There Are A Lot of Memories Here

I set the alarm for five, confident I wouldn’t need it.

I didn’t. Waking ten minutes early I turned off the alarm and got dressed.

Nearly every opening morning for the last 18 years the routine has been the same. So has the place.

It’s hallowed ground. Scout died after she was bitten by a rattlesnake there in 2006. I buried Jem there four years ago. He too, suffered a snakebite along the same creek bottom, but survived and lived to the ripe old age of 14.

Spot and Ruth and Ace — all of them gone now —also hunted there.

It’s Dot’s fourth season. I suspect she’ll be the last. Then I’ll be done. I’m getting too old to start another pup.

But while hunters and dogs come and go, the land lies unchanged. Some years it’s grazed a bit more than others. There aren’t as many trees as there once were, but at first light it seems to glow emerald green and gold. Then the sun tops the ridge to the east and the light flattens out revealing a harsh landscape.

The little green that remains on September first clings tightly to the creek bottom. What color there was on the land above the creek has long since fled, leaving only faded yellows and browns, and the pale green of the sage. Cactus is plentiful, but the dogs quickly learn to avoid it. I haven’t. At least once every season I sit or kneel in a prickly pear patch.

The sun was starting to lighten the eastern horizon when I left town. By the time I reached the creek it was almost time to hunt, but I forced myself to sit a bit longer in the truck listening to rock’n’roll on the radio.

Dot didn’t seem to mind. A quiet dog, she waited patiently in the back seat, ears perked, while I rocked out.

There were simply too many memories here for me to sit quietly with my own thoughts waiting for sunrise.

Once it was light enough, I let Dot out of the truck and she raced up the road 50 yards before turning and racing back. That was Ace’s thing, and she would chase him, both of them returning together. He died at 13 last summer. Now she’s chasing a ghost, and I’m hunting with them.

Brown, and black, and white dogs racing through the sage and shortgrass, disappearing over the bank into the brush along the creek bottom. It’s hard to keep track of them all.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]