When I was younger, and my dogs and I would find birds in the exact same spot year after year, I would sometimes feel a little guilty about it, as if we weren’t really quite hunting. It seemed we were using the knowledge of previous years rather than the more primal and direct responses of scent, sight, sound, intuition.
Such encounters seemed to be lacking the wild extravagance, flamboyance, and stunning originality of finding birds in new places, or places where you did not expect them, or places where you expected them but have never found them before. It’s as if the dogs and I knew a secret; as if the dogs and I held, in our experience, an unfamiliar advantage over the bird hiding in that one, same spot.
What I think now, however, is that there is something just as flamboyant and spectacular in the eerie parallels of sameness that proceed, now and again, finding a bird beneath the same cottonwood, or in the precise same strand of cattails. These replications call out to us to notice them more deeply, not less, in their enduring sameness: like the teacher who desires that the students learn by rote or brute force of memorization certain of the most important lessons.
It doesn’t just happen with gamebirds, of course.
Big-game hunters, for instance, have noticed that there are certain places upon the land where animals appear year after year: a herd of elk passing by a certain forked-top larch snag at a certain time of morning, in late October before the snow is down. The summer bachelor herds of mule deer being found with surprising frequency, although not quite predictably, but almost at the base of a certain avalanche chute.
The one particular swale or flex of earth in eastern Montana where generations of sharp-tailed grouse have appeared with such regularity and near-predictability that it seems as if they are rising straight up from the earth in that one location, like a rooted crop, rather than passing across that location in meandering free will.
Part of such replication in the lives and movements of wild animals is able to be explained as the simple affinity for habitat. But surely sometimes there is something more than that.
Sometimes, when the dogs and I approach such places, the dogs will look at me with an expression that says unambiguously, Remember being here last time, and how we got that bird?
It’s a strange and powerful communication.
And there is another variation on this kind of knowledge. There are instances when you really, really want a bird, when you need a bird—not for yourself, but for some other larger and more important reason than yourself—and when the bird does appear, it is delivered to and for the young dog that has worked so hard and needs one for the learning experience; or it appears on a hunt with an aging father; on a hunt with an aging dog; on the last hunt of the year, in the last waning minutes of the last day of the season. We have all been in these situations and have asked, and have received.
Sometimes in such instances, particularly when the hunter has implored, or prayed, for an animal, it seems that the animal, when it does appear, is presenting itself: and despite the fact that the hunter had requested such a presentation, the hunter is not aware of any internal power that he or she might have possessed or expended to successfully accomplish such a miraculous summons, but that instead the power lies wholly beyond the hunter, and that the gift, totally without merit—swathed instead only in grace—has come completely from some other, and much larger, force. That the hunter is only one part of what is happening.
And it can be a somewhat frightening revelation, as well as an assignation or responsibility, for the hunter to realize not so much the power or simple purity of his or her own beseeching, not that at all, really—but instead that something larger lies beyond him or her, on that certain mountain, or in that certain forest, or out on that certain prairie.
Such replications and deliverances of the object desired—a grouse, an elk, a pheasant—come from some place other than the hunter’s desire. The hunter’s incandescent purity of desire cannot pray or summon these things into being, for if such a grand creative power existed within the hunter, surely he or she would feel it, and even if it simply passed through the hunter, like electricity, or like water rushing through deep channels, surely he or she would feel it then, too.
Without question, then—and yet without proof—it, that power to create and deliver an object of desire, lies beyond. The hunter, or other similar traveler, is only allowed, sometimes, to participate in that greater current, greater power: as if sticking a thin straw into it, piercing it, and then sipping from it.
It’s a mystery, but it’s the way the dog looks at you, when you’re approaching a place where there once was a bird beneath the old rusted harrow and the dog gives you that look that says, there’s one there again, this year: the here we go again look, but something more. Something that for a moment says, maybe time doesn’t quite always operate the way we think it does.
It’s just there for a moment, that strange communication. Then we move in, gun at the ready, eager, puzzled, confused, exhilarated, marveling, time-swept.
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