While You’re Still Here

We seldom caught the sun in the shade of Moosehorn Valley. A glacier had cut it too deep to give it both its rare beauty and the warmth of a wide open plain. It floats in my mind like a walled island where you feel submerged, like you are at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by bursts of bright coral on the valley walls. Purdey, a young setter, ran ahead of us, her white tail flashing through the valley’s shadow.

The water drains from the remaining snow and ice above into a rocky creek, then cuts its way in meander streams like black silk through lime-green mosses, eventually meeting along the edge to cascade down in white froth, purified by rock.

Steve will drink this water. He drinks from his hands or sometimes carries a small camp cup. He has told me many times that nature is clean and how it’s supposed to be. I get the idea and subscribe to it. I just don’t do it. Not very often, at least. I have been to the high plateau above the valley on a few occasions when it is not covered in snow. When it’s covered in sheep leavings.

No matter how many of my best days are in the mountains, I was raised on faucet water. I was well-schooled in fecal coliforms. When I was in fifth grade, my class had to walk from the schoolhouse to the clinic each day to gargle fluoride. The wild gazelle in my heart wants to drink from a source as pure as the earth I am made of, but something in my human brain stops me short. The animal in me loves Gaia – the primordial Earth mother, but not Giardia, the protozoan water contaminant.

When I take a drink of pure mountain water, it might look like people unfamiliar with alcohol taking a teensy-weensy sip of whiskey. Meanwhile, Steve kneels by water as clear as vodka, drinking as if it were a sacred act of communion with the earth. I have looked at this image through a camera lens, loving the message it sends. It makes you think, “I want to be that man, that rugged individual, that laconic, reckless soul who exists alone in the wilderness of a world wrapped in single-serving packages.”

The price of admission, it often seems, is the wind. The morning thermals hit you like a flash freeze. After you have climbed and sweated your way up, submerged your boots in the creek crossing, the only thing that is lukewarm is your water bottle.

As beautiful as it is and as much as it feels like a gift to get to see the place again, after hours of exertion and cold, I was ready to go when we turned back. Purdey disagreed.

She had been running all morning without stop. Her body was a flash of joy when she crossed ahead of us, her feathers wet as she stretched herself wide open to take in as much air and space as possible.

I’ll never be as fit as a setter. Even if I ran every day. My two legs could never carry me the way her four do. It’s a better design for covering ground. I’ll never run with my nose stretched so far ahead of me, the back of my body flying away with a tail to wave like this is my country. I’ll never be close to that feat of speed and grace, and I watch in awe.

Purdey is not a highly trained bird dog. Steve and I have been lucky to have many self-taught dogs. It may be that our luck in that department ran out when we kept a litter of English setter pups. Purdey, the only female and only tri-color in the litter, never seemed to “learn how to learn,” as the trainers say.

While her littermates began to show their characters, Purdey remained the most mysterious to me. She didn’t seem to know how to be. When we took her grouse hunting, if anyone fired a shot, she ran back to the truck. You would find her dancing around on her tippy toes, an adorable yet somewhat limiting habit for a bird dog.

If you called her name, most of the time she took off in the opposite direction. You might think this is rebellious behavior, but it didn’t have that feel to it. It seemed more like she was taking off like a bird you had suddenly encountered.

We took a break on a ridge near the headwall, looking back on the ground we had covered. Purdey didn’t sit with us unless we grabbed hold of her. And I held her on my lap for a few minutes, feeling her heart beat wildly, as if I were holding a bird’s wings closed in my hand. I could feel a panic in her, and I thought about how I wished I could talk to her, console her in some way. “I’m not going to kill you. Just hold still and take a break.”

When I let go of her, she was off on another run. It’s one thing to cover country behind a dog like Winchester, who ranged with a mastery that seemed there from the day I met him, when I peered into his dark puppy eyes and felt like I had encountered someone old and new. An old friend, an old Zen monk, an old sheep standing on a rock, an old fish in the deepest sea, and a new chance, a new world, a new horizon uncorrupted by the frames built to cage it from what it used to be.

You would think his pups would have inherited more of his way – his gravitas.

But they didn’t. Hugo got Winchester’s stride, Cogswell his sense of order, Colt his black spots, Boss his tenderness. Purdey alone inherited his lift, his wild undercurrent. For Winchester, it was never a wild hair as much as a wild undercoat. The wildness lifted him, but it didn’t send him sailing away. He could harness it for his purposes. Purdey has all of the lift, but is too light to anchor.

Just as Steve and I are descending the last steep level on the way back to the truck, and I have visions of warming up, drying out, and taking a nap in the passenger seat until we get to a food establishment, Purdey decides to run back up the mountain.

This may not seem like a big deal, but in my mind, the day was over. When the day is over, I’m like a trail horse headed for the barn. You can’t un-ring the dinner bell with me. I am like Colt in that regard. I was set in our course to the truck and looking forward to it.

If she had come back when we called her, the memory of this day would not be so vivid. But we headed back up the mountain after her. Back at the start of the valley, I saw her ahead of us and called her name. She stopped, looked at me, and turned and ran away from us again.

The memory of it comes to mind like a movie reel going backward in single stuttered frames. Going down the mountain is going back up.

As I sit here thinking about her and that day, she is lying in a dog bed with her head resting on the edge, eyes closed. She turned 11 in June. Last week, she felt her back legs go out from under her for the first time. She looked at me before she closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she is looking at me again.

I am still typing and stop. I wonder if she remembers that day.

We can’t go back now.

Her legs can’t hold her. She can barely stand and walk without losing track of her feet. She’s not eating at all or drinking very much.

I got up and went over to her. Why is it, I wondered, that I can feel such an intense loss of those days we had, when she is still here.

She’s still here. As long as I’m here. As long as you’re here.