We had a sly red fox come into the yard before dawn. You always know when an animal comes into the yard at night. The three pups catch the scent through the porch screen and jump up and run to the screen door (latched securely in two places from the inside because Foxy has figured out how to get it open), and the barks – Foxy a “ruff,” Peppy a “woof,” Daphne a “riff,” and they stand there, the three, and sniff, noses high, and look back at me laying in bed.
These three are not guard dogs to be sure. They consider territory not a home or a place but a state of mind and being.
One night it was a single minded black bear that ripped into the screen porch trying to get at the dog chow. Sometimes it is skunks or marten working the chicken coop, though the sounds of the hysterical chickens might precede the musk scent.
No, we are adventure dogs, and together – three and me – we seek it out.
It’s like what old Abe Lincoln said about the dog chasing the train: “What’s she gonna do when she catches it?” So it is in the heavy summer when we flush coveys of woodcock and partridge into the trees. Or the wayward mallard or wood duck resting in the creek. Or when the lone wolf on his own adventure huffed at us and took flight and The Fox flew after him. When a bear went up the tree overhanging the woodshed. We live by the credos of Huck Finn, which begin, “If ’n you ain’t gettin’ into trouble, yer doin’ somethin’ wrong.”
James Egan’s three dogs: Foxy, Peppy and Daphne, couldn’t appear more joyous than they do in this photo. The foursome, led sometimes by James, sometimes by Daphne, sometimes by Foxy, and sometimes by Peppy, trek all through the Northland in search of brook trout streams and adventure in the hills and backwoods of Cook County. Photo courtesy of James Egan
In the summer now the mice are re-populating. At night inside, the pups no longer mind the chewing inside the walls (our insulation is four inches of wood chip), but it grates on me (maybe as my teeth grinding once grated on my father and brother and girlfriends). Occasionally we are startled by the Snap! of a Victor mouse trap, and silence.
Today we swam the tobacco-stained Trout Lake over marl-covered boulders, and everything was a green brown. When a school of yellow perch pilot alongside, you first see their eyes, big and black and dead and alert. They are not yellow or green but barred brown over cream. The dead crayfish on the bottom are sour-milk white.
We feel rejuvenated coming out into a rare tall grass meadow that has fought off the brush and saplings. I cannot identify the grass. Maybe Indian grass, maybe invasive. It is tall and lush and I lose the pups for a moment in it.
At the edge of the meadow the pups have found something. They are quiet, high-stepping, gathered and sniffing around something low. It is something unspeakable. A sin against the Universe. I do not say against Nature or God because it is more immanent.
The fresh (36 hours) kill of a spotted fawn, its skin pulled back from base of skull to shoulder blade, showing pink and white, an eye missing and hollow, one great puncture wound dried black at the top of the skull. The spots. Always the spots in your mind the way maggot flies and carrion crows hover.
I have sinned against the Universe by all the mice I have killed, and wood ticks, muskrats, partridge and feral cats. I am not one to judge. When I judge I sin, too, against God.
This is part of our story. It is no novel, nor any longer a bildungsroman. The comic hero is D’Artagnan (myself). And the Three Musketeers – Athos, Porthos and Aramis – are Foxy, Peppy and Daphne. The cunning, the corpulent, and the beatific demon.
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