Turning for Home

CHAPTER ONE

Turning for Home

My heart knows what the wild goose knows, and I must go where the wild goose goes. Wild goose, brother goose, which is best . . . a wanderin’ fool or a heart at rest?"

Young folks won’t remember, but back about the middle of the last century, first Tennessee Ernie Ford and then Frankie Laine forged huge billboard hits with those wondering words. Can’t recall who wrote the song, Ford or another. But almost without the trouble to know, I’d bet he was a sporting man.

Somebody that maybe stood in gum boots, with a big Fox or Ithaca over one shoulder – at dusk, in a squalling rain, knee-deep in the freezing, muddy water of a half-flooded pit-blind, on a sand bar in the Mississippi – watching through a leaden sky, the last, long skein of Canadas . . . headed for the quiet water. Someone, maybe, who sat once on a hillside kopje, overlooking the glimmering ribbon of the Limpopo, pondering the bloody lapse of the sun into the purple plains of Botswana, while close-around the francolin summonsed a covey call. Someone, perhaps in tweeds, who sat a stone wall longside a liver spaniel, a Purdey and a feathered game bag, hands clasped chin-high on a walking staff, contemplating the remains of the day through the gauzy hues of a Scottish grouse moor.

Maybe any one of these, who, in the uneasy gloom at the edge of twilight, painfully extracted himself from one place he loved, and put one-foot-before-the-next for the other.

Turning for home.

Would you suppose we ever know ourselves less doubtfully than in the closing hours of a sporting journey? Particularly a hunting adventure. In its space we will have known both the beauty of life and the indignity of death. Have been brought face-to-face with the slender and fragile dimensions of our own mortality. Know that life-paths have crossed, and have respected with remorse the ones discontinued. Have scaled the extreme heights of happiness or drowned in the depths of regret. Though now, all is over. Conclusion drains anticipation, heightens unfamiliarity. Loneliness displaces exhilaration. In the vulnerability of a few hours, the wanderlust that propelled us far from where we started is questioned by the risk we might not return. Distance compounds the emotion. Bringing meditation that swirls bitter-sweet in waters both happy and sad. It is in this chasm of contradiction that the fences come down, that we are exposed to ourselves in greatest clarity.

For most of the trip we have flown with our spirit. In the pensive, lonely hours that close the circle, we meet with our soul. It is not easy to talk of, but always, it is there.

A little pride, a little doubt, a little fear.

In the cavernous quiet of a few incisive minutes, a couple of probing hours – the droning labyrinth of a plane ride – we celebrate again the joy of our victories, nurse the pain of our defeats, examine earnestly and inescapably all that we’ve gambled and all that we’ve gained. The exploits of spirit that have so unbelievably altered our lives, in the escape of a few days. The things that have propelled us to go, the reasons we might have more comfortably chosen to stay. The greatest loves of our lives. The dilemma they ever will be. What we would trade and what we most treasure. The stakes are much greater than the hunt.

It must have been an itinerant sportsman who said first, the heart is a lonely hunter.

Irony, or not? That – in the end – the metaphysics of emotion should serve so closely the experiential law of mechanics. That for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yet we are soon to discover . . . for every venture of the spirit, the heart seeks equilibrium to convalesce.

Milton Lancaster was a friend of mine. He valued roots and family as devoutly as any man could. Said and done, today-come-tomorrow, his ‘backyard’ was summarily the happiest destination of his existence. Yet, strangely though it would seem to many, within the liberal epoch of his life, he gambled it tirelessly – hunted and fished the extremes of the earth. All the things that could have killed him, didn’t. Maybe he could have helped it along a bit more, but Fate allowed him death in his bed, encircled by his wife, his children, his old dog Jim . . . those most he loved.

There were always the happiest two moments of my life, he told me once, the moment I got somewhere and the moment I got back.

Another old-timer I know, claims Folks do a lot of their dying on a Sunday. It accumulates, he says, until one day you get old and tired.

Lot of melancholy in a Sunday, no denying. Maybe it’s that on Sunday we get pause enough from the bustle of a week to sit down with ourselves and consider that – good and bad, like-it or sad – it’s gone. That particular march in time is laid to page. That part of the book is done. What we did with it is all there ever can be. That, come tomorrow, we’re hard put to go out and do something at least as useful with the next.

As the years turn on, the feeling I get at the end of a hunt is a lot like the feeling I get on a Sunday. I think it sums up pretty much the price of living. I mean living. There’s part of me sorry I left, and part of me glad I was gone. Part of me longing to be back, and part of me thinking when next can I go.

But then, come think of it, it’s a whole lot like the feeling I’ll get when I’m bitten to leave again. The strange, gutless feeling at the pit of my stomach when I’m loading the truck for the airport, that argues so emotively . . . this time . . . not to go.

Once my sails are full, the stars kick in.

Ever feel that way, or am I the only one straddling the burden?

The longer I’m back, the worse it’ll get. The wanderlust. Worse still, on nights with geese against the moon. Pretty soon, I’ll have spread my wings. Whether Lucifer or the Grace of God, Somebody tells me go. All there’ll be is the feather by my bed. Thank Up or Down – depending upon your perspective – I’m gone.

Sundays . . . Africa, Madagascar, Mongolia . . . Pennsylvania Avenue. Guess I’ll die soon enough, if Loretta doesn’t hasten it along.

I suppose this all sounds rather exaggerated and impertinent, an anathema to the trustworthy soul that never drifts farther than Sunday school, the PTA or a local golf course, who mows his yard every week and won’t miss an episode of Seinfeld, who paints his house every year, is scared of flying and ventures nowhere wilder than the nearest greenhouse for azaleas. Who never thinks to sacrifice a day or mile from the things he holds dearest. Who’ll be buried undivided when at last he has to travel on.

Ephemerally, I envy him sometimes.

A rolling stone gathers no moss, he’d tell me.

To which my Aunt Louise, who had a lot of goose in her too, always retorted but it gains a lot of polish. And to which some other star-crossed warrior, likely at the eclipse of a Montana bird hunt, once observed, home is where the heart is.

I don’t know how much polish we can see fit to claim, those of us forever deserting home and hearth to fly off to some wild and distant destination. I only know the hunger to go is as constant as the sand and the sea. I suppose we’ll ever be restless. Whether in stone or in stipulation, our epitaph is pre-ordained . . . ?

A man’s body may be wrought to lie in a single grave, but his heart is buried in many places.

Wild goose, brother goose, which is best . . . ?

I’ll be gone. Ask the goose. I believe he started it all.

CHAPTER TWO

Time and the River

Bare day . . . a coyote yips an overture, then bewails in earnest the departing darkness. It pulls us to a halt. The long note dies as mournfully as it begins, touching something inside nothing else can reach. Unspoken, we resume a stalking walk beside a perpetual fenceline.

An hour along, we stand inconsequentially under a misting rain on a high, grassy ridge, glassing the next for grouse, reduced to a mere pencil dot by the hundreds of others that open and clasp amid countless folds and wrinkles the twenty miles to the horizon. Gray-green lie their shadowy flanks and gold the cottonwoods that course the black earth of the draws, shot like veins of ore through rotten granite. Parades of sumac, blood-red and liver-splotched with October, march alongside. Beneath the gunmetal clouds, a thunderstorm wends angrily about, walking jagged stilts of lightning and grumbling as an old man ruminating a grudge.

Infinite the land, awesome its immensity.

I wish he were here.

I have waited the better part of fifty-six years for this South Dakota morning to unfold. Since I was waist-high to a bluestem head, and taken with Crazy Horse, Indian ponies, rolling prairies and bison herds.

I come with valid measures for words like infinite, humble and profound, calibrated by sporting adventures from the Big Woods of Maine to the Florida Everglades, from Carolina pocosins to New Mexico parks.

Each will be redefined in less than a fortnight.

When I arrive I am one man. When I leave I will be much another.

Grouse and chicken, Mike Moody announces as he hands me the binocs. I see them milling, already nervous and alert. I pass the glasses to Doug Muhle, my hunting partner.

Looking straight into them, the separation is hardly more than a naked half-mile of prairie hay.

We mount a flanking maneuver. I swing wide and right. Mike and Doug drop low and left. Molly, our Lab, heels until the distance is closed, then grabs the wind and circles a force play. Almost there, lungs pumping, I hear the kac, kac of the flush. Predictably, the dozen birds rise prematurely. I glimpse them flapping and gliding their way to safety, forsaking a brushy head for another open hillside maybe a mile away. A lay bird loses the flock, gambling over Doug in a wind-driven rush. Whirling, he snaps a shot. The blunt wings go limp. The bird bounces and tumbles on the grass.

It will happen irregularly.

As vast as the prairie are the instincts of its creatures for survival.

They’re dumber in September, our outfitter observes as we return to the truck.

Perhaps. Nonetheless, I’m wishing for a rangy pointing dog and a rematch on the morrow.

How he would relish this, I muse.

Humble is gray-dawn in a prairie pothole with the tangy, sulfurous stench of marsh mud in your nostrils, under a cloud-clabbered sky so stunningly enormous it seems to encompass the universe, so black it’s forbidding. There’s a spatter of rain, a stiff north wind at your face. It whistles around your ears and rattles the cattails. Occasionally the clouds blow apart; there’s a momentary glimpse of the moon. It’s on its back, hardly bigger than the crescent of your thumbnail. Ceaselessly, the heavens sizzle with unseen wings, seethe with the fluted cacophony of restless geese, high-ball with harbored ducks, whimper with cranes. From the core of your soul springs both an exhilarating loneliness, and a shiver of insignificance.

On the right! The one on the right! Moody’s cohort Al Schmidt screams frantically in my ear.

I swing hard past the flaring bird and pull. It buckles, head jack-knifing back over its body, hangs briefly, then crashes heavily to the flat. Water shatters as Al’s Lab Koda lines the mark. As quickly, another flock settles into our set, while above, others are circling for a berth, and teal scorch by head-high like so many robins.

We shoot only greenheads, big corn-fed, northern birds with rich orange legs.

Profound is a field of unharvested sunflowers that would take in the whole of eastern Carolina, it seems, the big, pregnant seedheads hanging like locker-room showerheads.

They raise birdseed out here, quips Doug, of the ever-ready wit.

Profound yet are the six-dozen pheasants that gust out of a twenty-by-sixty-foot hump at its interior. It has rained for three days. The birds, weary of wet feet, have shopped for high ground and a windbreak. Overgrown with grass and sumac, the sheltered, rocky hump has filled the bill. Doug has the off side, I the near. I hear his 1100 thumping frenetically. Flabbergasted, I stutter like a burred ratchet gear from one erupting bird to another. Finally the Beretta locks on the cackling rooster in the next quintet. He bursts into fiery colors, flaming to the grass.

Keep moving, stay ready, yells Mike, there may be more! There are.

Doug stands the last afternoon, birds in hand, before a midwestern sunset. I fall alongside. We speak without words. I think of him again, two thousand miles distant.

Homeward out of Pierre, the prop-jet levels at low altitude, a speck in a brilliant blue sky. Beneath, the prairie crawls slowly, interminably, by. Westward shimmers the Missouri River, rolling away in sprawling, nomadic loops, on and on, until it disappears at the horizon into bright silver clouds. The great Trinity: Time and the River, and Eternity.

Such thoughts and words are on my shirtsleeve. There is a reason.

A week before I had looked down at him . . . at my father . . . coming eighty, two days out of a massive surgery, pallid and limp against a ghostly white pillow. With the uncertainty of another day between us.

He had struggled to lay a trembling, age-splotched hand on the back of my own.

Go, Son, he said, I want you to go.

All the years, he rarely used the word Son, . . . only when his heart was closest to his wish.

Here lay the man who had given me life, modeled my determination, steeled my discipline, kindled my wanderlust.

There was no answer to the dilemma. Only a consequence. And my burden to bear.

I had gone. It was that third gray-dawn morning in a prairie marsh before I truly knew why. Before I comprehended that he understood me as completely as he loved me. Before I recognized that the dream of the Son was little more than the dream of the Father for the Son. He worked forty-four years in a small-town textile mill. He never got to go.

It seemed extravagant now to ask. But I begged one more privilege.

I wanted to get safely home, and tell him about it.

CHAPTER THREE

Christmas Past

The fire has fallen to a glow and whisper. Joyous small voices have surrendered to sleep. Too briefly has abided this happiest of evenings. Gone home are old friends in unwillingly good-byes. The multi-colored reflection of the lights adorns her dreamy eyes, and her good-night kiss is upon your lips. A retreat of footsteps and the house grows still. The magic of Christmas is yours alone.

Frost frames the window panes. Faintly, at the edge of consciousness, swells a song . . . I heard the bells on Christmas day . . . their old familiar carols play . . . soft and sweet, in words replete . . . ? Only the colored lights and the timid flicker of the fire soften the darkness of the room, and between light and night, snow is sifting gently down. The coziness of the coals has distilled from the tree a fragrance of evergreen and coaxed from the cookies a resurgence of spice. Upon your palate is the smooth, neat burn of malt, and upon your soul a drift of reverie. Softly the wonder of the season is painted upon the canvas of your mind. Wistful the portrait and drowsy your eyes, and . . . ?

The night is touched by illusion. There is strangely no moon. Yet a mercurial glimmer washes the world beyond the window. The thickening snow glistens as white satin. The trees sparkle as silver. On the air is the jangle of sleigh bells, on your nose the scent of a pipe. And under the tree . . . under the tree . . . is a gift. A large box, wrapped in gold that was not there before. A box that begs to be opened. Only it is not wrapped at all, simply lucent. Each face of it is a window, and inside, in the gauzy golden light behind each pane, whirls a calliope of sporting memories. Days, faces, places – merely then, way back when. Another and another, the most resplendent of your life, on every side. Like siren songs they emerge, spin and fade, while your mind tumbles with the mystery, and stumbles oddly into the melancholy of Toyland . . . when you’ve grown up, my dears . . . and grown as old as I . . . you’ll wonder where the years have gone, that roll so swiftly by, my dears . . . ?

You are a boy, someone had said vaguely, so long ago, "but one day you will be a man and have wonderful memories. And strangely, you shall find they will both comfort and haunt you. At a time when you will wish as much for yesterday as now you beg for tomorrow.

One day you will come to a question, of the life you have lived, that will begin very beautifully, but fade to a riddle.

And now, abruptly, on the most wishful night of the year, that time has come, and here is the question, as starkly as the Star of Light.

Could you relive one day of your sporting life. Which would it be?

One yesterday you can go back for, to the moment, to the letter. To a feeling, whisker, fin or feather.

The single best. Tonight. But only one.

Here is the astonishing gift of it. Which shall you choose?

Reunion. Someone dear. Any day you were together was extraordinary. But one of those few, when premise became Paradise, and the world whistled your tune. When together you could only marvel, divided by mystery but united in zest. An exquisite day of awe and bliss, when someone stood as stalwartly in your life as a great heritage oak. That sheltered you in the shadow of its strength, graced you with the reach of its wisdom, and comforted you with the steadiness of its company. But later, where the oak was, there it was gone. Would you have it back one last time?

An unfettered day from childhood. Simple and free. When happiness was as evenly presumption as promise, was innocent of heartbreak and bereft of regret. A day spun as simply as a straw hat, bare toes in the mud and a hickory pole – a worm and cork-stopper – a toffee-colored creek and a huge old yellow-cat.

Honest love. The purest and deepest you have ever known. Days with dogs. Marsh and sedge, hill and plain. All the treasured times. So many there were, yet so short were those you had. The replication of any one of them would be almost the gift of the others.

Special days accomplished alone. The incomparable satisfaction of solitude. One of those scarce cloudless times when you held perfection in your hand, when every saint in Heaven stood in your favor, and beneath your breath you whispered hallelujah. A day you gave yourself far and away, high and wild, a day you crowned the achievement of your years with one more dream – stood alone – so high you’re still coming down. Or so, sometimes, it seems. To actually feel it, see it again, as it was just then. Or maybe the inverse. A day born for greatness, that died with an after-thought. If only this, or better, that.

You could go back, dig the sun from the sunset.

Or could you? A day with someone dear. But whom? Which? There were so many. Could you pick one, and live unburdened by the rest? Childhood. Wonderfully blithe, thoughtlessly gay. Could you savor it freely now, even for a day, give up all the others – and frolic away?

To live again a day with a dog. To hurt with the joy. But could you look in the eyes of one, with the very faithfulness they taught you, and not betray painfully the others?

An incomparable day again, alone. But selflessly?

And there, on the most beautiful night of the year, is the riddle. The ghost of Christmas past. Without the need to remember, would there be the need to forget? What of hope, the message of the Messiah? You must choose. While there is still the magic, still the moment. Push through the agony and decide. Choose one wondrous or let it go forever.

Only in memory can you faithfully have them all.

But now, mercifully, someone is shaking you. All the lights are on, carols are boldly playing, and the night is no longer silver, but leaden with dawn. Her kiss is on your lips again, though this time it’s good morning and this time, Merry Christmas!

Noel, Pop your son is saying, while the family closes round. Happy Christmas in a chorus.

Into your lap climbs a beaming little boy with a cap pistol, close behind a dimpled little girl with a doll.

You were dreaming, Gran’pa, they clamor in unison, you missed Santy Claus.

A glance to the skirt of the tree. The golden box is gone.

But not the tiny trace of soot at the chimney.

CHAPTER FOUR

Believing

Iwas late to bed and dead-tired, and outside the rain whispered down in a steady patter on the roof.

Sleep came quickly and deepened, and when again I awoke it was full day. It was raining still, but more softly; the morning was gray and clabbered, wonderfully cool with a light west wind. The thin and wispy clouds overhead were restless with the travel of the breeze, and beneath their skirts the eastern sky carried the faint pink promise of the sun. By nine o’clock, light and shadow would stir.

Though there was strangeness to the air. Everything seemed less, or more, than normally it was. Reality was mislaid in a peculiar dimension, a warp between place and time.

Around me the world was curt and contemporary. The rural Carolina landscape had the graveyard look and feel of the quail-less milennium. Too Yankee, too pretty, too much cotton, corn and fescue, too barren of shaggy edges and old-time gallberry heads. Suburban houses planted neatly in a row, where once grew partridge peas and wandering fencerows.

Yet it beckoned, as once it had. This same land. When it was pastoral and genteel, full of faith and friendliness. When it was Southern, quaint and birdy. When the closest thing to a shopping center was a crossroads store five miles down a dirt road. When neighbors laid fence, but never between them. As it had for those of us left, who knew it and loved it that way. Who could be happier had it never changed.

The difference moved me to hopeful eyes, but on its face it loomed the same birdless 21st century nightmare it had grown to be. While, somehow, beneath the glib clip of its presence I could sense clearly again the entreating antediluvian crawl of its past. Calling to me, from somewhere unknown, as if it was imprisoned and straining to be free.

I found myself on the walkway to a white-washed, two-story clapboard country home. I remembered it well. Mary Kate’s autumn roses were a-blush on the porch trellis, and there was Bill’s old orange Case tractor tethered to a harrow by the barn. My green Chevy pickup sat in their front path, no longer faded, dented and rust-ridden, but nearly new, as once it had been. There were dogs barking from the box. Begging to go. Beautiful, beloved voices I knew immediately, but had never expected to hear again. Meg, Kate and Cindy. The greatest gun dogs of my life, together, in the same era. Though they were whelped, had lived and died, apart.

My Glory. To watch them spin merrily ahead, together as never. If only . . . if only . . . we still had the birds.

The world swam in a riddle of old and new. Nearby, cars zipped by on an interstate highway that had exterminated a hundred family farms, reminding me it was 2009 – while across the accompanying silence of a rural morning floated the too-long-gone, faint and plaintive 1950 notes of a first-light covey call.

I was changed as well. The clothes I wore were used-up long before. Ragged by the 60s. Yet, on my head was the just-right heft of my grandpap’s old felt hat. Beneath the tattered canvas vest that my first-bred puppies had chewed, tossed away but somehow found again, was my once-favorite flannel shirt. Worn so honestly it’s nap was soft as a lover’s touch. Beneath my frayed chaps were the same shabby Levi cords, serviceable again, that I had hoarded 40 years and swore to be buried in.

I struggled to find myself. Tried to talk the dizziness out of my head. Was this real? Or only a wrinkle between void and verity?

As I stepped onto the porch, the door swung wide, and there was Bill again, as I knew him, in overalls and sleeve-garters. But Bill was dead and gone. Laid to ground on another rainy day, too many years before. I had stood graveside, watched him leave. But there he was. I could hear Mary Kate, singing from the kitchen.

It was as if they had never left.

I guess I’m here, Bill, I said.

His smile was broad and earnest, welcoming as sunlight after a sullen storm.

It’s comin’ a good day, he said, drawing a breath, "you’ll find birds today.

I’d go, but there’s turnips to tend.

Yes, there were always turnips to tend, or sweet taters, or roasting ears. He had trusted the place to me alone. For the price of a few Sunday birds.

Fate brought fortune when I met old Bill. There were nine big coveys on his farm then, probably twenty-five on the round that took in the neighbor’s. Once I had run of it all. The old times were good times. Gone now, this means or another.

Bill was a presence around Stancil’s Chapel. If Bill Craven vouched for a man, he could go on about his bird huntin’. Bill Craven had vouched for me.

Try that swamp corner on the edge of John Davis’ pea patch, Bill said brightly. They’ll be there, I’m bett’n.

But they’re gone, Bill, I thought. Gone. The pea patch, John Davis and the swamp too.

Mary Kate brought an apple-jack to the door. It tasted real. Hot, cinnamony and mouth-aching good.

You’d best call on the church bevy, too, Bill said, must be thirty of ’em. That ragweed head where mine backs up to Tom Lassiter. Man, that’s a whoppin’ bunch of birds.

This was too strange. Too real.

But they’re gone, Bill, I said.

Bill’s face sobered, and he stared curiously at me.

The wild birds are gone, Bill, I said again, and they’re not comin’ back.

No, he said firmly, "they’re still here. We’re all still here. You got to look beyond yourself.

You remember, he said, how it was when you dead-dog knew there were ten coveys on a farm, but on a given day, no matter how you scoured, you couldn’t find a feather? Wondered where under Dick’s hatband they’d all disappeared to?

I remember, I said. Who, ever, knew where the birds went on a day like that.

Well, that’s where they are, Bill said.

Momentarily, the traffic noise from the interstate broke through again. Brash and foreign.

I couldn’t find them then, Bill, I said. How do I find them now?

Your dogs, he said. "They’re the best you ever had. They’re back this one day.

They can find them now, he said.

But how did you know? I said incredulously. How did you know they were back?

Bill looked at me deliberately. A chill ran my spine.

I shook my head. None of this was real. It grew ever stranger.

But look around, Bill, I pleaded. "It’s all changed, and it’s not comin’ back. I wish it was, but it’s not.

I looked around again too, just to be sure. Nothing more than before: modern millennia, all the people, all the houses. The paltry little left of what I had loved most, that wouldn’t be here five years from now.

Look around, Bill, I said again. It’s not comin’ back. I know it’s not.

Queerly, beneath the traffic noise and the kids playing at skateboards in front of the modern house across the street, a quail called softly again.

Son, I’ve looked around, Bill said. "And I can see pretty well from up here.

Sometimes, he said, you gotta look beyond what you know, and fly on what you want to believe.

We left Bill’s to go huntin’. Nothing looked as once it had. Suburban houses huddled more closely around. The old dirt road was asphalt. Cars blew impolitely by. A stereo blared street music. As if all were trying to hem us in, to tighten the bars of time.

It was scary turning the dogs loose, for fear of losing them again. I had loved them so. But something kept calling. Something begging free.

From the box, they were whining. Trust, they said. We’ll find them, they said. Just give us be.

We turned out behind the little white church the community was named for, my heart in my throat, and the three best dogs of my life on the ground. They were Stonewall bold, Katie, Meg and Cin’. There was never no give to ’em, and they looked at each other and with no word from me tore for the front. They flashed through the little neck of woods behind the chapel at light-speed, and I ran to catch them and abruptly – before my eyes – the world was renewed.

It was 1950s quaint and quiet again.

The land welcomed, and abruptly I recognized it again, and what moments before had been farmed-to-the-trees, sterile cotton and tobacco fields stretched away in broken woodland and frost-silvered bean rows, hoary ragweed corners with broomsedge skirts, gray-green bays of peas, brown and sticky stands of beggar lice, and thick fingers of gallberry heads bordering deep and dusky swamp bottoms. And there, pray be, square-middle, was the church bevy.

It was a little farther than I expected. But the dogs had sailed three long edges like they wore wings, and there at the farthest gray corner under a ray of sunlight they stood abreast in a magnificently divided find. None bent to the other.

God, how my heart sang. And they were thirty strong, like Bill said . . . the birds . . . when they came up in a bewildering bluster, and I took ’em honestly. Two stayed behind, and no sooner were they laid to hand than the dogs were reaching again. I yelled for them to bend, and they did, way out there, and Come-Down-Moses! There was John Davis’ swamp corner, three dogs standing and birds at home. Again, like old Bill had said they’d be.

All was right and nothing was real, and I was simply spun along in the spell.

The dogs kept reaching, farther and farther, tails crackin’ and dust flying. My beckon wouldn’t stop them, but every time I could catch up to them, they’d be hard on point, sparks liftin’ and another bevy at home.

So this is where they had been. All this time. But where was this exactly?

Follow us, the dogs said. Don’t fall behind.

They were off and gone again, reaching and reaching, and the land was growing bigger and bigger. No matter how I called, they wouldn’t swing. What had been gray eastern farmrows had become golden western prairie. Suddenly, we were pointing prairie chicken and sharptails, and at its fartherest throw, the difference between the land and the sky was seamless.

On they flew, and I was running as fast as I could, trying to stay up. But the distance grew. Desperately, I begged them back.

Follow, don’t fall back, they said happily. This is what we do now; we have to go. But my lungs were bursting. I couldn’t.

Suddenly, I could hear the cruel noise of the interstate again, the death wheels of the highway. Somewhere, ahead . . . the dogs were speeding toward it.

I could feel the surge of time, gaining on my heels.

No . . . No!

Loretta’s hand was on my shoulder, shaking me free of sleep. There was fright on her face.

You were calling Meg, she said breathlessly, and Kate and Cindy. Yelling at the top of your lungs.

What in this world?

I sat up, pulled my hand heavily across my face.

It wasn’t, I said. It was another.

What?

It was another. I couldn’t keep up. Had to fall back.

She frowned. I don’t understand, she said.

I couldn’t keep up, I said again. I tried with all my might, but I couldn’t.

She was awash in bewilderment. But what was it all about? she pleaded.

I turned slowly, met her eyes.

Believin’.

CHAPTER FIVE

Confession is Good for Your Soul

Turkey thrashings are legendary. Like death, taxes and rheumatism, they’re bound to happen and once victimized, about all you can do is hike up your britches, cover the welts and blunder on down the path, dreading the next one.

If the scars were simply physical, you could dab a little salve on – they’d heal soon enough – and you could brave on with a modicum of dignity. Problem is, the worst of them persist in your head, muddling things up in the balcony so you can’t decipher up from down. Tricking you to believe you’re less than a fool, when anybody midway of sane knows you’re goofier than a double-gobble.

I myself have been taken to the woodshed more times than I care to remember, coming away each occasion not an ounce wiser for the experience. Hunting on as though I know better, gambling my best strategy, winning just enough to bluster into another hiding. All this, when any rational man would have called home the dogs and pissed out the fire.

So that it was bound to happen, the Reverend Mother of all shellackings, just last season at an unlikely place: Bruce Prins’ Prairie Sky Ranch in northeastern South Dakota.

Ever vulnerable, I had no reason to deny the gospel when Matt Gindorff of The Sporting Traveler dangled the bearded carrot from Fargo, North Dakota.

This place is crawlin’ with turkeys, he said feverishly, "they gotta shoo ’em off the doorstoop. They’s so many gobblers Bruce’s had to pen the hens.

Easterns, hybrids and Merriam’s. Best thing is, I’ve hunted it several times. Know it like my lover’s wrinkles.

Well, hell. Here was a highly accomplished turkey hunter, a man who’s jammed a slam, a man with a gold-plated reputation for orchestrating successful big game and fishing ventures all over the free world, forking over the next thing to a guarantee. What’s to doubt?

I wanted a big, silver-hammered Merriam’s. One that blows up and shines like quicksilver. Everybody knows Merriam’s ain’t top of the Dean’s List.

I’ll do ’em with the bow, I declared, reckless with lust.

Three days and two arrows, Matt replied firmly, alls we’ll need.

Nobody could say the promise wasn’t pretty. It was springtime on the prairies and the sap was rising. By every puddle and pothole hung a NO VACANCY sign. Each slap-full of displaying wildfowl in ceremonial plumage. An occupancy of big burgundy-headed, bull canvasbacks in white canvas dinner jackets; primly vested sprig in elegant grey coat-and-tails; rusty little rump-roached ruddys in blue war paint – all waxing silly for their lady-fairs.

Hah-haa. You could hear the thudding Z-Z-Top rhythm of it. Th’ girls go crazy over a sharp-dressed man!

It was the age-old pageant of renewal, in all its tones and colors, and it was beautiful – cast beneath the rush of the prairie wind – and you could feel the thrilling restlessness of it.

The pelicans were back. Small, neat squadrons lifted and glided in dignified sorties here to there. From the vantage of half-a-hundred miles loomed the dramatic gray demarcation between the eastern plains and the wonderfully rolling hill country we would hunt. On the oaks in the folds of the hills leaves were newly born, pale and suckling, but gathering green.

We arrived late,