I’m back in the classroom now. Not that this news matters much to anyone beyond my students, and even with them, it’s pretty much, “Meh.”
I’ve whined about injuring my arm since May, as it’s resulted in me living an aimless summer. Since I first picked up a fly rod sometime in the early 1980s, for me, there has been no clear line between summer and fly fishing.
Since that mind meld, summer, fly fishing and I have become one.
Until this spring, when pain shot up my arm and the doctor was sure I’d torn the rotator cuff on my casting arm. It turned out to be a less menacing hairline fracture of my humerus, though these facts are inconsequential. What matters is that I haven’t been able to fly fish since a day in May when my daughter Zoe outfished me at Duck Lake.
Still, a boy can dream of better days ahead, days when my wounded limb will heal and I’ll be back at it, though “it” won’t be fly fishing. Now I’m motivated by dreams of bird hunting with my English setter, Jade.
To prepare, I’ve been writing about Jack, my first bird dog.
At the start of hunting season about 15 years back, after I’d moved to Wyoming, I tried on my vest and found a lone, spent shell loose in a pocket. I’d missed it when I’d cleaned out my gear at the end of the previous season. The shell was from our final hunt together, in a favorite spot in Arizona, where Jack and I often chased quail.
Images of that hunt remain as clear as my last trip to the kitchen. Clearer probably, as these days, when I make it to the kitchen, I often forget why I’m there.
This was a hunting trip I hadn’t expected Jack to make. He had been sick for months but was still hanging on when it was time to leave for Arizona, so of course, I brought him.
A remarkable thing happened when I got my old boy back in cactus country in the Verde Valley. The Verde was about an hour from our place in Flagstaff and the closest spot we’d regularly find birds.
I wasn’t expecting much from him, but when Jack got a whiff of that country it was as if the scent of the place revived him, at least temporarily.
We had three days and Jack hunted like he had five years earlier. As I walked along a ridge line our last day in Arizona, he repeatedly charged through cactus and catclaw, working into a stiff, shifting wind. He was moving slowly, deliberately, his belly low to the ground.
He’d taught me long ago that this crawl meant he was working fresh scent.
Jack retraced the route of those running birds, a path marked only by molecules of scent lingering in the desert air like invisible cairns. Then he coerced the covey to hold. I got one on the flush, then a couple more as we chased singles hunting back to the truck. We killed three birds that day and I remember it as the best hunt we ever shared.
Jack succumbed to cancer once the season was over. I buried him on a rocky bluff in Wyoming, just south of the Montana border, at a spot near where we hunted chukars, in a shallow grave covered by a mound of rocks to keep out coyotes. In the spring, when the ground is soft, it’s covered with chukar tracks slaloming through the sagebrush next to where he rests.
Ever since, when the dogs and I head south to hunt Jack’s favorite spots in Arizona, I collect a stone or two to leave on his grave in the chukar grounds. There’s a pile of stones now, right next to that shell from our final hunt.
I’m sure Jack’s in a good place.