In the mornings among the wire grass and cattails, in my canoe camouflaged for the same, a dozen-anda half mallard and wood duck decoys amongst the wild rice and lily pads – the majority brilliantly colored drakes (too brilliantly, because brilliantly colored drakes sell decoys to duck hunters but do not fool ducks), and Peppy in the bow, my body feels cold but not tense or strained or old.
I feel some peace with myself. My doing is aligned and balanced with my dreaming. It is where I’ve wanted to be since I was six with another golden retriever not coincidentally named Peppy up at the cabin, and since I was nine in our duck blind in my father’s lap.
It matters not how many ducks I shoot or how many flocks I see. Only that I am among some occasional ducks (a lone woodie or five mallards) listening to my duck calling and working my decoys.
When I awake earlier on these mornings I feel ambivalent and alone. The alone feeling does not mean that I am lonely. When I was 22 and I experienced a broken heart that both ruined me and made me grow into who I am, I made it my mission “To be alone but never lonely.” Now when I say that I feel alone in the morning, I mean that I want to stay that way. Alone. When I say ambivalent,
I am being expeditious and ambiguous. It is easier and better than going on about feelings.
The evenings are for my spaniels: Foxy the Brittany and Daphne the English cocker. We park deep in the woods at the confluence of dirt roads and two-tracks and deer trails, and they stand alongside me alongside the truck while I put on my blaze orange and take out my 20-gauge over/under and chamber two 6-shot shells. And then I say, “OK! Hunt ‘em up!” and they take off into the woods, to one side and another, noses to the ground. Sometimes they stop and look into the trees for roosting partridge, then snort, off again. Looking back often to find me. And I am found. That’s how I feel.
Whatever can go wrong we – or at least I – can handle, and whether it goes wrong is in the hands of the universe. I carry all I need.
Grouse hunting with Foxy and Daphne is an aesthetic experience, the taking in of joy, beauty, emotion, life and death.
Any discord or dissonance comes from my idea of aesthetics versus endeavor. Again, in the woods producing does not matter.
Tonight we did not produce. The pups flushed the same bird off the ground twice, and on the second I had two good looks at it and missed both times. My girls look at me wonderingly, like, “What, exactly, are we doing here?” They are not here for the aesthetic experience but for production.
My character is that of an introvert, a “brooding bard” (James Joyce describing Steven Dedalus in “Ulysses”), a thinker and not an actor, someone passive as opposed to active or proactive. A philosopher rather than a philanthropist.
These are aesthetic experiences for me. I feel happy and think clearly. Some would say they are spiritual experiences, but I, alone and brooding and introverted, do not feel at one with the universe. Only with myself, and my pups, and waters and woods.
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