One day in late October on a vast juniper savannah north of Two Dot and next to a tiny spring where watercress grew and where Pie sipped and slept, we ate our lunch, following the hawks with our eyes and admiring the partridges we’d laid in front of us. The warmth of blue sky that had persisted all through September had given way to a steelier blue and the suggestion that the clouds sailing across us on prevailing westerlies would soon bring snow.
Dr. Olsson was watching me, and at first said nothing. Then, “We’re going to get you out of your house before we lose you altogether.” My rejected first impulse was to stage some defense of my household culture, which for all its deficiencies was mine and mine alone. But it was clear that Olsson would leave it at that and allow his remark to acquire its own weight.
One of the unusual things about Dr. Olsson was that he had never married. He had no children and was all in all a very proper fellow who neither drank to excess nor flirted, though he confessed to me that he once played strip poker with the nurses back in Ohio. My mother told me that he had been in love with a girl in school who married his best friend. His shamed grin at this confession was enormously appealing. I rarely saw him without a clean shirt, pressed pants, and often a tie. His great passion was hunting partridges with his black and white dog. Unless she was in trouble for running off or breaking point, she was just “Pie.” Pie was a shrewd little mongrel, four years old, with a brisk, upright tail, a liver-colored spot on her right ribs shaped like Australia, one black ear, and a finely speckled muzzle. She hunted and pointed birds and would not retrieve the ones we shot, though she helped us find them. She handled nicely on Dr. Olsson’s whistle, changing direction on one blast and returning on two. Dr. Olsson was inordinately proud of his whistle, which was of chromed brass and made in England, an “Acme Thunderer.” It hardly thundered but had a nice sharp sound when compared to the spit-filled gurgle of a police whistle.
When Pie thought hunting was afoot, she would whirl in place, faster and faster, then tip over and bite her own leg, only to jump up with a cry and dash to the screen door, where she slid to a stop and awaited assistance. She was an outstanding and enthusiastic bird dog, found in a ditch alongside the Two Dot road where she had been tossed from a moving car. A Canadian tourist delivered her to the All Creatures veterinary service in Big Timber, where Dr. Olsson acquired her. He had her dewclaws removed, had her vaccinated and spayed, then brought her home and propped her beside him in bed where, night after night, he read the essays of Montaigne while feeding her treats with his free hand. Given the degree to which Dr. Olsson was besotted by his new prize, it was not unexpected that when she was half grown he trained her firmly in unstinting daily increments. By six months, Pie knew “here,” “heel,” “whoa,” and “no,” and she had them learned for life. After that, her days became less stressful as Dr. Olsson introduced her to game birds — partridges and grouse — freely allowing her to make mistakes as she determined her objectives and strategies in the mysteries of wind. Dr. Olsson told me, “A bird dog needs to be just that much wild” as he held thumb and forefinger an inch apart. I didn’t think she could be very wild with her head on a pillow every night, but in the field Pie revealed not just energy and purpose but a thousand-yard stare. Dr. Olsson said, “They know things we don’t know.” Twice in the early days of Pie’s training, she either left Dr. Olsson or got lost. Most would leave a personal garment on the ground, go home, and return in the morning hoping to find their dog. Dr. Olsson curled up on the prairie and slept until Pie found him. When he walked Pie around town, attentive at heel, people commented, “Here comes old Dr. Olsson and his wife.” Pie was the wife and I was the child. He wore a sport coat when he was hunting, a worn old tweed from J. Press clothiers in New York. Sometimes he called a covey a “bevy,” an old-fashioned term. He wore glasses except to shoot, and he trusted Pie so much that when she was pointing a covey he patiently removed his glasses, slipped them into his pocket, and then flushed the birds. He was an excellent shot. Dr. Olsson took me hunting as frequently as I was willing to go. He found me a timid shot at first and suggested, “Step forward, shoot a lot, and claim everything.” I gradually rose to holding my own and even began to understand the management of a bird dog in the field. It required concentration on the dog. Shooting also required concentration. Understanding habitat and wild country took concentration. I had never tried concentration before, being such a random, disorganized young man when Dr. Olsson took me under his wing that he was lucky I didn’t accidentally shoot him. He taught me to use the recoil to speed the slide for the second shot on the Winchester. It took me a long while to understand any of this, and I was predictably abashed as Pie led us to the birds I had missed while Dr. Olsson had harvested at extraordinary range.
I think some of my solitary ways derived from my early training under Dr. Olsson. He lived in rented rooms with Pie, drove an old car, and within two years of arriving in Montana knew the country better than the natives did. At sixty-five, he would not infrequently walk twenty miles in a day, wear me out when I was seventeen, and outshoot me. At times, I never raised my gun but only watched in awe as he squared up, focused, got his face down on the wood, and fired. When I visited him in his rooms and surveyed the sparse furniture, the half-filled closet, the worn shaving utensils carefully laid out by the sink, the wedding photograph of his parents, the small brown radio and single bed, I got an inchoate sense of why I would never outshoot him. In the single-car garage, he hung his birds next to his snow shovel and lawn mower. The garage contained a small workbench and vise as well as his reloading tools for the rows of shells lined up along the back.
We took Pie afield year-round, rain or shine, in or out of hunting season. In the off-season, we counted coveys and entered the information into Dr. Olsson’s partridge log, which he sent to the department of fish and game without acknowledgment. I was very anxious to do away with the hawks that decimated our partridges during the winter, especially the northern harriers who hugged the ground and left many a feather pile behind. But Dr. Olsson gave me my first inklings of a holistic view via the old phrase “the balance of nature.” He insisted that I learn to love the hawks. I didn’t find that easy. When he learned that I had shot one from a tree out at Gladys and Wiley’s, he stopped speaking to me for twenty-nine days, which I thought would kill me. I once poured my heart out about my love of hunting and nature to Wiley and my father, who squinted through their cigarette smoke as I talked. When I’d finished, Wiley asked my father if he thought I’d been drinking.
I think that Dr. Olsson was an atheist. When news of some fatality or another came to our attention, he always said the same thing: “Live it up.” Over time this seemingly casual remark acquired a kind of resonance, and the subtext for “Live it up” came to seem, “That’s all there is.” It might have explained his friendship with Wiley, who often quoted the old-time trail cowboys to the effect that if you waited for Jesus to feed you, you’d starve to death.