.

Now she’s old and for the past three years I’ve left the woods after the season convinced that she’d never hunt again. Then, come fall, come autumn, come Riika’s time, she’d hunt, against all odds. Last year on a December afternoon I killed the last grouse of my season over Riika and I knew that would be her last day to hunt.

Now I don’t know that. Now I think, “I could take her out for a little while.” We could do a short walk on old familiar trails and we could hope to bust out a grouse or woodcock and I’d miss the shot but I wouldn’t care, wouldn’t care at all as long as Riika had bird scent one more time.

I hold the promise of the hunt to come. It will come as will come the frost and the leaf fall and the shortening days. It will ride in on north wind and chill. We will hunt for birds, yes, but more, we will hunt for memories, for moments, for the ceremony of it all; we will hunt for things light as a feather on the September breeze, as fleeting as the drift of a falling leaf, as precious as the look in an old dog’s golden eyes.