Dan had awarded himself a little English sixteen-gauge for graduating from the Wharton School of Finance that year. It was in the gun rack behind our heads now, the bluing gone and its hinge pin shot loose.
“It’s a wonder we found anything,” said Dan from afar, “with the kind of run-off dog we had. Señor Jack. You had to preach religion to Señor Jack every hundred yards or he’d leave us. Remember? It’s a wonder we fed that common bastard.” Señor Jack was a dog with no talent, loyalty, or affection, a dog we swore would drive us to racquet sports. Dan gave him away in Georgia.
“He found the sage hens.”
“But when we got on the back side of the Little Snowies, remember? He went right through all those sharptails like a train. We should have had deer rifles. A real wonder dog. I wonder where he is. I wonder what he’s doing. Well, it’s all an illusion, a very beautiful illusion, a miracle which is taking place before our very eyes. 1965. I’ll be damned.”
The stagecoach road came in around from the east again, and we stopped: two modest ruts heading into the hills. We released the dogs and followed the road around for half an hour. It took us past an old buffalo wallow filled with water. Some teal got up into the wind and wheeled off over the prairie.
About a mile later the dogs went on point. It was hard to say who struck game and who backed. Sally catwalked a little, relocated, and stopped; then Betty honored her point. So we knew we had moving birds and got up on them fast. The dogs stayed staunch, and the long covey rise went off like something tearing. I killed a going-away and Dan made a clean left and right. It was nice to be reminded of his strong heads-up shooting. I always crawled all over my gun and lost some quickness. It came of too much waterfowling when I was young. Dan had never really been out of the uplands and had speed to show for it.
Betty and Sally picked up the birds; they came back with eyes crinkled, grouse in their mouths. They dropped the birds and Dan caught Sally with a finger through her collar. Betty shot back for the last bird. She was the better marking dog.
We shot another brace in a ravine. The dogs pointed shoulder to shoulder and the birds towered. We retrieved those, walked up a single, and headed for a hillside spring with a bar of bright buckbrush, where we nooned up with the dogs. The pretty bitches put their noses in the cold water and lifted their heads to smile when they got out of breath drinking. Then they pitched down for a rest. We broke the guns open and set them out of the way. I laid a piece of paper down and arranged some sandwiches and tangy apples from my own tree. We stretched out on one elbow, ate with a free hand, and looked off over the prairie, to me the most beautiful thing in the world. I wish I could see all the grasslands, while we still have them.
Then I couldn’t stand it. “What do you mean you’re not going to get better?”
“It’s true, old pal. It’s quite final. But listen, today I’m not thinking about it. So let’s not start.”
I was a little sore at myself. We’ve all got to go, I thought. It’s like waiting for an alarm to go off, when it’s too dark to read the dial. Looking at Dan’s great chest straining his policeman’s suspenders, it was fairly unimaginable that anything predictable could turn him to dust. I was quite wrong about that too.
A solitary antelope buck stopped to look at us from a great distance. Dan put his hat on the barrels of his gun and decoyed the foolish animal to thirty yards before it snorted and ran off. We had sometimes found antelope blinds the Indians had built, usually not far from the eagle traps, clever things made by vital hands. There were old cartridge cases next to the spring, lying in the dirt, 45–70s; maybe a fight, maybe an old rancher hunting antelope with a cavalry rifle. Who knows. A trembling mirage appeared to the south, blue and banded with hills and distance. All around us the prairie creaked with life. I tried to picture the Indians, the soldiers. I kind of could. Were they gone or were they not?
“I don’t know if I want to shoot a limit.”
“Let’s find them first,” I said. I would have plenty of time to think about that remark later.
Dan thought and then said, “That’s interesting. We’ll find them and decide if we want to limit out or let it stand.” The pointers got up, stretched their backs, glanced at us, wagged once, and lay down again next to the spring. I had gotten a queer feeling. Dan went quiet. He stared off. After a minute, a smile shot over his face. The dogs had been watching for that, and we were all on our feet and moving.
“This is it,” Dan said, to the dogs or to me; I was never sure which. Betty and Sally cracked off, casting into the wind, Betty making the bigger race, Sally filling in with meticulous groundwork. I could sense Dan’s pleasure in these fast and beautiful bracemates.
“When you hunt these girls,” he said, “you’ve got to step up their rations with hamburger, eggs, bacon drippings — you know, mixed in with that kibble. On real hot days, you put electrolytes in their drinking water. Betty comes into heat in April and October; Sally, March and September. Sally runs a little fever with her heat and shouldn’t be hunted in hot weather for the first week and a half. I always let them stay in the house. I put them in a roading harness by August first to get them in shape. They’ve both been roaded horseback.”
I began to feel dazed and heavy. Maybe life wasn’t something you lost at the end of a long fight. But I let myself off and thought, These things can go on and on.
Sally pitched over the top of a coulee. Betty went in and up the other side. There was a shadow that crossed the deep grass at the head of the draw. Sally locked up on point just at the rim, and Dan waved Betty in. She came in from the other side, hit the scent, sank into a running slink, and pointed.
Dan smiled at me and said, “Wish me luck.” He closed his gun, walked over the rim, and sank from sight. I sat on the ground until I heard the report. After a bit the covey started to get up, eight dusky birds that went off on a climbing course. I whistled the dogs in and started for my truck.
TO SKIN A CAT
South Kensington produces London’s best evenings. English ladies appear from the Pakistani grocer heading for residential hotels and recently converted mews. Old church spires preside over the latest generation of buggy English youth trickling through the tolerant neighborhood. They are still outnumbered by the men in bowlers, but many of the latter are modern offshore phonies, completing the destruction of England.
In front of Blake’s small hotel, Bobby Decatur, an American, thirty, helplessly exudes privilege in his tweed jacket, Levi’s, and cowboy boots. He is watching a striking American girl named Marianne climb out of a limousine. He doesn’t know her. The chauffeur cuts his eyes at Bobby. Bobby is steadfast in his examination of her legs. She stoops for her belongings.
Bobby Decatur says, “Need a hand?”
She walks right by him and pulls open the glass door.
Bobby says, “Whore.”
“You wish,” replies the girl. The door closes behind her, and her image shimmers off and evaporates in the glass.
At the desk a Dutch girl named Hildegarde, who wears smart designer clothes every day and who directs the sallow Cockney bellhop, gives Marianne the key and says, “That’s your new room. Away from the noisy landing. A little nicer, that. Room Two-ten.”
Bobby listens from inside the door. When Marianne disappears up the stairs, Bobby approaches Hildegarde, who says, “This one is not for you,” in the voice of a procurer. The American does a burlesque Who-me? And Hildegarde adds, “She is visiting her fiancé. A nice Englishman.”
So Bobby Decatur goes across the foyer and down the stairs into the stainless-steel decor of the lounge. Jack the bartender has a crinkled face and a Prince Valiant haircut. He reminds Bobby that he is cut off. Bobby states that he has a letter from his doctor attesting that an unfortunate side effect of his medication goes a long way toward explaining his erratic behavior. Jack says that we’ve all got one of those doctors.