Behind three bird dogs, two men walk up the middle of a gravel road, shotguns slung over their shoulders: a hunter and a poet trailing two ticked-up setters and an old grey-faced black Lab.

One man—though he is presently more boy than man—carries a shot pheasant in the game bag of his vest and the other hangs three from a steel lanyard attached to his belt, the dead birds jostling occasionally with a lengthened stride, the regal skins releasing a feather that kites off into the stark November sky.

They could walk all day and not reach the foot of the small range of mountains toward which they walk. The poet is thinking this when the shilpit male setter veers suddenly off the road into the ditch, his keen nose snaking back and forth, nuzzling the ground. The poet sidles up behind the dog, parting the deep lissome grass, shuffling to the fenceline where the entirety of the trusted dog, even his formerly frantic tail, halts and hardens like something cast in pewter. Beyond the fenceline lies a mile of ankle-high cut wheat; the bird, if there’s one here, has run out of cover, and will be forced to flush.

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