The following is an excerpt from my novel Needle & Thread. All text is copyrighted and may not be reproduced. Enjoy reading!!
"Hard to believe that one night
more than sixty years ago, during a dance that had turned rowdy, someone hit
Lawrence Welk over the head with a brick in Hague, North Dakota."
- Ian Frazier, Great Plains
The dog quivered, eyes wide and body frozen as
he stared into the grass. Landon crouched behind him, grasping the check cord
with two hands. He was caught in the rapture of the moment, his lips spreading
open and a faint smile steadily growing on his face. The dog was on point.
It was nine in the evening; at this latitude in
early June, the sun’s warmth glowed on Landon’s skin. He closed his eyes while
the dog held steady, statue-like, immersed in the moment. He breathed deeply
and slipped into non-time, the realm of the transcendent. Although the sun’s
heat continued to resonate through him, distant clouds obscured the day
gradually, like theater lights dimming, signaling the commencement of a play.
He opened his eyes and looked at the dog, whose eyes gaze was still fixed and
remembered the work at hand.
As
a trainer, Landon’s job was to hone the dogs’ instinct to point. This was to
instruct them to resist the temptation to break their trance and flush the game
prematurely. He thought hunting with pointing dogs for upland game birds as
more an art form than a necessity. Anyone could buy frozen chicken breasts from
a grocery store. Taking the time to find, shoot, clean, and cook a wild bird
was a luxury, primitive yet elegant. The dogs’ passion to find birds was
beautiful; bounding and leaping to find the game, the sudden stillness of a dog
standing point took his breath away.
The
pointing instinct never failed to amaze him. A vestigial behavior from
ancestral wolves, medieval dog breeders took the trait and refined it.
Generation after generation each dog inherited the wolf’s instinct to stare
down their game the location of the quarry. For pointing dogs, this instinct
was amplified so the dog would freeze up when he smelled any trace of game to
signal his pack leader – the human hunter.
Breeders
developed this trait in dogs as a strategy to capture game. When a bird or a
rabbit felt threatened, there were two ways it might react: one response was
the animal would run; the other instinct was to bury itself in cover and
freeze, hoping the predator will miss it. Pointing dogs were the trump card for
the second response. They could find and pin down the location of the game so
the hunter could bag it. While the Thirty Years War raged in central Europe,
breeders quietly developed this breed of dog. The hunters tossed their nets in
front of the dogs’ noses and gathered the day’s table fare for their lords.
As
technology progressed, hunters exchanged their nets for firearms. The dogs,
whose progeny developed into dozens of breeds, assisted the new generation of
hunters. Instead of throwing a net, the hunter would kick the grass and shrubs
concealing the bird in front of the spellbound canine. Then, bursting in a
flurry of wings, the pheasant, woodcock or grouse exploded into the sky just as
the shooter took aim.
Landon
imagined the medieval hunters felt the same pride and fascination with their
dogs’ ability that stirred in his heart. Holding the check cord firmly, he
repeated the whoa command and stroked
the dog’s sleek fur. As the pigeon took wing, he couldn’t help but think that
the dog’s cocked ears and outstretched tongue signaled a smile.
The
trainer stood from his crouch and released the check cord. The dog vaulted into
the open prairie, content that he had done well. Tall, puffed clouds continued
to shroud the fading sunlight in the west as Landon looked into the broad vista
of his training ground.
“Looks
like rain,” Landon said as lightning flashes silently threatened in the
distance.
****
The Badlands of the northern plains
were in thunderstorm season. The gods of summer frolicked in pyrotechnic
insanity, meandering across the prairie sky, emptying their chalice, whose mix
was both life and destruction on the plain—precious water, flame, or flood.
The
clouds were white and bright. Tall, leaning themselves into the eastern
blueness, they seemed like gods imposed on the infinite canvas of grass and
buttes and sky that was Dakota.
“See that one?” Landon pointed. “That’s a cumulonimbus.”
“You mean the one that looks like a big-damn-white wall of death?”
Landon raised one eyebrow, turned his eyes toward his assistant,
Wade, with a bit of contempt and amusement, adding, “Yeah, that one.”
He
loved this time of year. Training was underway, grass was green, and the storm
season was upon them. He liked thunderstorms in the Great Wide Open of western North Dakota. A
transplant from the east, he never got over how big everything seemed. And how
small he felt within it.
1 comment:
Je voulais vous dire que j'apprécie beaucoup de lire vos articles intéressants. Toutefois, je tiens à lire sur l'herbe, parce que c'est mon métier.
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