Chris sideslips down the coulee slope toward his setter, Drake, who stands on hard point at the other side of the drainage. I remain above and watch the scene unfold between Chris, Drake, and a pheasant hidden somewhere in the grass.
Each is held in suspended animation in relation to the other: human to dog to rooster. Chris, finger on the safety, is drawn closer to Drake. Drake’s spotted body held taut in a graceful blend of training and instinct. The pheasant pinned to a patch of cold Montana ground by Drake’s stare.
And here I am, beginning to descend over the lip of the coulee, struggling to keep my footing on the thawing dirt that was frozen white an hour ago. While Chris closes the distance, he speaks to his dog the way my father spoke to me as I shot jump shots on the basketball court: firm but with a tender recognition that the body knows what to do. I recognize that I am in the presence of something beautiful—a moment balanced but ephemeral, made more beautiful by its impermanence.
And then like a logjam during a flood, the moment is jarred and ended.
The day had been marked by missteps. At the first field, all the roosters flushed wild and disappeared above the irrigation pivots a hundred yards away. In the next pasture, Chris and I bum-rushed a stand of willows. Twenty birds lifted and scattered. Chris hit a rooster high but then turned to watch my poor shooting instead of marking where his bird landed.
Another rooster rose late, crossing from left to right in front of me at 15 yards. I hurried my first shot, surprised at the size of the bird I was hoping to hit, and was too late on my second, forgetting I was shooting an over-under and not the pump-action I had left in my apartment back at grad school in Indiana. A blown layup in the middle of Montana.
After setting up along the next line of willows at the back end of a farm, I watched 30 pheasants sail over the cut wheat and into an irrigation ditch 200 yards away. We chased them but only flushed hens.
Back in the truck, I found the roast chicken Chris had packed for the day: half the breast and a leg had already been eaten.
“You should be an expert in frugality,” commented Chris while checking his phone. “Every grad student needs to know how to stretch his food. I never forgot! I can get eight meals from a whole chicken. I’ve already had three off that bird!”
In the warming cab of the truck, I poured a balsamic dressing over the breast and scraped the cold meat with a plastic fork.
I was drowsy from a lack of sleep the night before. Between the hot air hitting my cheeks from the dashboard vents and the sound of Drake picking burs out of his coat in the crate behind us, my eyelids drooped dangerously low. With the not-entirely-pleasant smell of myself rising from the now twice-dried sweat of my shirt, I rested in the perfectly imperfect: safe and warm, healthy and full, hours to go and miles of fields and ravines left to walk—and yet no birds had fallen and cratered the snow to their shape.
Chris slammed on the brakes as three roosters crossed the road in front of us and onto private land. The two trailing roosters rushed back over the berm onto the ranch we had permission to hunt. We parked quickly and cornered the birds in a copse of trees along a stream, but they flushed directly away, never offering a shot.
Drake led us upstream, the long hairs of his tail swaying like milkweed seeds, following the crosshatching of tracks left by deer, pheasant, and mice. The only cover we saw ahead was another small stand of trees; when we reached the tangle, however, the pheasants flushed to our left, up and over the coulee rim.
I love to watch birds fly, so those pheasants soaring and then landing a half-mile away was enough to make me smile. While we caught our breath from the quick climb, Drake pushed us forward along the fence line with flash points until he held in the steepest vein of the coulee.
Noah Davis grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in Missoula, Montana. His writing has appeared in Fly Fisherman, American Angler, The Flyfish Journal, Anglers Journal, The Drake, Fly Fishing & Tying Journal, Backcountry Journal, and Southern Culture on the Fly. Davis earned his MFA in poetry at Indiana University and his first collection of poems, Of This River, was published this August by Michigan State University Press. He hopes to become more familiar with all the wild birds Montana has to offer.
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