2004-11-16 - 6:51 p.m.
The dogs are beat. We took a long walk this afternoon, going across the back field and through the woods on our way to town. At first I had intended to take only Beau, but Chance saw us going and started to bark, so I went back and told him, “You’re right. It isn’t fair that you don’t go too,” and let him off the chain to join us.
The first logging trail was rutted and muddy, but once we got beyond it the others were solid and dry. We walked along easily, high up, but then gradually descending towards the valley. Sometimes I forget how far up I live, though I look out over the valley every day. But at such a distance the perspective is muted. Walking through the woods on a ridge top barely wide enough to hold a small vehicle one gets a much more immediate impression of height while looking down into ravines that fall away on both sides and bottom out four or five hundred feet below.
Beau had a great time chasing things and I had to keep calling him back to make sure he didn’t get on a scent trail and forget where he had been. Chance stayed beside me the whole time we were in the woods, just happy to be out and not tied up at home.
At one point I stopped and considered my surroundings. The moment felt both familiar and distant. I was looking level into the upper reaches of trees and remembering a similar afternoon maybe twenty years before when, while deer hunting a ridge just like this one, I came upon a place where leafy squirrel nests—huge nests measuring maybe ten feet across—bulged in the near tops of some very big and likely very ancient trees. The effect was slightly surreal, otherworldly. I’m guessing I had discovered a bit of virgin forest left over from the beginning of time and I’m further guessing it’s all been cut now—though I wonder whether I could ever find that place again to know for sure.
Nearing the end of the ridge trail, descending to the valley, I came across a pile of sand that had spilled from a hole in the cut bank to my left and lay untouched, pristine and elemental, like so much brown sugar poured from the earth and onto our path. A little farther and we were done descending, leaving behind both trees and a brushy periphery that held the unidentifiable remains of rusted machinery discarded at the back edge of a farm.
Two deer stood grazing unperturbedly in a field of luminescent green nearly half a mile distant while the dogs acquired their scent and tracked them, zig-zagging back and forth in the shin-high grass covering the flat ground all around us. In the farther distance traffic rumbled along the highway, a dull impertinent intrusion. Again and again I called to the dogs, checking their advance while they repeatedly attempted to extend the range of their reconnaissance. Eventually the two deer caught on to our approach, flicked their tails, and were gone.
I tied Beau in the back yard and let Chance into the back room. Because he hardly ever makes the trip, Mom mistook Chance for Beau and had to apologize. “Oh Chance,” she said, sitting down to pet him. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.”
I rode my bike home, the dogs running at my side. We stopped briefly twice where there was water in the ditches and the dogs drank and flopped down panting, wetting their bellies to cool off. And then we continued. The dogs, beat, are now flopped on the floor beside me. Every now and then one or the other will whimper and run sideways in place, blurring the wet image he lies on, perhaps dreaming of the day’s adventure.
