For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  A recital of fall-colored feathers concealing a soft-boiled, egg-shaped body weighing less than a thought, bob-whites are baffling. How does something that soft, seemingly without a muscle in its body, run and fly so fast? Terror, perhaps. From somewhere a description returns to me: “Quail leave the ground with the speed of a snipe, the sound of a partridge, and twist through the trees like demented woodcock.”

  Bobwhites remind me of Hungarian partridge, birds that run up mountains faster than mule deer, rise in front of a pointing dog with the same clamor of wings, feel just as soft in the hand, and have, when they glide across the prairie, the same wing set. If I could hunt only two species of birds they would be the gray-legged partridge on a canvas of infinite perspectives and the bobwhite quail in my backyard.

  The settings for my hunts have replaced the number of birds I kill, and because I hunt behind pointing dogs, covey birds offer more to see. I am becoming more of a birdwatcher than a bird-hunter. While I won’t stop hunting, my priorities have shifted. Watching a belted kingfisher beat a brim to death on a tree limb interests me more than making a right and left double on quail. I suppose it is because I have not seen as many fish-beating birds as I have made doubles in my life.

  This morning I thought I saw leaves falling from the pecan tree in the yard, but it was a dozen sparrows flying down from the tree’s branches to where the nuts lay broken on the ground, and flying back up again, unlike any leaves I’d ever seen. My paleontologist friend thinks of birds as beautiful lizards. I tell him a birder is a voyeur and I qualify, having at one point or another keyholed the private quarters of some pretty and not-so-pretty women.

  The exquisite pleasure I derive from watching birds through the lenses of my binoculars, full-sized birds stylized like those in the paintings of Gould and Selby, Thorburn and Audubon, is more fun than writing, so I write very little and watch a lot. I don’t keep a count because I am more interested in what birds do. But just because I’m amused when I see a grackle shitting on a cardinal loitering around the feeders and am charmed at a dove’s offering its mate a kernel of corn, does that mean I will feel differently about shooting this fall? The answer is no, not in the slightest. I will kill doves and quail and a turkey or two just as quickly as I wring the necks of the chickens and guineas I raise and with the same dispatch I use to ship a dozen pigs each year to the slaughterhouse. While these animals are under my care I feed them corn and overripe melons and bread and the remains of what I eat. When I feed them I watch them play and fight and try to mate and it makes me happy, but when the time is right I kill them and eat them and that makes me just as happy.

  I can’t shoot deer for having crippled a couple when I was growing up, but Bill Poppell loves to hunt them, and most of the deer he or his friends shoot feeds members of the community who need the meat; the rest goes to others who don’t need the meat but love to eat it. I won’t deny that I derive a certain pleasure from the act of killing the birds I spend all year raising, but who is to say that I don’t love my animals as much as the next man, or that my pleasure is more ill founded than the pleasure of eating a double burger is to another? Are there people out there so spiritually in tune with the animal world that they categorically know it isn’t better for my pigs and deer and birds to have lived and died than not to have lived at all? I think not.

  The humane societies have taken advantage of our gun-flexing attitude and made great strides in implementing their agendas. They want nature to be restored, but fight against one of nature’s fundamental rules. In nature, the cruelty displayed by the hunter is a passing moment, an accepted entity, the reason why animals do not grow old in the wild. Yet the animal-rights people plod on, entrenched in their own vision of a world that never existed, a world they have conjured up with the same religious fanaticism of the deer whackers. Nature suffers while these extremes in stupidity argue and howl at each other with the fervor and rage of the mentally imbalanced.

  The bobwhite’s softness and shape encourage the viewer to imagine its fears, including visions of fangs and talons tearing into flesh. Coveted by snakes and skunks before they are even born, bobwhites gather strength from a collective fear that in the presence of danger immobilizes them as a whole and then triggers a loud and chaotic escape, meant to startle and confuse whatever threatens them.

  The birds that have survived this far have a 60 percent chance of surviving until spring. The weak and the foolhardy are dead, and the survivors live in communal bliss. A cold November storm blew reams of golden leaves to the forest floor. Perhaps the old birds in the coveys remember this change of scenery as a transition time between the soft mast rotting on the ground and the hard mast as yet unfallen from the trees, a continuance of the vegetal year and a preview of winter, when that same hard mast sifts and hides on the forest floor and the legumes are cold and underground. Maybe the old birds also remember this as a season of added terrors, the terrors of dog and man.

  I pumped gas next to a farmer who was going through hard times. His eyes looked beyond me. He was so far away in heart that he didn’t know what day of the week it was, but he wanted to know about the birds. I said, “The drought is fixing to kill the young ones.”

  He nodded and said, “Good day,” and drove away.

  There is no reason to explain to a farmer why there are good quail years and poor quail years. He knows. He understands that no matter how well one manages the land, God is weather. In recent years the Bible Belt farmers and their families prayed for rain and lenient bankers, with an equal lack of success. As a newcomer to the game I curse and shake my fists above my head; so far that hasn’t worked either.

  IV

  No one can have the part of me I give to my dogs. A gift as safe as loving a child, or for some as loving Christ; a part of me I guard carefully because it bears on my sanity. My dogs forgive the asshole in me, the anger in me, the arrogance in me, the brute in me. They forgive everything I do before I forgive myself. For me, the life and death of a dog is a calendar of time passing. I dream about my dogs, but recently the dreams have been turning into nightmares. One recurring scenario finds me hunting with Robin, the spaniel, on the ridge of a steep talus slope overlooking the Snake River in Idaho. The bitch runs after a cripple and follows the bird over the edge of the cliff. In my dream I watch Robin fall away, seemingly forever, a small tumbling figure against a mosaic of sagebrush, wheat, alfalfa fields, and water thousands of feet below. More recently I dreamed that suddenly, and with no warning, the same dog began shrinking, shrinking and barking and running in tiny circles around my feet, growing smaller and smaller, her eyes huge and brown and imploring. I threw my hat over her mouse-sized body but missed, and when she was the size of a fly she flew away.

  I don’t know what these dreams mean, but if they are meant to prepare me for my dog’s eventual death I would like to remind my psyche that the bitch is only five years old, and to lay off for a while. On the other hand, perhaps these dreams are preparing me for my own death, or are fed by the guilt I feel when I kill something as beautiful and enviable as a bird. In any case, I’m sure that the communion I have with dogs should be channeled to my peers. However, as I think of man as the creator of desolation and not the center of reality, I don’t, and I accept as a by-product of that choice the longing of loneliness, and the dark dreams that follow.

  December 1, 1989

  I wait in the front seat of my car next to a four-month-old puppy for ducks to fly out of a flooded hardwood pond on the edge of Lake Jackson. A cold fall morning without a gun. This time I hunt with a different perspective on life after spending time in southern Florida. I do this by sitting and watching wild things pass by. The sun, which broke quickly into the pale gray sky, hangs a few inches above the lake, shedding clouds until the water turns red. When the clouds burn off, the white sun resumes its ascent into the sky. The desperation I feel every time I venture into cities passes, even though not a duck creases the sky. The young dog, Robin, sits next to me with her head
out the window, her ears opened to the fecund sounds of the marsh.

  Back at the lake by 5 P.M. The puppy sits on my lap and stares out the front window, trembling. When the darkness gains weight the wood ducks fly back from the open water of the lake to roost and Robin follows their outline until the upholstery blocks her view. The ducks are reduced to long-winged shadows falling from the sky. In the backwater under the hardwoods, the ducks squeal and stir the mud, exciting the puppy. Wood ducks are my favorite table duck, and my least favorite to shoot because they are beautiful and dumb: male-model ducks.

  Lake Jackson has turned purple again, purple water supporting a red horizon. Robin stares through the windshield at mosquitoes big enough to be birds. I am at my best when the sounds of civilization are at their lowest decibel and envy the fellow who, along with his Nagra tape recorder, hunted and found all the places in the world where the sounds were purely natural and nonhuman. He only found a handful, but there he made beautiful music.

  A cold wind pushes night into the car. Robin shivers and curls up on my lap. On the way home the headlights play under the pine trees. Rock and roll fills the cab. I feel young again for having been alone with the dog, the birds, and now the music. Just before I fall asleep the puppy lays her head on my chest to let me know our day together is over, and then she moves as far from my restless sleeping habits as she can and still share the same bed.

  My second dog is a seven-year-old lemon-and-white English pointer I bought four years ago as a broke bird dog. Mabel lived in a kennel before I bought her and now sleeps in a chair in my bedroom. I have spent four years hunting for Mabel instead of hunting for birds; four years of howling at her to come and watching her run 180 degrees away from me into the quagmires of neighboring counties. The dog doesn’t mean to run away, but the moment the terrain is in any way at odds with her ability to see me, she becomes confused and then lost, incapable of figuring out from which direction I am calling. This happens because Mémé is dumb, dumb as a knot, dumber than the dumbest human being I have ever known, and a graduate of Spark College, the modern, electrically oriented school of dog training.

  I should have sent her back to her previous owner, or at least given her to a retired social worker. The dog loves children and women; they in turn enjoy dressing her up in their clothes. Instead I persevered under the assumption that because she loved me she would one day recognize the sound of my voice as a rallying point and not the echo of dementia. She never has, and now that she is middle-aged she has taken to pissing in the puddle of water she drinks from, licking the fertilizer in the flower beds, and eating toads. I, of course, have taken to feeling sorry for her.

  It has been said that a pointer that comes when called is rarer than an honest judge, to which one should add that compliance is not the compelling reason for owning a bird dog in the first place. Bred and trained to hunt with their senses screwed to the bone, they are designed to raise the level of quail hunting to an art form, and when things are right, they do. A breeze ruffling a handful of feathers carries enough weight to enslave a dog to a bird in a covenant of uneasy immobility. Setters, Britannys, and German shorthairs face quail as if their lives depended on it, but when a good English pointer faces a bird he does so with all but one foot on the coals of hell.

  To counteract two demanding and jealous bitches, I have recently brought into the house an eight-week-old equalizer: a roan-colored dog with white whiskers, a black nose, black eyes, and best of all, a pair of nuts. His name is Carnac, the first male dog I have owned since I was sixteen years old. Carnac is a French Brittany that looks like a suckling pig, a roan-colored suckling pig that keeps its eyes on mine or on my hands, the hands that feed him and smack his ass. I turn him belly up sometimes, and point his tiny dick at the bitches to prepare them for his leadership a year from now. The little man-dog already likes to bite them in the ass and then run like hell, barking with joy. Once in a while the bitches catch him, pin him down, and make him pay, but because he is a male they mostly put up with his puppyhood. Carnac is a happy dog, willing and able to piss on any carpet and hump a woman’s leg, displaying via the abandon of his grasp the keenness of his will. Now, if only he will hunt …

  V

  I remember reading about the old days, when Southern quail were abundant and time was cheap and hunting was an honorable diversion, when bird dogs spent most of the year as glorious bags of teats and bones, pups raised under slat-board porches and tended to until the sounds of acorns crackling under tractor tires snapped them to their feet, fired up their genes, and drove them to the woods. Dogs were bird dogs, English pointers, whose real reason for being was to stop the instant the scent of a quail intercepted their olfactory paths. What actually happened in terms of training between the time the bitch rose from her eight-month slumber to the time she splendidly addressed covey after covey of bobwhite quail, forgetting herself to everything except the birds and the men she was hunting for, was not specified, leaving me with a picture of cynegetic aplomb and grace.

  Once in a great while, albeit not for very long, I have a desire to own an all-age, field-trial dog, a crackerjack flamenco dancer with quick feet, a flaring nose, and a whalebone rib cage; a dog that owns the ground it runs on and the wind on which birds fly. I want a dog whose casts give reason to the landscape, a dog that shakes at the delirium of discovery and imposes on birds the fortitude of its resolve; I covet the bag of bones that each fall metamorphoses into a greyhound. I covet the magician, the trickster, but I also want it to come when I call, and that is asking much too much. All-age dogs are the savants of the field-trial world, and asking them to do something as mundane as coming on command is like asking van Gogh to add a cow to the landscape.

  For a moment in time, twenty years ago, I hunted bobwhite quail from horseback behind those kinds of dogs. Memories return in the shape of thin, black men riding fast Southern horses, men who worked the flanks and signaled points by raising their caps above their heads, and uncanny dog handlers who smelled birds before the dogs. I remember galloping to points with my heart in my throat for fear of not getting to the covey before it blew up. I hunted behind all-age dogs that had competed in, and in some cases won, national championships; dogs that trembled at the mere mention of birds, dogs that presented to the guns a quarry whose head they were given to eat. Memories of those days also include races between horsemen and deer across broom-sedge fields, of old dogs found pointing swamp birds under the radiance of a cold winter moon, of gentlemen who only killed male quail, and of dark-skinned women whose favors were as warm as the biscuits they baked.

  A quote taken from the guest book at Sehoy Plantation, Alabama, December 13, 1967:

  Flushed twenty-seven coveys of quail, shot over twenty-three. Filled two limits. My companion missed all but one bird. Pointers, stretched to a beautiful attitude. Kennel mates backing in perfect unanimity of opinion. Tipped a bobwhite or two out of each covey rise. Moses [name of black dog handler] exclaimed, “Gents, that covey’s powerful close.” Ate fried quail, collard greens with pepper vinegar, lima beans, hot rolls and French wine. Port with dessert, Cognac later. Bid six hearts, finessed the jack, and made the slam. A day to remember.

  Dogs, like men, lose their range and enthusiasm for life from having the wildness in them questioned. In the case of dogs, trainers these days ask the questions with single-digit probes of electric trauma, trauma that reaches its destination faster than the trainer’s thought. When sustained, and with the range to reach across fields and dales, this bolt of bionic inhumanity will scramble a dog’s brains and walk the sonofabitch to hell and back. In the hands of most men the electronic collar serves a number of purposes ranging from expressing suppressed hate to being a genuine training tool. The obvious shortcut electricity provides is not unlike sound bites and fast foods, and allows questionable trainers to postpone working a client’s dog almost indefinitely. In the hands of a good man the collar removes the boot and the leather strap from the routine of training, and when
applied just right can make the dog believe that God is watching and its salvation rests with its trainer. A thin line. One application too many and the client owns a round-eyed dog that pisses in the water it drinks.

  I am a terrible dog trainer because the trait I like in dogs is the same I like in men: namely, civil disobedience. Training is repetition; hell is toeing the line. I have witnessed extreme punishment applied to dogs with instruments ranging from a thirty-second hold on a number-five button to a two-by-four. When I was much younger and fresh out of Europe, where field trials were and still are thought of as civilized sporting contests between reasonable men and women and their dogs, I sucker-punched a dog trainer at a field trial in Pennsylvania for jerking a full-grown Labrador off its feet by its ears. The dog had swum the wrong course at a dead duck. I drilled the asshole in the ear and he pitched face first in the mud. My British host, without so much as raising an eyebrow, patted the dog on the head, looked down at the man, and said, “Well, as he’s in no position to answer you, we might as well be moving along. Cruel bugger, what?”

  The breeding program for bird dogs in this country has historically been geared to the field-trial competitions, and specifically to those dogs in the high-octane category, dogs with speed and endurance, dogs that cast to the far reaches of sanity and flow across the landscape like music, orchestrating their quest with a batonlike tail, and do so with more style and purpose than their brace mates.