My field notebook was open on my knee as I wondered, “What is the color of the creek?” – a question like a Zen koan.

I hesitated to call the water white. The instrumental sound of rushing water seemed to say, “Listen.” The movement of the water, making color and reflecting the sky and green banks, seemed to say “watch” – and do it without trying to pause the moment. Without trying to capture it.

The effort to describe felt like dipping a tiny glass vial into water or air and labeling the sample. The words are my memory, never the creek. They will take me back here someday and remind me of the exact spot of my attention.

I have been suffering from a bit of writer’s block. A sort of living block. The kind that tells you all the best thoughts have been written. All the best memories are behind you.

This may happen to you if your writing tends to celebrate and you find yourself grieving. You are the guy crying alone in your beer. The creek is your bar and your beer, and you are moderately afraid to drink it after doing a 14-day parasite cleanse.

What happened to your wild days, you may wonder. Were you just lucky enough to have them, and that is that.

So it was with some surprise that Steve and I were asked to bring a group to this valley. They were young adventurers traveling from across the country to Alaska in search of wildness.

Their journey would start with restoration work in a creek far downstream from the one in the valley, where so many creeks joined together to warrant a name.

They would go on to fly in a bush plane, fly fish for sockeye, learn about subsistence and indigeneity, and watch the world’s largest brown bears. But, before the remote part of their trip, they would join us for a morning in the mountains.

It had been over a year since I had been to the valley. While discussing logistics on a video call, we pulled up a satellite image.

I mused about J.M. Barrie’s directions to Neverland.

Second to the right, and straight on till morning…but, even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions.

It seemed strange to give directions to a place that exists so dynamically in my heart, as if giving directions to a person.

This particular mountain valley is where I would want my ashes scattered into the wind. Not in the creek I drink from or on the peak.

The valley is carved out by the belly of a glacier and filled with moraines, meander streams, lichen fields and mosses giving way to dwarf fireweed near the edge of the creek. The creek flows through the valley, collecting so many wild streams before falling over the edge, singing down rocks, slowing along an even shelf, only to fall again on its way to wider water far below.

Although I love the sound of water and the view from the summit, it’s the first sight of the high mountain valley where something in me opens up. I am, like the bird dogs I love, someone who follows the direction of the juniper and comes alive in the wide-open world of lichens and rocks where the birds live.

They do not live in water or where flags of nations or weather stations are planted. They nestle into soft snow for the night, survive cold winters, and watch their white world melt into the creeks, changing color with the ground.

By fall, the valley bottom is alive with the last of the dwarf fireweed, bright green moss near the water’s edge, and the hillsides on fire with orange and white lichens. The ground is soft beneath our feet, an intricate carpet sewn across moraines that feel like bones lie underneath – shoulder blades and moose horn.

Each step, each pan of your eyes around you, each inhale of air – whipped through the tangles and rocks and flowers so that it holds all of the valley – makes you feel submerged in the depths.

Feel born again. Feel converted. Feel transported.

Feel like a fish with legs.

The valley is like a person you love. Constant in certain features and yet each visit is a renewal. Never the same, always changing, growing, losing, and gaining.

I wasn’t sure that I could meet the eyes of strangers new to the place. They might see exotic formations and wild Alaska, and I would see Hugo in the creek. I would see him dash into the water in his free-spirited way. I would remember him slipping and catching himself valiantly, never sheepishly.

I would see Winchester and Hugo run ahead of us across a high valley, their tails like a paintbrush as they covered the field, like artists on fire. A grand opera. The wind and the creek sound like a symphony, carrying every form of life in this place to a crescendo.

I would see the white birds – ghosts of the valley. They were once so easily found here.

Did I call too much attention to them with my stories? Did I betray their home? Was I a fool for what I loved?

For so many years, a voice inside seemed to be insane with a desire to get back to this place with the dogs. To celebrate in stories sent to publications. To see smiling dogs in the hills.

Steve and I let our house go to shambles, loaded up the setters, and headed for the mountains as often as possible. With a lust that wore out boots and socks and our bodies, always wanting more, more, more. Like a child grabbing everything from the shelf.

Mine, mine, mine!

These past months and even years, with the feeling of aging and losing Winchester, then Hugo, I haven’t been taking as much.

It’s as if an inner parent or voice of maturity tells me: Put that back, you don’t need that. Some people don’t have as much. Be happy with the 500 toys you have rotting and molding in the yard.

We met our new friends in the gravel parking lot.

I was grateful that Rigby, our Labrador, was welcomed to join us. Rigby, having grown up without proper socialization, tended to act awkwardly around anyone new. When he met the large group, he acted out a kind of fearful aggression – barking with his tail wagging, nipping at hands as if to taste them.

I hoped they could read him right, and they were as forgiving of his manners as good strangers often are.

We all suspended judgment, deferring to the wildness around us as our reason for being together before we sat in a circle in a clearing near the creek for a proper round of perhaps awkward introductions.

We may have all felt like I guessed Rigby did: This is kind of weird. We should be running around having fun.

A woman in the group, an expedition filmmaker, shared that she did not have a great love of people, and I identified with that. She went on to say that she noticed people were different in the wilderness.

She pondered the word “wilderness” and the word “will” within it. She had read Robert Macfarlane’s work on wild places and the etymology of the word “wildness” – the idea that wild land can be self-willed.

I had never focused on the “will” in wilderness – I thought wild + er + ness.

I wondered whether it was incorrect to think of “will” rather than focus on older forms of “wild,” which evoked the world beyond the edges of places tamed by human culture.

But I thought of will – human will and wild will. I thought of choosing hope, desire, and purpose. The way wind and water move with freedom. Then the wildness of the deer or other creature – the spirit of the land. And the ness – of loneliness, awareness, betweenness. I thought of the Scottish “ness” – of place, of a promontory headland.

She went on to say that she noticed that in wilderness, people became more their authentic selves. You see their natural smiles, their joy at being alive.

It’s hard for me to know where her thoughts ended and mine began.

Although my rational mind fought the linguistic and cultural frames and claims about “wilderness,” I gave way to the imaginative feeling of the word and found myself as curious as she was.

As the morning progressed, Steve and I stayed back near the creek with Rigby, and the group headed towards a lake at the back of the valley.

I worried about them. Were they getting cold as they headed across the snowpack and the morning thermals hit them? Was the lake I had wanted them to see – the aqua blue color – covered over with ice?

It seemed like an hour had passed, and I kept looking to the ridge, afraid that something bad might have happened.

I was relieved to see them returning.

Then, I saw one of the boys slide down a snow slope. Then another. Then I saw them slide on their bellies, laughing, playing like otters. They ran up the slope and did it again and again.

It was just as the woman had said: each person’s face seemed changed from earlier, when we shared an awkward round of introductions. Now their faces were full of joy. They were celebrating the mountain.

They may never know what the valley means to me, but I know it meant something to them.

A few weeks ago, while sitting on the hill by the same creek, I realized how much a wild spot of ground has the power to heal you.

While some might say Mother Nature cannot love you back, can kill you as easily as thrill you, they don’t understand that for some of us, there are moments where there is no inside and outside.

There are times when life opens you up to the present moment, and it doesn’t matter how much you have been through, how much you have lost, how much you wish you could return to a simpler or more joyous time. What you have is the spirit of a place, and I want to sing from the mountains that there is not a gray leaf growing in the human heart named grief.

If you search for wilderness, you will find it.

There are no directions to it or from it because it is everywhere on earth and inside us.

It is right here in your heart, like mine – the will to be alive, here and now.

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There is no room for the pragmatic, realistic, or common sense when it comes to enjoying the fact that you have more than 30 rabbits in your yard. By mid-May, the number of feral rabbits living around our house had grown to 53 – we counted them by the number of new young that would “hatch” from beneath the porch or various brush piles. Despite what Steve said along the lines of “we have a problem,” when the weather allowed him to burn the brush piles, he let them stand.

It wasn’t like I purchased these rabbits at a 4-H Expo. They just appeared as a pair of weary travelers who were hungry and trusting. Their company was in some ways more nourishing than other human relationships, which sometimes seemed to involve a lot of talk without a deeper connection. I imagined that I would slow down and sense what was unfolding in the yard without overthinking.

Steve delivered carrots to the bunnies each morning. No matter what I thought about the “problem” – which is not the collective noun for feral rabbits – it did my heart good to see the tiny furballs surround him, chase each other, and twitch into the air. I loved to watch them eat dandelions.

When Cogswell, a 12-year-old English setter, took to watching the rabbits with us, it seemed like such a sweet thing for an aged bird dog to do. Eventually, he moved off the deck and sat in the grass with the rabbits all around him. One of the rabbits nearly touched noses with him one evening. It seemed to suggest something rare and beautiful.

I didn’t question myself too much as I placed fencing around the apple trees, tamarack, wild strawberries, and any other wild plants I wanted to keep off the menu. Neither Steve nor I went beyond the step of admitting there was a problem, and I half wondered if our circumstances weren’t somehow related to prolonged grief after a series of heavy losses.

Carl Jung once said, “The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.”

I was content to let my unresolved grief appear in the yard as fate. I could take care of the rabbits just as I could take care of the dogs as they were growing older. What was another mouth to feed?

“It’s odd a hawk hasn’t shown up,” Steve said.

A few weeks later, a coyote arrived. He lay down on a hill overlooking the bunny “pasture” seemingly without a care. Eventually, he got up, looked around, and snatched up a carrot before trotting away with it.

We couldn’t believe it. It was as if Trickster had arrived. Bugs Bunny the coyote. I had the sense that something was transacting, but I couldn’t understand it.

Later that same day, a goshawk landed in a birch above the brush pile. He watched for half an hour as the bunnies peered out from underneath vehicles. He flew away, but Steve said, “He’ll be back.”

Over the next several days, the number of rabbits in the yard began to decline. We never saw a kill, but we saw signs – blood and fur.

A neighborhood cat and a black bear showed up on different mornings before the great gray owl swooped into the yard and landed. He killed one of my favorite young bunnies – the one with the white face – and left it lying dead outside the garden fence.

I am a hunter, so it may seem incongruent that I found it upsetting to see the owl had killed two rabbits that morning and left this one with just a puncture mark.

“If that owl killed this bunny and is not going to eat it, I’m going to be pissed,” I told Steve. “He better come back for it,” I added, as if I were the owl’s mother. Then I sat by the window with the binoculars until it occurred to me that, as Steve had said many times already, “We have a problem.”

Maybe he wasn’t talking about the rabbits.

Somewhere along the way, I had become the person who lectures wild animals about finishing their dinner or not having intercourse with relatives. But I have always been interested in the intersection between the wild and domestic. I had read that lynx will kill and not eat chickens in an enclosure. A wolf may decide not to kill an animal that makes a stand.

What has domesticity done to these once wild creatures? What has civilization done to me?

I thought of the wolf I saw once in the Arctic – the loping, hungry gait and predatory eyes of a creature for whom remorse is a luxury.

The exact wolf in my mind is a lone white wolf first spotted by the pilot. It took me a few seconds to recognize the shape below, and at the same moment, the wolf looked up at me, flying overhead in a small plane.

Part of me went out to the wolf in an attempt to understand the nomadic life of an animal living unhindered and without remorse for killing caribou calves. And, part of me felt romantic and ridiculous for staring out from confinement at a living being as an emblem of freedom when I’d be back to work in a week.

Now, I was staring out the kitchen window.

The comparison between dogs and wolves is as far-fetched as the comparison of a snowshoe hare and a domestic rabbit. Wolves are wolves – the wild spirit of the land, the monstrous mother who nurtures and destroys.

Like me, dogs crave adventure, but there is always a warm house waiting for us to return.

All my miles, all my journeys, as much as I love to go and look at open country to purify my mind, sort out the notes of water and rocks falling in the mountains, smell the faint hint of petals mixed in with the heavier scented greens, taste the cold white water purified over rocks, and lie on a bed of lichen, which seems to grow against your back as a testament to the ever-living mountain, it is only as a visitor, hindered by a requirement to return home.

I wondered if the rabbits had a wild mountain or river. What was the place that was not home?

It may well be that it was, for those who were not born here, my yard.

As these thoughts crossed my mind, the owl came back and took the young rabbit. He is wild and hungry, and so I find no fault in his methods.

Today, we have about ten rabbits in the yard. Steve is away camping, and I am the one handing out the carrots. This afternoon, I sat down in a lawn chair by the woodpile and could hear Huey the squirrel chirping at me, which I took as a reminder to go get him some nuts. When I came back, there was a baby squirrel next to my chair.

Until I find a better way to be human, I’m content to let the brightness of this cheeky little spirit make my day.

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My thoughts tend to frame subjects as a treatment of the past, a record of the present, or an image of the future. But my mind is haunted by feelings and locks up on ghostly images: three setters slicked with fog on a rocky plateau inching toward a small group of white-tailed ptarmigan. Later, on a mountainside, I sit with the white body of a bird, warm and bloodied in my hand, with the feeling that I am holding my own heart, and I wonder if I could ever kill another bird.

These images are not subjects. Not things. They do not make for polite conversation. If someone asks me a practical question about how to get started bird hunting, I don’t mention this, but it is there in my mind, along with the image of a smiling, athletic English setter in his prime. Winchester or Hugo’s joyous and open run in the high country, covering miles while I look on, dazzled by the brilliance of the country and the magical light of our collective best days together.

“You get a bird dog,” is how I answer the question of how to start.

You get a bird dog, and you follow that dog with all your heart. And I specifically don’t say that one day you will be on the side of a mountain, feeling that you are holding that heart, and that isn’t even the worst of it, because eventually you will have to say goodbye to the dog that has taught you everything you know about bird hunting besides how to shoot a gun.

That will come later, after the pain is worth all the joy.

Last week, I found myself at a gun range where a small group of women gathered. They all had bird dogs, although not with them that day, when they were learning about shotgun work and what to expect as part of a months-long lead-up to their first bird hunting season.

The woman leading the group asked them to promise not to yell at their bird dog on the first day afield. She explained that they would lose their voices trying to restrain the unbridled enthusiasm of their dogs. “Let them get it out of their system,” she said.

It may not be polite to eavesdrop, and so I moved along, thinking to myself, Winchester never got it out of his system. It was his system.

Bird hunting. To some people, it conjures images from old magazine covers – the rising bird, large in the foreground, the dog on point in the midground, and the small man in a plaid shirt with a raised shotgun in the background. This is not the point of view in the field.

Most of my remembered images are of dogs in motion while I am on a long march behind them. Whatever is in the dog’s system that makes him run that wild and free, I wish I had it in my system.

If it’s in my blood to yell, I might yell that it is so goddamn beautiful.

Besides, I am more of a crier than a yeller. I’m more apt to cry out questions to the gods: Why am I crouched on a rocky precipice when I am afraid of heights, and Hugo is over the next ridge, flushing birds? How did I get myself here? What am I going to do? Is helicopter rescue an option? Is that bed of lichen below me likely to be soft to fall into or a thin veil over shale?

Winchester and Hugo both learned how to hunt on wild birds. Though at first, Steve and I tried to show Winchester how to do it the human-structured way: we took him to a game farm, put chukars to sleep, and planted them in the field. His response was lackluster.

If he were a human, his game farm point might have looked like a school boy raising a limp hand to indicate he is present. If his body could talk, it said, “Here are those sleeping birds that smell like you put them right here where you are looking.”

It was not the serious point that I came to love seeing in the mountains. The point that had his entire body gripped with purpose, thrilled by life.

I’ve been around other dogs who love to find any bird – pen-raised or wild, sleeping or awake – just like there are some people who love to shoot clay pigeons on the trap range and pheasant in the field in equal measure, even if different. But that wasn’t Winchester’s way.

He loved to hunt wild birds. And that’s what he did best.

Early in his hunting days, Steve and I followed him into the mountains, and I spotted two willow ptarmigan right off the trail. We hadn’t yet reached treeline and broken into the country, as Steve called it. Winchester had run by the birds.

“Steve,” I said, “There are two willow ptarmigan right there.” I pointed to them, as if I were the bird dog. “Should we call Winchester back?”

“Maybe they’ll be there later,” Steve said. I was a bit surprised, as it was early in my upland hunting days as well. I thought we were bird hunting, and here were the birds.

It’s clear to me now. It’s clear to me what Steve means when he says, “Winchester’s birds.” Or “Winchester’s mountains.”

We were hunting Winchester’s birds. There was no point in pretending that it was a team effort in which we all played multiple roles. He might as well have told me to “Stay in my lane.”

Other hunters might do it differently. They might have a dog who appreciates a little help and guidance. Some parties can stand multiple pointers.

Rigby, the Labrador, loves all the help he can get finding a duck, and I don’t mind being out in the water with him in my chest waders, even if that’s not the traditional way it’s done.

If you’re ever with a dog who is master of his territory, you don’t question his work. If he wants to pass by willow ptarmigan along the trail, you don’t figure the wind is wrong, and maybe help him circle back.

“Let him work,” is our motto.

I don’t need the birds for the pot – it’s true what some people who are against hunting say. Most of my food comes from the grocery store. What I do need is to be a part of the life cycle in a way that is true and good from time to time. Even if I live in a world that shows me every day that I can survive in a fluorescent-lit box, eating Soylent Green rations. I need to be honest, even when it hurts.

Winchester’s birds were the highest, farthest birds, always just over the hill you didn’t think you could climb. Just over the rise that opened into the most splendid view you’ve ever known. He made you work to keep up with him, to go at speeds and heights that forced you into a different world than you had ever known. He took you into the world of birds, their home in the mountains, his heaven.

Some say hunting requires cognitive dissonance, a way to hold two contradictory beliefs as true – you love birds, you shoot birds. And you don’t have an industry staffed by hundreds of people operating machines between these truths to square and label the meat in Modified Atmosphere Packaging.

You have a sacred pact with yourself to follow a certain set of rules, you don’t take too much, and you follow the dog, you chew your meal slowly. Bird hunting becomes more than the sum of its parts. It becomes the fusion of interdependent forces – birds, dogs, country, humans.

The relationship is not complicated except when my human heart intervenes to understand, to be a part of such a wild world, to try to live beside, within, and beyond greater forces than myself.

I try to make out the shape of what is to come after those days on the floor with a puppy, those days in the field with a friend like no other, the bird in your hand, and a sloppy-jawed soulmate at your side, tongue askew and rakish. You, with your well-worn gear and gun, smiling for a photo you can’t bear to look at these days because you were so happy then, and now you’ve lost the loves you came home to, and went on adventures with and you don’t know what is next.

And just when I wonder if I have lost my mind in grief, I stumble upon true words of advice from a woman teaching other women that is too good not to share.

Promise me you won’t yell at your bird dog.

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But some lights do, no matter what you want fairness and equality to mean. Some lights are the wild shooting stars that bear the name of all that you are. They make you do something crazy. They make you keep a whole litter of setter pups. They make you dig into your gut to force yourself up a shale slide when you keep falling back and saying things under your breath that you would not include in the story later.

Fuck. Shit. Piss. Dammit. Little bastard. Terms of endearment for a situation you put yourself in and would again. Terms of endearment for a smiling coyote of a dog just over the ridge having the time of his life, searching for rock-colored birds, floating over shale like it’s a race track and he’s a greyhound.

Just above him, an old goat has shifted rock that falls down. You are taking steps like the rocks are stairs that shift. You are a stumbling fool, swaddled in too much gear, wrenching the sling on your gun over your head like a too-tight shirt so you can use the butt as a walking stick.

You need a minute to catch your breath, get your bearings, and as much as you want to scream that it all seems impossible and ridiculous and you are dehydrated and forgot your water again, you see him run the skyline – highlining, we called it – his silhouette against the sky with a mountain between us.

And instead of falling to your knees to yell at the gods for your inabilities to reach the unreachable, you turn back to your partner just a few yards below you and clinging to the same hill smiling in the same idiotic way that you are because no matter how badly we’ve pulled the whole thing off, we’re all on the side of a mountain together having the time of our lives.

I used to say that Hugo was my spirit animal. Some people say the same thing over and over because everybody knows what it means. “I love you” or “I love you times a million” and on and on until the inflation undermines the sentiment if it hadn’t already lost its charm by overuse. At this point in the history of the word love, I’d rather be someone’s spirit animal.

Hugo’s spirit made me piss metaphorical blood on almost every occasion we went afield. Why did he run full tilt toward the edge of a cliff and cast himself beyond my view into what I imagined was the abyss below as I brayed “Whoa! No!” and when I reached the edge, breathless with the fear of seeing him sprawled on the valley floor like the smote-out hole in a Warner Bros. cartoon or worse, I would look down to see he found some slight ledge to run along like he had wings that could find earth with each stroke, breaking trail.

Hugo was a trickster. Was. He was.

He lifted me up, made me follow him like he was my country.

I did not want to say goodbye to him. I did not want to go home and realize he wasn’t there. I did not want to face that the mountains would not be the same without him.

All those edges that he had made disappear would now be real edges. The fangs of old iron rails broken off and jutting out of the mountain where we once stood would no longer be just the broken dream of a miner.

They are a part of my broken dream now.

All the magic we found on our way to Neverland – the old beaver dam, the stream spilling over the edge, the moonscape – all signs along a secret path, doors to other worlds. He ran through them with lightning speed. He never saw a closed door. Never saw a cliff.

The world without him feels very narrow.

Like a long, dark basement hallway with a fan that creaks and one dust-covered light flickering.

“I will find you again,” I told him. “Find me again.”

I don’t know if that’s how it works, but if anyone could do it, he could. He could find the open door and run through. If the human mind or a culture frames life as having a certain course of events and obstacles, he wouldn’t see them.

And maybe the spark he had is how I’ll know. In this life or the next one. That will be my clue that we are meeting again. I will be struck by the sudden charm of a gallivanting spirit and follow it. Follow it like I am hypnotized by a beauty so beyond myself that it could only be the glint of the sun after a nuclear winter. It could only be the one thing that makes me shut up about myself, my aches, my pains, my stupid people outfit and go to the place where we felt most alive.

I’d see this silhouette of a dog at the top of the hill, and I’d say to myself and whoever else could see the same gods: I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. And I would climb the goddam mountain.

Post script:

Hugo was born on June 30, 2014, and lived his best days chasing wild birds in the mountains of Alaska. He passed from this world on March 17, 2026.

He left behind his four littermates (Colt, Boss, Cogswell, and Purdey), a chocolate Labrador named Rigby, a springer spaniel mix named Fausti, two humans, and a yard full of feral rabbits.

Although his last 21 days included recovery from a splenectomy and what some may term a “fight with cancer” – Hemangiosarcoma (HSA), a friend put it better: “Hugo won.”

He won because he was so loved and lived so large. Even if his people felt the mad condition known only to those obsessed with life outdoors and the insistence of setters to go to the far away every day, that “it was never enough” (IWNE), he won.

And although his humans feel sick with grief and burst into tears at moments that seem odd to anyone who was not graced with Hugo’s presence and catalog of facial expressions that seem to color every corner of the house and yard, the sadness is part of the same lunacy as the joy he brought, an expression of suffering, howling at the moon, howling at the mountain, howling from the yard because your humans are going to town without you and you don’t know what it means to “just be going to the grocery store” or the office, or whatnot.

He won, we won, and anyone who has felt this way has won.

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“Stay with me,” you say. Stay with me forever, when you know that you were never going to get forever out of the deal.

That’s what hurts the most. For people who believe in heaven, they know they will see their dogs there. They will get to run the mountains again. Aches and pains will all go away, and only bright skies and wild birds for miles. We will get to run all of that together forever. But I don’t know that, not for certain.

What I want is for my dog to stay with me forever right here. Forever like we’ve had. That was heaven, and it wasn’t a faraway place. We could get in our car and go there. I don’t have to dream it up, and it isn’t a static image. It’s a moving picture of Hugo running wide open in a mountain valley, tail flashing. It’s watching him run up a valley wall so steep it would take you a half hour to reach his elevation, and before you could get there, he’d be somewhere else. Like a kid who can’t get enough, who tries to run everywhere at once.

Hugo has always been like that. If he were a person and had the chance, he would jump out of an airplane without a parachute. I’d like to think his faith in me and Steve is the reason why he takes so many trust falls. The times I stood with my legs shaking on a goat’s hold of a shale slide, trying to call him back or find him because he outdistanced my field of vision, are so many that I have rolled them all into one memory. No matter how many places we’ve been – the different mountain valleys or foothills, they all condense into one place. Our favorite place, where we had our best days. Where we were most alive.

That place is our heaven, and I want to be there again with him. I whispered that in his ear. I want to take you to the mountains again. However, I am not sure if I can. I don’t know if we will still be alive and able by the time the snow melts. I don’t know if we will get to have that again, even if we can wait out the suffering months and drive there, and our feeble legs can make it to the place we remember best. I don’t know if you can run so fast and far ever again. There is only one time in our lives when we hit the highest point, and we never know it until we cannot try again.

It’s impossible to think that we will get another chance. It’s impossible to ask for that because it goes against gravity and other forces of nature. But that’s what I want most. I want what cannot be. I want you to live forever and to go to the places we went to. And, if I can’t have that, I want a heaven for us where we are magically young again and all the people didn’t show up and put tents on the lichen and have parties there and drive away the wild birds and leave bare patches of earth.

Maybe true believers would tell me that it’s possible and that heaven exists. And I won’t insist that it doesn’t, because I want it to. I won’t insist. But it’s that I can’t be sure that it does that has me gasping like a fish without water. I’m here in this world, where we’re all screwing things up.

Meanwhile, a good dog is suffering on the floor. Hugo had collapsed on the floor in the middle of the night – the sound of his falling woke me up. We had been lying on the floor for quite a while before I got up to research symptoms – pale gums, cold paws, lethargic. I type these thoughts as I wait for a return call from the emergency vet. I’m not going to work in a few hours. My face is swollen, and my head is filled with snot. And I don’t care to fix any of that right now.

What I want is a heaven that doesn’t exist. I whisper in Hugo’s ear, as I have since he was a pup, “We will have adventures.” I have always meant this, and I still do. I just don’t know how to make it happen now. It’s an impossible prayer. It’s faith in the form of suffering. It’s belief in the form of memory. It’s love for the beautiful life on the floor beside you – a dog who is better than you are and who you always knew would not live forever, even though you ignored that fact for as long as you could. And when you finally have to face it, you find a way to ignore it a little longer.

We will have adventures.

Post script:
Hugo is an 11.7-year-old English setter who has spent most of his life running in the mountains of Alaska. Over the past year he has slowed down some, but he still enjoys a daily run near our home and loves the mountains.

On Feb. 26, Hugo collapsed in the middle of the night and had an emergency splenectomy. A ruptured tumor on his spleen had caused internal bleeding; the surgeons removed the spleen and tumor, and he lost about a liter of blood (a lot for a 55-lb dog). The pathology results a week later confirmed hemangiosarcoma (HSA). The encouraging part was that it did not appear to have metastasized – his chest X-rays were clear.

Our vet recommended scheduling euthanasia within 1–2 weeks and prescribed prednisone, explaining that HSA can progress unpredictably and that a planned goodbye might spare him the trauma of an emergency crisis. However, I was not comfortable making that decision yet –especially since there was no evidence of metastasis and many people have shared positive experiences with supportive care, both Western (chemotherapy) and Eastern (I’m Yunnity, Yunnan Baiyao, etc.).

These past few days Hugo still seems very much himself: bright eyes, playful, and eating better. He barks at moose outside the yard, plays with the other dogs, and snuggles with me in the recliner.

I’ve been learning as much as I can about HSA and the different approaches people take to support their dogs through it. I had no idea how many people have faced this heartbreak, or how common this diagnosis is – especially for Golden Retrievers.

Several people kindly shared resources with me that I found helpful, and I’m sharing them here in case they are helpful to others as well:

(1) Canine Hemangiosarcoma | Facebook

(2) The Heartbreak of Hemangiosarcoma in Dogs - Dr. Loudon

(3) I’m-Yunity for Dogs Immune Support Proprietary Mushroom Supplement

(4) Yunnan Baiyao Capsules (Jiaonang)

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Although I knew this appointment was the last in a long series that began in September, Steve and I waited in a small back room to learn what “active surveillance” meant.

“Why do they bring you back to a room like they’re ready to see you and then make you wait?” he asked.

I was sitting on a padded bench while he paced back and forth in front of me. The room was small, with no art on the white walls. I agreed it would be more comfortable to wait in the lobby where there were comfy chairs, animal photography books, and cute dogs coming and going.

While he paced, I mused over the notion that I live with two versions of Steve: Field Steve and Steve in Captivity.

We have sat side by side in a duck blind for hours waiting for first light. In those moments, he is both alert and relaxed. The smooth pour of coffee into the lid of a thermos is balm to our souls. If we see ducks, we mention where they are, where they appear to be going, and if there is any conversation, it halts in the presence of a natural wonder. It doesn’t matter if you are about to get to the punchline of a joke, you stop your chatter.

One of my favorite memories is sitting in a blind with Steve and two friends. We’d been there for several hours with very little movement in the sky. A friend started to tell a story that had quite a long windup, and, as it always seems to happen, the ducks came in. (I think they love a good story, too.) Everyone shifted focus. We watched a flock of widgeon coast in and land just out of range. For nearly half an hour we worked the situation, telegraphed observations, coordinated duck calls, and rearranged dogs. The tide was coming in. The boat had to be moved soon. When the widgeon finally flew away, the tension released, and our friend picked up his story from right where he had left off.

If you saw Steve that day or on a crawl through marsh on a rainy day toward a pond, camouflaging his movements while enduring discomfort, you might think he was patient.

We had been in the back room for about five minutes when he got up and started pacing. “This is getting ridiculous,” he said.

We had left our house at 6 a.m. to make our 11 a.m. appointment in Anchorage. The roads through the pass had been glare ice the day before, so we felt lucky but nervous about freezing rain in the forecast. The ultrasound, x-rays, and intravenous administration of drugs had taken three hours. I had spent $7.50 on vending machine food, skimmed two books about dog breeds, and was now trapped in a small room with Steve climbing the walls.

I just wanted to see Rigby and get back on the road.

When the door finally opened, I saw Rigby’s happy face, his big brown body swaying back and forth. I didn’t care how awful the day had been up to that point. The tech dropped Rigby’s leash, and he came straight to us.

“He did great!” the vet said. As she explained that he wouldn’t need to be seen again for four more weeks and then again at eight weeks, I noticed the door to the hall was still open.

“Will he still need to take Denmarin for his liver and the probiotic?” I asked.

More people entered the room – vet techs, the two women from the front desk, and a few more people I had not seen before, but who Rigby seemed to recognize. The room was overfull with people now.

One of the techs pulled a piece of paper from her file. “Today is Rigby’s graduation day,” she said, holding up a certificate.

Everyone in the room clapped and cheered.

Rigby wagged his tail and picked up his leash in his mouth, parading around the room as if performing, gathering accolades. He seemed to know that all the fuss was for him.

I could feel my throat tighten. I didn’t want to cry, but I felt like it was going to happen. Steve’s face had the same choked look.

That moment of relief and joy doesn’t change the fact that neither of us is well-suited to the caged atmosphere of medical institutions. We are more accustomed to being in the field than in hallways.

In the field, everything moves at field speed, which is to say that stillness and action are shaped by purpose, with a heightened awareness that can make a second seem like an hour.

A photographer friend once joined us for a ptarmigan hunt in the mountains. When birds flushed and shots were fired, she was shocked, “It all happened so fast,” she said. In my mind, it happened slowly, almost frame by frame. The Navy SEAL mantra “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” is a concise description of how deliberate action can be faster because it reduces friction.

In shut-in places, confined to rooms and schedules, fighting through paperwork and obstacles seemingly without purpose except to catalog the life force as it is draining out of you, a second can seem like an hour, but heavy and unmoving. Steve and I are less prepared to handle the kind of slowness that is not smooth. It makes our hackles go up.

And yet, even though this year our waterfowl season began with Rigby’s diagnosis of a mediastinal mass consistent with lymphoma, and our lives entered a long standstill punctuated by waiting and terrible hold music, we had somehow summoned up our fortitude. Instead of a slow that moves you forward, we found a slow that holds you in place – within it, time that still belonged to us.

We set aside the part of ourselves that is ready to be called to adventure, to wild places, to the best moments a hunter shares with a bird dog, while wondering if letting go of some days afield meant giving up on the life we were trying to save.

These past five months have been some of the hardest of my life, but they are also filled with the unexpected gift of what might still be possible.

It was worth the wait.

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Boss lay along my legs, sleeping without much sound as Hugo and I regarded each other. I reached my hand out to him, and he began to take a step through the doorway. Before his claws touched the wooden floor, he paused.

It’s been said that when a pointing dog points, the point is nothing but an exaggerated stalk. I never had more insight into Hugo’s character than watching him use his physical prowess to cross a bedroom in the night without waking five other sleeping setters.

Hugo never faltered in his technique. Although the situation reminded me of the Warner Brothers cartoon in which Yosemite Sam is a Roman legionnaire sneaking across a lion’s den, Hugo had an old-world grace, without a single word in his life to prove otherwise. He moved like a cat without the crouch.

I heard Colt jostle – a familiar sound from the place where he sleeps, the way he ruffles himself before settling again. Hugo froze. One of his back legs was in the air, and it stayed there.

His eyes shifted to me. That was the only movement. Seconds passed before the back leg came down, slowly as if an electric door closing. He waited again.

I wondered if I was prey, like the songbirds he stalked. I wondered if he would launch onto the bed all of a sudden? It was often his way to move slowly and then quickly. What is in this dog that he would spend half an hour crossing a room?

A predator searches, stalks, kills, and consumes. But Hugo was not a killer. He regarded his meals with the discernment of a child who doesn’t like vegetables or food of a certain color. His attention drifted from food so often it seemed he was looking for reasons not to eat. Calling him prey-driven, given his lack of interest in consuming, seems insufficient.

Rather than attend to food, his serious pursuit was birds. Anything could be a bird. A moth or a bee compelled him into a similar state. A mouse crossing the floor caught his attention as if it were a robin landing on the woodpile. He would attend to the place he last saw the mouse as he was attending to me.

Like I was a bird.

I always figured this was due to breeding, even as I listened to the other dogs – his littermates – sleeping nearby. Even as I watched them eat with sameness: heads down in their dishes until finished, except Hugo.

He looked at me across the room without looking into my eyes. We watched each other. I noticed how it seemed his eyes locked with mine only in the stop he made between each step, when he let the room settle.

Hugo was invisible when he stopped moving, or so I imagined he believed. When he checked my position, his gaze reminded me of the way a hunter avoids looking at prey, knowing that a hard look attracts attention. Hugo looked at me in this gentle way, from one periphery to another. A look that does not intrude.

Why is he expending so much effort? Why was I so fascinated by his behavior?

All I could come up with, at the end of his stalk when he pressed his nose into my neck and stepped onto the bed, knowing I would guard his passage, was that Hugo was a perfect expression of himself.

He did not spend his time searching, killing, or consuming, as other dogs or wolves sharing his ancestry might. He did not fill his time with play or small conflicts among his littermates. He did not spend his time in unnecessary ways but mastered exactly what it was that he did best. He could stalk like no one else. He could pay attention.

He moved with presence and an instinct that called to something wilder beyond himself. Like his father before him, they were both serious bird dogs. They are the wolves howling for me somewhere. They are calling me to join them, follow them, and they show me where birds hide in a field. They set aside animal instinct so that I may shoot a bird cleanly, and so we each act our part as beautifully as blood and brain allow.

As I think back on that nighttime stalk many years ago, Hugo is going on 12 years old. He spent little time in the mountains this past year, but when his feet hit the ground, he ran the farthest of any of us. He ran as wide open as a dog of his age could, with a grin as old as time.

Nothing makes us feel as alive as those days when a bird is the thing most worthy of our attention, making us worthy.

Now we are near each other in our declining years. I am at my desk, and he sleeps at my feet.

His body twitches with memory like I type at keys. Digesting our days afield, our best days.

It may be that life is fading before us. Or that we are just beginning to imagine its absence while still waiting for our next chance. Growing old with a dog is heartbreaking. It is limiting. And still, when you cannot do it over, you replay the moments. You cross the room again and again in your mind.

You cross it like it means something to carry the weight of your being and purpose.

I love the way Hugo still regards the world around him as if any moment a bird could fly up. I love how he gives his full attention to the present, wherever he finds himself, and I love sitting beside him as he dreams.

Summer grasses,
All that remains
Of soldiers’ dreams.

— Bashō

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My eyes ran along the shelves of a china hutch, laden with ceramic cows and chickens, to wood-paneled walls hung with plates depicting hunting scenes, before coming back to a woman whose pale face uttered details between sips of stew. “You remember [insert name of someone you don’t remember],” she would say. There would be a tally around the table of yeahs and nays. Then she would lower the spoon ceremonially and say, “She died.”

Please, I asked Steve afterward, if I ever become a person who reports on the health misfortunes of others, check me. Tell me if I have drifted so far from myself and my feeling for life that I can no longer see clearly and begin to traffic in the woes of human existence.

I figured I would need his help if I ever began to inventory suffering because it would be a sign that I had lost sight of what made me feel alive and could no longer see through to the mirror.

I was in my twenties then, and I had not experienced much in the way of death of loved ones or the medical woes of aging. It all seemed an American Gothic scene without the pitchfork.

I just wanted to get outside, be outside. Feel alive.

Lately, I am going through a transition. What I feel most is not a lack of joy and beauty, but a deep sense that I know what I am missing.

The other night, I made notes about Rigby’s health – what he had for breakfast, his medication and supplements, his level of enthusiasm for exercise by number of balls chased and caught, the firmness of his bowel movements. His daily notes look much the same day after day. He eats, takes pills, goes on a walk, goes to the proverbial bathroom. He is on day 109 of chemotherapy treatment.

I have never kept journals, and I’m not very good at it:

• Day 43: Thursday 10/16. Day after Vincristine. Breakfast: Hamburger and green beans. Prednisone, Cerenia, Probiotic. Psyllium. Slightly less active. Not less hungry. Lomustine. Denmarin.

• Day 91: Wednesday 12/3. Day of Anchorage appointment. Breakfast: Prime rib and carrots. Cerenia, Trazodone, Gabapentin, Prednisone, Ciprofoxacin, Psyllium, Probiotic. Saw owl carry snowshoe hare across Main Street in Kenai. Denmarin.

• Day 100: Friday 12/12. Breakfast: Chicken and carrots. Psyllium, probiotic. Good walk/foot-long poo. Denmarin.

Rigby’s journal may work better as a spreadsheet. I picked the above excerpts at random, but I scanned them to find any that might give a deeper meaning to what I am doing. Sometimes, I jot down something Steve says. One day, he said, “Nothing to report.” He may say this often, but I only wrote it down once.

It seems like something Steve would say – one of his North Dakotaisms. Perhaps the meaning is along the lines of the sentiment “I hope your trip was uneventful.” More likely, it has to do with Steve’s opinion that the only items worthy of report must qualify as “pertinent or amusing.”

This was an opinion I shared in my twenties when I thought I would like to die on a mountain without a dollar in the bank. I still like that idea quite a bit, but then practical thoughts creep in like a kind of nagging parent. What about the dogs? They would probably like you to come home and feed them.

While my journal exercise may amount to a bank ledger in terms of creativity and confessing its contents goes against my sense of vanity, goes against the anti-suffering reportage anthem of my twenties, it contains what I find most pertinent in life at the moment. Steve and I are rallying around Rigby and the other older dogs, whose conditions might sound like the chronic medical diagnosis of a second cousin you have never met, between requests to pass the bread.

I don’t blame you if you want to run to the wilderness instead of read about my dog’s bowel movements. I don’t blame my young self either.

Beyond the medical words, there is the life they fail to account for. If you’ve ever loved a dog – or any creature – you know the comfort of their weight and fur. You know their face by heart, can imagine the way they look at you and the feeling of your heart opening.

The way Boss somehow synchronizes his breathing with yours as you are drifting off to sleep and you sometimes let out your last sigh of the day together – you look forward to that.

You might love how only Colt’s eyebrows are turning gray in his black face.

When I look in the mirror, I still see the mountains in my eyes. I miss the bright days above tree line. I miss wondering about the snow conditions and whether the dogs will be able to run on top or break through because I know for many of them, their hearts want more than their bodies can give.

I miss all the things people complain about in the field – the weather, the dog hijinks, the fading daylight, the blisters. Oh, to hear the healthy complaints again! To be cold and hungry outdoors instead of well-fed at the table of woes where you hand out more of your food to the dogs than you eat.

What matters is that we shared views from the top of a mountain. We shared nights in a tent and long road trips. We shared a life that involved great love and passion and maybe very little thought about what it would feel like to see it gradually slip away from us as our collective abilities declined with the years.

It doesn’t feel fair to write only about the good times, as if there were no struggle and no suffering. My days afield are becoming shorter and shorter. Fewer and farther between.

None of us who once found a kind of paradise ever lost it. It stays with us and flashes in our eyes at any age. We recognize it in others with a sense of the larger story that includes the beginning, the middle, and the end.

If you are at the beginning, get the dog. Climb the mountain. Go all the way and back and then go again for as long as you can. As far as you can go without leaving any integral part of yourself or your loved ones behind.

And if you are me, nearing the end of a wonderful story, don’t worry too much about being no fun at the dinner table. Just say what you have to say. Feel what you feel.

My attention looks like this:

• Day 109: Saturday 12/20. Breakfast: Hamburger and green beans. Prednisone, Psyllium, probiotic.

I reach down, and Rigby nudges my hand – his nose cold, wet, and searching for a treat.

It may seem like nothing to report.

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If you’ve ever followed a big running English setter into a wide mountain valley, watched him run up the valley wall like it was a stubble field only to stop suddenly, go on point nearly 1,000 feet above you, and hold his point for nearly a half hour while you hauled your pathetic human body up the rocks like it was a hundred pound sack of potatoes being drug along by an insect brain, you know that the expression means you must be crazy too.

Genius and crazy are subjective. One person’s genius might be Michelangelo’s David; another’s might be the way a grandparent and his granddaughter examine a willow ptarmigan together for Thanksgiving on Adak. One person’s crazy might be jumping out of an airplane without a parachute; another’s might be keeping a litter of English setter pups when you already have six sporting dogs.

Winchester was not a genius or crazy – those words don’t seem good enough to describe the finest dog I have ever known. He was the best, and not just because he had a better pedigree than me (he had champions in his background, and I do not). He had a way of being wide open to life and mastering it on his terms. I loved to watch him work, and he awed me like something genius or crazy might.

Maybe he was destined for greatness – his ancestors had been treated as elite athletes for generations. They were field trial setters, who hunted far more often than they tested. They ran over the prairie and evolved from a crouching stalker of the English countryside to an animal that runs a marathon every day and stops with a twelve-o’-clock tail, straight as a pole with a feathered flag blowing in the wind as if to claim the place as conquered.

Winchester was old world grace and new world swagger. He showed us mountains that I had never seen from the trail as if he were showing them to his ancestors. As if he were showing them to the eternal audience. Not just to find game birds but to celebrate them as the sole occupation of not just one life but the pinnacle of a lineage.

The experience of going to the mountains with Winchester all those years ago – seeing his silhouette charged by light, his great bright eyes daring Steve and me to be as alive, watching him cover country in minutes that would take us an hour, was to see your soul.

I do not mean soul in the sense of a personal trinket. I mean soul in the sense of the world soul. The thing that charges us all with life and shows up as billions of stars.

The grief in saying goodbye to Winchester and our years together has stayed with me. I don’t say this lightly. I say it with the full weight of my daily burden to continue to exist in a world without him in it – a form of mental unhealth that might qualify as crazy without any chance of being mistaken for genius.

On top of Winchester leaving us, his litter of pups is now going on twelve years old, keeping us closer to home. I am going through what my doctor calls perimenopause. Apparently, I should have looked it up at some point before it happened. It may be what is making me crazy lately. I don’t know how to tell, as I am writing this under its influence.

There is good crazy and bad crazy. Good crazy is “Crazy like a fox.” Bad crazy is crazy, “truly,” or like the woman who pulls over on the side of the road to cry at the sunrise. I have done that lately. On more than one morning. I am probably on somebody’s trail camera. Me and a particular seagull. But I digress.

My saving grace has been a chocolate Labrador named Rigby. He came into our lives five years ago as a fat and healthy pup who only ever needed to be adorable. He did not have to be masterful or show us worlds we had never seen. He seems to love every food-filled moment, and his very presence brings sanity and the simple joy of being alive.

Last week, I sat with Rigby, now five years old, who has been shaved for an ultrasound, and I questioned if we were doing the right thing for him. He is going through chemotherapy in a similar way that humans are treated for cancer. The vet says that dogs tolerate it better than humans and that the focus of the treatment is on quality of life.

It doesn’t seem to bother Rigby that more than a square foot of his fur has been shaved off or that each of his legs has a cuff mark where the IVs have been administered. He still plops himself on a snowbank as if it were a pile of pillows. He still plops himself across my lap in the recliner.

I find myself thinking about how monks shave their heads as a symbol of commitment to the monastic life, and how, as much as Rigby can share human food, furniture, and treatment modalities, he cannot demonstrate a detachment from personal vanity and societal norms by shaving his head. He also can’t chant.

These private musings are not things I usually say out loud or consider worth sharing, and yet, here we are. A girl and her dog. Grateful to be alive, even if his only commentary is a deep sigh and a snore. Rigby is stretched across my lap, all 109 pounds of him, a giant sack of potatoes and the world’s best therapy blanket in one, with me peeking out from underneath.

It’s one of my favorite things to sit there like this. It makes me smile like an idiot.

Earlier this week, I received a follow-up report by email from Rigby’s vet that said: “Radiographically, he does not have persistent evidence of a mediastinal mass, which is encouraging for a robust clinical response to his treatment!”

The joy of being alive in recovery is not the same as the feeling you have taking in the view from the top of a mountain, but it is a part of that feeling. It is the foundation. It is the bottom of the mountain, the widest part of our lives. It is most of our hours in most of our days. The place where we can be most grateful but seldom are. At least I am not as often as I should be.

But that’s where I am now, somewhere between amateur and responsible. Somewhere between love and loss. In that place that is life, where the feeling is always better described in a song than in a medical report, even if the news is the same.

The vet said it best: dogs tolerate things better than humans, and it is best to focus on the quality of life.

She may not have gone so far as to say dogs know how to live better than we do. She certainly didn’t go on to say that maybe the fine line between our left-brain thinking and our right-brain feeling has become too fine and the left brain has taken over, filling our days with too much data and judgment, without the holistic right brain there to shake her head kindly and say, my child, you have got it all wrong. She may not say it in the same lyrical voice of my hormone-riddled mind, but she may say it like this without apologizing for the rhyme:

The information may say one thing, my dear, and it might say it in every calculation every time. But there’s something that the data can never say, and that is, everything will be just fine.

It has always served me well to follow a dog. They have been my reason to go and now they are my reason to stay.

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When I see kids now at a bus stop shivering in their street clothes, my heart goes out to them in solidarity with the girl I once was, the one who said, “Weather doesn’t bother me.”

In my teenage years, I wrote poetry and thought of weather in a metaphysical sense:

In the wind

Two strangers blew together

They called it love

But it was weather

I didn’t experience hypothermia until my early thirties. After I wrote about it, the trip’s sponsor called it “an incompetent effort at survival.” My account reflected poorly on my abilities and implied that I was sent into unsafe conditions. If I published it, I would have to repay all expenses, including the raft rental.

The temperature never reached freezing, but I remember sitting in the tent with my wet sleeping bag wrapped around me. I had stopped rocking and watched Steve through the tent flaps. He was walking back and forth at the edge of the river when he finally stopped, raised his Colt .45, and fired three shots into the air.

A group of guided fly fishermen picked us up. A woman whom my memory has dressed in a nun’s habit ran down to the dock and ushered me into the boot-warming shack. Someone handed me hot chocolate. I told them how we had dropped into the canyon in pack rafts, how I had hit a sweeper and soaked all our gear, how we paddled nearly 30 river miles in the rain before we dragged our rafts to shore a few miles short of the Bering Sea.

By the time I finished telling it, I could smell the damp neoprene. My senses were coming back just as my thoughts escaped whole fields of feeling. I had been rescued.

A friend once told me, “People say they want an adventure, but most people want to have an adventure, not be on one.” As a bush pilot, she had dropped off and picked up many people on remote trips in Alaska.

Most adventure stories focus on competence. I prefer ones that include struggle and give you a chance to show who you are, make you aware of how fragile and small you are. If the story goes through too many drafts and edits, what’s left may only be a fragment with no sense of the cost involved. It might show the highs without the lows and create an image that lacks weather and context – you can’t hear the cold water hitting the raft, lulling you to sleep as you fight to stay awake and maybe alive, the way you watch a king salmon dart away beneath the surface and think you ought to be fishing and not pondering a symbol of life escaping death.

I mistook my first real adventure for its advertisement. The initial blast of cold water was vitalizing. I didn’t have the experience to realize I was going under. I couldn’t see the days ahead – the ones where you could die 100 miles from the nearest road system or crawl up a sandbar and collapse because it felt so good to stop moving.

By the time I got back to work and people asked how my trip went, all I could manage to say was that I had never been so cold in my life and had lost seven pounds. The adventure itself seemed to dissolve into the dawning realization that you can’t frame the moment when you are at the whim of forces greater than yourself.

I am a lover of the idea of something. I even love the first five minutes of the reality behind the idea, too. It’s just about the length of a song.

Maybe people like me build our lives around five minutes of feeling – the big mountain summit, the cabin in the woods with smoke coming out of the chimney, the warm feel of beach sand. You can view these vignettes on a screen without being subject to their weather system and game of chance. You view them as things. Somehow permanent in structure.

Weather, whether real or metaphorical, wakes you up from the dream of life. It shows up as a worthy opponent. It demands attention, relationship. It says things may not go according to your plans so show me who you are or become a creature of oblivion. It challenges you.

Maybe it is part of growing up and maturing to become fascinated by weather and perhaps all systems in flux that are beyond our control. As a child, I had no real concept of illness or disease. It seemed rare and random. Years later, I began to realize everyone is suffering from something. The weather is constantly changing, predictable and unpredictable at the same time.

Now, my adventures are almost an inverse of what they once were. Instead of failing to anticipate what could go wrong, I imagine worst case scenarios. I am filled with anticipatory dread. My sensitivity to life no longer has the bullhead of the adventurer but the soft heart of someone who has loved and lost, tried and failed.

You know what the punches life throws feel like, and maybe now you try to anticipate them, dodge them. Yet somehow, you feel those hits in the form of a thousand doubts – tiny punches that never land.

The week before Rigby’s vet appointment in Anchorage, I kept checking the weather forecast. I worried about whiteout conditions through the pass. The car was packed with all the right gear – an adventure shovel, a milk jug full of gravel, blankets, and the old bunny boots I once would’ve refused to wear.

The vet tech had asked us to bring Rigby’s medications. I didn’t understand why until she explained that people sometimes get stranded between home and the appointment. Of course, I thought. You travel with your medications. That’s a good piece of survival advice I hadn’t considered. I am getting older, and medications are now part of my adventure kit.

Despite my dread of a much longer office visit – a previous appointment for chemo treatment had lasted five hours, Rigby was done in an hour. The storm in the forecast did not come, and the roads were dry on the drive home mid-afternoon. Rigby snored from the back seat. The November supermoon floated like a ghost in the pale blue sky.

I was still making incompetent efforts at survival and had still survived

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Even though I don’t know a lot about the military, I would not have mistaken The Colonel for a fried chicken franchiser or as someone bestowed with the honorary title but without command responsibilities.

It was clear from his posture and reserved manner that he did not believe events as they are shown in the news. What I might imagine of war – hellfire with hurtling chunks of hot metal raining down – he might describe as a “tense moment.” You could see years of military training pressed into his clothes, packed into his resolve.

He was sure to be the last in line behind the rest of our group – there were five of us and three bird dogs – two setters and a Brittany. At the end of a long day covering fields in South Dakota, we arrived back at our vehicles, and the tailgates came down. The friend who introduced us all to each other opened his cooler and offered us a choice of beverages.

I watched as two of our new friends drank and wiped their mouths. The Brittany ducked under the shade of the vehicle, and one of the setters sat panting while his human began to eat a sandwich.

The Colonel had not taken a drink. He helped his old setter, Beatrice, into the back seat of his car, parked under a shade tree. He gave her a drink of cold water in a dish, and while she drank, he brought out what looked like a Dopp kit – a small leather travel kit that carried dog grooming supplies.

He methodically checked Beatrice’s paws and combed her fur, removing burrs, sticks, and tangles. It wasn’t until she rested her head that he moved to the back of his vehicle and attended to his shotgun, a side-by-side.

He takes care of his dog first, I thought. People often say the dog comes first and I knew it, too, but sometimes you don’t really know until you see a fine example, and you think, I want to be that guy.

Back home, I kept a comb and scissors in the glove box, but I didn’t have The Colonel’s style. I knew I would always like him after I saw how he took care of Beatrice, no matter what else. That’s how I feel about people – a single act can charm me so completely that it has my loyalty in the face of many minor flaws that I can easily overlook later.

This is how I have gotten to know myself over the years. I try to pay attention to what I admire most in others. I don’t always do a good job of replicating it – I do silly things like buy a dapper leather kit, fill it with supplies, and then forget to take it with me.

There’s a line in the movie Black Hawk Down in which Hoot says, “When I go home people’ll ask me, ‘Hey Hoot, why do you do it man?’… They won’t understand why we do it. They won’t understand that it’s about the men next to you, and that’s it. That’s all it is.”

I loved that line, and I thought, I sure want to be that guy. Then, I realized, as much as I want to be that guy, what I probably want more is to be the guy next to that guy. Either way, I want to show up for someone and stay by their side, no matter how difficult the moment becomes.

Last night, I sat on the floor with Cogswell. He’s 11 years old now, and he has always been the slowest of our setters. He has always been a “good boy.” He is not the best hunter, or the best runner, or the best at figuring out what the words you are saying mean. He’s just good. He tries to be good all the time.

And he likes me to sit down with him and scratch his ears. He presses his forehead into my chest, and I feel his head and shoulders and legs. Cogsy has more lumps than any of our dogs – they are benign lumps. He has had seven of them removed, and it seems as soon as he has a few removed, more start growing.

Affectionately, we sometimes call him Lumpy. Or Grandpa Cogsy – even when he was young. I tell people that our house has become like a nursing home for old dogs – we now have five dogs over the age of 11.

As I sat on the floor with Cogswell, I thought of our years together and how honored I was to have him still by my side. I remember him as a puppy lying next to my head in the sleeping bag in the back of the truck. I remember when he ran after some geese and looked ashamed of himself when Steve brought him back by his collar. He bucked around until he caught himself and seemed to realize that’s not how he wished to behave. He never chased geese again.

Earlier in the day, he sat on the porch watching the feral rabbits in the yard. Two rabbits ate grass just a few feet away from him. He’s the only one of the dogs we can trust to sit and watch the rabbits with us. It took all our years together to have the moments we have now.

I am not sorry that we can’t go as high or as far into the mountains anymore. Our reason for being was never about summiting a mountain or getting a limit of birds. It was about being there, and being there with each other, for each other, and those chances don’t stop when the scenery changes from the alpine to the recliner.

You can learn a lot about a person by the way they treat their dog. You can learn even more by the way they treat their older dog. And maybe what you learn is what you want to be yourself.

I don’t just want the memory or the credit for what I’ve done. I want as many chances as I can get to feel true love despite the circumstances. I won’t always make it. Sometimes I need someone else to help me figure it out, to be an example, to remind me, to carry me back.

Sometimes it’s a dog. Sometimes it’s Steve. And sometimes it’s a real retired Army colonel.

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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.

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Some people have been so bold as to tell me that I have too many dogs, even now, with just seven in the house. Some wonder how I can give that many dogs the attention they deserve. Or, in the words of a co-worker: “It’s just kind of crazy. Like, cat-lady crazy. It’s too many.”

A friend once advised me that no one should have more dogs than they have hands. In most cities, if you have more than three to six dogs, you are required to get a special license, your home is subject to inspection, and your neighbors are notified. Your situation is defined as a kennel, something like a horse stable, even though you have all the modern conveniences for humans. You are, in the minds of many, living with the animals. You might as well have sawdust on the floor.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t live in town or that we live in an age where people can watch videos of a Highland cow’s bedtime routine, complete with pajama time. It doesn’t matter that my video feed is full of little dogs getting facials in kitchen sinks or a lady sharing a pillow with a squeaky-clean pet pig. Why can’t the animals live in our world?

When people visit our house, which is rare, I always ask them not to take off their shoes. Even before I lived with so many dogs, I believed shoes were part of an outfit. I never understood the suburban custom of partially undressing at the front door. If there is a flood or fire, I do not want to be scrambling to find my shoes in a pile. This is just one example of my predisposition to living in a barn, even if I wasn’t raised in one.

My family is not a traditional “nuclear family” – defined as parents and children – with “nuclear” originating from the word meaning “kernel,” not “kennel.” I don’t mind when people refer to me as a “dog mom,” even if it conjures the image of a woman swooning over a spoiled, floofy dog. You love who you love and leave the caricatures for the carnival artists.

You can be a dog mom and have a house full of muddy hunting dogs drying out from a day in the rain and snoring from dog beds scattered around the house, waiting for their next adventure.

Long ago, when I brought home my first chocolate Lab, Jack, a duck-hunting friend asked me if I let Jack sleep in my bed. The thought filled me with a kind of housekeeping panic. If you had seen Jack, you would have seen him excavating rocks in the yard or rolling in salmon carcasses. He often had drool hanging from his mouth or wrapped around his face when he tried to shake it off.

That night, he wanted to get up on the bed. He put a paw next to my head. I removed it, as if it were a dirty napkin. He put the paw up again. “Jack, no,” I said. “You are filthy. Work with me on this.”

The next day, I put a blanket on the floor next to my bed. I thought about how my white down comforter didn’t fit in the washing machine, how I didn’t want any more Jack-shaped marks on the furniture. My beige couch was already ruined. But it wasn’t until the next fall, when I saw my same friend, that I realized how much I had changed. I had made my last purchase from Pottery Barn and my first purchase from Cadre Feed. I bought a Jack-colored secondhand leather couch. I had water-absorbing mats at the front door. Nothing that you would call “decorative” existed at any height Jack could reach on his hind legs.

“I slept with Jack,” I told him. He knew exactly what I meant.

From that day forward, my dog family grew. My defenses only weakened and are still weakening. I have no hard shell left. I am completely open now.

That means all the love I have felt sharing a view at the top of the mountains or sitting side by side watching the sunrise on the flats is right there with all the heartbreak. One thing human parents don’t experience as much as those who live with dogs – especially hunting dogs – is the shortened arc of shared adventure with its inevitable end.

One day, you are sitting cross-legged on the porch in July with a litter of fat, soft setter pups all around you – a warm day of puppy breath and the delight of little bodies exploring the outdoor world for the first time. Eleven years later, you are running a canine nursing home, still calling those same dogs your “puppies” as each one suffers from a different hardship of age and exhibits a rich history of life they cannot share in words.

You have feelings, a lot of feelings.

You wake up at 1:58 a.m. because you hear Purdey crying out. You get out of bed, run up the stairs, and find that she cannot move her back legs. She is panting, which is a sign of pain, but she also holds her breath and stares past you. She needs to see a vet, but the next day, Rigby has chemo in Anchorage.

So you sit with her through the night, watching the hours of the clock. You offer her water that she won’t drink and try to make her comfortable in blankets. In the morning, you load her and Rigby into the van – at this stage in your life, you have a vehicle dedicated to senior dog road trips. You are all going off on an adventure – not to the alpine you love, not to the flats to hunt ducks. This time, it is to see an internal medicine specialist, to consult with a vet oncologist, and to sit for most of the day in a waiting room where you meet other dog moms and dog dads who each share their story.

That evening, you are still there with a woman and her blind French Bulldog, and a couple with a black rescue dog named Aishiteimasu – adopted three times and now named after the Japanese word for “forever love.” When Rigby, who no one has yet met but who everyone has heard about, finally emerges from his appointment, the whole room cheers.

“He’s such a beautiful boy!” says the woman with the Frenchie. I wanted to hug her and tell her we would stay in touch. But I don’t know this woman. I doubt I will ever see her or her blind, sweet heart of an old dog again. Even though for hours we had all watched over this dog because she kept bonking into the corners of the coffee table.

If you are like me, and you’ve never had kids, and you aren’t going to have them, being part of a family of dogs doesn’t mean you don’t have a family, it means you have an unconventional one.

I recognize that it is not for everyone. I get that it might not work for people who like to have nice things, love solitude and sleep, or who do not want their unruly pack to disturb the peace and quiet of another town-dweller. Despite the acoustic cost of modern traffic, industry, and human density, a dog bark can pierce the night air like the Chernobyl alarm. I do get that.

I get that it is heartbreaking and expensive to care for old dogs. It can drain you in ways that might be similar to being a parent of an infant. You still have to go to work. Instead of spending money on hockey gear or dance lessons, you are spending money at the vet or for GPS tracking collars. Maybe you built a bridge over your driveway with a ramp into the fenced yard so that the old dogs could have easier access in and out of the house.

Maybe I am crazy. Maybe you are, too – in a different way. Or maybe the real insanity is believing love has a limit. That you can only love as many dogs as you can pet with two hands or that only a conventional family can give the joy you need to feel the most fulfilled and emptied by life, made whole by being opened up to the eternal light that can light the next candle when these go out, and is by no means limited to three to six in town.

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I rehash the old stories. It is not always intentional. Sometimes I find myself driving Bridge Access Road between appointments and catch sight of the Kenai River Flats. Yellow and woody brown, lit by the sun, with a flood tide about to come over the top. The river – sometimes glacier-blue – is subdued by mud, taking on a silty, moody hue.

The beauty of it hits you as more than just a landscape. Looking over feels like looking back, because all the feelings come back. You see a whole life out there. The lives of your dogs. The life you shared with them. Everything you once didn’t see, and all that you came to know.

You remember the joy of mornings in the dark. The cold air. How your boots broke open patches of black water with each step. The weight of the shotgun on your shoulder. How heavy the sled was with decoys, camp chairs, and gear. Being led by a duck dog – Gunner’s sure course to our blind a mile out or, later, Cheyenne’s command of every possibility she knew was in store. That blinking red light in the distance. The sound of widgeon wings before first light.

You remember Steve setting out the decoys under Gunner’s supervision. The pour of coffee from a thermos. The ermine that snuck into the blind to steal a mallard – the impertinent look while he backed out of your pack with a duck bill clenched in his jaws. As if to say, “I have been doing this longer than you. I’ll be having this.”

Because he didn’t just back away.

He looked. He knew.

I could have missed it. I could have never gone out. Someone like me is not an obvious duck hunter. I have heard that more than once. A year after I started hunting, a reporter interviewed me and described my “frizzy hair and makeup” as evidence that I don’t look like someone who would enjoy crawling through a swamp with a shotgun. I was a juxtaposition.

I wasn’t born into the hunting life. Most days, I went about my business as if I had headphones on. But duck hunting requires your full attention. Ducks don’t go where people put up fences. They go where everything you use to protect an ever-more sensitive and bookish inner self from external forces is stripped away. There’s no shelter. You might have neoprene against your skin, but you feel bare ass naked in the wind. Like you’re carrying what you should be wearing.

It’s not all a pleasant misery, though. No matter what the legends say.

One morning, when heading in, I noticed what looked like dead dragonflies caught in branches. But they weren’t dead. They were waiting there, stranded by dew, wings too wet to fly, until the sun would come out and dry them.

I remember the time we saw a shrew swimming at high tide, exhausted and unlikely to reach a safe shore. Steve kept him warm in one hand while he built a makeshift raft with the other. Once it was ready, he set the shrew on it and let it drift. As the shrew floated away, I was lost in wonder that a creature I reviled in the house was one that I would encounter as a friend in need in the field.

I don’t believe in rock bottom. I think at the bottom there is a lot of silt and sand. Maybe that’s why I love watching a tide go out.

In a flood tide, everything disappears under water. When the tide recedes, the flats empty, leaving the ponds full. The sloughs trickle down to thin ropes of brown water at the bottom of muddy slopes. The place has a particular heartbeat you begin to feel more than hear. It’s the place where I emptied Cheyenne’s ashes into the wind.

The lessons and losses flood back. The tide of memory, like the real tide, seems to stop momentarily at the banks. It won’t break over like a bore tide but slowly cover the ground, swelling the sloughs into rivers until the water is one body covering the tallest grass like a lake.

Sometimes I can barely drive. I am so overwhelmed with all the memories – distant or like dreams.

I wonder if this is me getting old, getting sentimental, subject to some hormonal spell of middle age. Why am I like this lately? Why do I feel like the magic is gone when memories well up, seemingly from nowhere – as if all the good things are lessons I learned and can’t learn again?

All the dogs I loved are in that same heaven, locked away from me. And the tide still comes and goes, the migrations still map the skies, the forces of nature, so beautiful, indifferent, and real.

I didn’t miss it.

But I miss it.

One of Gunner’s favorite things was to sit on the banks in Redoubt Bay, where we watched the mud turn green in the sun. The snipe picked at the mud and moved up the banks as the water rose. The long hours between tides lull the measure of time so it no longer contains the click of a clock stuck in traffic or the square lines on the 15-minute block calendar.

It’s been a long time since Steve and I have gone out during a high tide, even though we had inched our way back with the water at the top of our chest waders many times. Once we had to wait out a tide on a driftwood stump. We were about a half mile out with gulls and water all around us, the stump rocking gently, telling stories about how other duck hunters without a stump had to be rescued. We were like those old friends who do not promise to bail each other out of jail because we know we will be sitting in the same cell – a partnership that shares victories along with defeats.

After seeing the high tide on my drive and knowing it would be even higher the next day, I was worried when Steve suggested we go duck hunting after work. He said it would be a 26.4 tide with the wind coming from the southeast. As we drove by the Inlet, the waves were crashing. We didn’t want Rigby to have to swim too much, and we probably had less than an hour to pick our way out and back.

Sometimes when I am outside, instead of making memories, I think about what we are going to eat when we are done. We often work up a sweat, and I was thinking about dinner when I noticed the tide crashing against the top of the bank.

I thought maybe we could go out for Chinese food afterward, and I said, “Let’s turn back.”

Steve agreed we should get going because of the tide. He didn’t know about my dinner plans.

Another hunter was coming in behind us. He carried five mallards. When he caught up, we walked together for a bit, but Rigby kept trying to eat his ducks. We fell back to let the guy get ahead of us and gave Rigby a piece of chicken.

The other hunter was about six feet tall. I watched as he approached the last slough before reaching where our vehicles were parked. I saw a splash as he sank – it looked like nearly to the top of his waders.

I’m 5’4” on my driver’s license. I wouldn’t swear to my height in court, but if I were scared honest, I’d say I’m closer to 5 feet, 3.54 inches.

Accuracy matters when the inches are at the top of your waders.

“We’ll just have to go,” Steve said. He picked a good spot to cross, one that was narrower, and I watched him make it across without incident, as he would say. He drifted a bit, but it didn’t look like he went over his waders. He is 5’8” on his license. Our years together make me suspect that he reports his height accurately, probably because it might be relevant to some boat or aircraft specification.

I figured that if he made it, I had about three inches less to work with. If I jumped slightly, I thought, I could make up the difference.

I couldn’t.

The cold water hit me at the same time it pushed me into the current. I caught myself, slipped, and crawled out, fell a few more times, and covered myself in mud.

Steve laughed as he reached out a hand to help me up. I think it makes him feel better when he hops across and I have to belly crawl.

I wish I could tell you that I felt more alive in that moment than I have felt in weeks – I did – but my first thought was: I can’t walk into a restaurant like this.

Dinner would have to wait.

And honestly, I’m more grateful to have been swept away for a bit in the tide than to have been presentable at the table.

I’m always glad I got the chance to go, no matter how it goes.

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Sometimes Rigby sees the ducks first, and sometimes Steve or I see them first, kneel and say “Ducks.” Always, Rigby can tell the difference between the flight of seagulls and even snipe and the way ducks fly – their wingbeats like working heartbeats, quicker than a bird that swims across the sky in slow drafts (gulls) or darts in acrobatic and sometimes symbiotic drifts (snipe). All migrating waterfowl fly like they are going somewhere on purpose, and Rigby can spot it just as well as we can.

When the thought occurs to me that Rigby is 35 years old in human years – going by the idea that one dog year is the equivalent of seven human years or some other more modern equation – I struggle with believing the math and the assumptions behind it. Even with more scientific calculations – ones that talk about collecting genes and the evolution of the mammal from rodent-sized to fang bearing – that may be more precise, I still get the sense that I am measuring imaginary flowers in the air. I cannot make sense of computing animal years in terms of human years any better than I can lately accept that I am 47 years old. The whole concept of why the number we could come up with could possibly mean anything eludes me.

Even if I pick a number, I try to find a way not to believe it. My resistance may be because I prefer an equation that gives a little more joy than a dreaded countdown. What if, I wonder, dog years are worth more, not less, than the human. In unmeasured quality, one look – like the vision of love at first sight – might be worth more than 10,000 drives to work that leave you wondering what happened along the road. If the dog to human year ratio is 7:1, maybe the dog to human quality ratio is 1:7. If I was good at math, I could tell you the positive and the negative somehow cancel each other out, but I’m not, so I say it just feels like they might be the same thing only reversed.

The math may not work, but the idea is that it may be possible for a dog’s life to expand time rather than represent a fraction of our time. In any case, if you are like me and have seven dogs, one year is seven dog years.

In recent weeks, Rigby has changed from a dog who anxiously awaits breakfast to one who has moved his entire around-the-clock operation into the kitchen. Where he once sat next to the counter with his eyes fixed on whatever dish remained to be dispensed, he now camps out there. He even takes his naps in the kitchen, as if he has a sacred mandate to guard the source of all foods and snacks as well as be first in line when they are handed out. His excessive appetite – a side effect of medication – has made him obsessively hungry.

Since I have lived with a large variety of Labs and English setters, it has become clear to me how much more the Labs prize food than the setters. While the Labs often put food first, the setters have placed food somewhere below running wild and free in the mountains, a sincere show of affection, and the flight of a dragonfly at the corner of their vision. Labs have typically tried to catch in the air any object thrown toward their mouths without question. While the setters pick through their food and set outside the dish any items they do not prefer to eat.

Winchester was our first setter and, technically, the father – I use that term loosely, knowing it typically implies more than just biology when applied to humans and Winchester would certainly never win Father of the Year, but as it happened, he is related by ancestry, on the male side, to the five setters who are now twelve years old. This is due to a single interaction he had with Parker, who shortly afterward delivered her only litter of pups in our living room.

Although both Winchester and Parker have since passed away, they also passed on certain traits involving food.

Winchester cared little about eating and seemed only to eat what was absolutely necessary and only when there wasn’t anything better to do – he never took a treat in the field. He was looking for birds. If you made him stop for a break and offered him water or a snack, he looked at you as if you were either insane or an idiot.

Parker could tell you how she felt about food in one story that she quite possibly passed on to her children. She might say:

“Mom was standing in the kitchen making mac and cheese with ham. The three Labs were sitting close to her with drool hanging off their sloppy jowls. Mom cut up pieces of ham just for us. She threw one in the air and Cheyenne – the most shameless – caught it before it landed. Jack, another brown dog, missed catching his, but then ate it off the floor. Gunner also caught his. Then mom handed out ham to the five puppies – she always calls them ‘the puppies’ because that is their group name since they were born. Then she walked all the way outside on the porch to give Winchester a ham, and he didn’t even want it. When she got back inside, I sat up so she would notice me. When she finally did, she threw a piece of ham right at my face. It hit me in the forehead. I don’t know why mom was throwing ham at me. Maybe she is upset because I did something and I’ll never know what it was.”

I read somewhere that setters are the aristocrats of the bird dog world. They must never be shouted at or given a harsh word. You should not make commands like “Come!” which can sound overly harsh but should instead say, “Come along little darling.” The same advice could go for any of the neurotic breeds. What I read about Labs was that they are “genetically hungry,” and that humans have been considered in terms of dogs, to be “the Labradors of the primate world.” My experience makes no argument to the contrary.

Rigby turned out to be what dog trainer friends have called “food driven.” After he started taking prescription drugs, his natural hunger only intensified. He went from someone who loves food, to being something of a food-a-holic. He was doing things I had never seen him even attempt. The first was counter shopping. I think he would have tried this before if he had the physical capacity for it, but Rigby is a very large front-heavy English Lab, known to “walrus” himself onto furniture.

There is no other way to describe how he gets up on the couch but to say it is the way a walrus would do it. I have not found a word that uniquely describes how a walrus moves from a lower level to a higher one. Rigby swings slightly for momentum to gain a bit of upper body leverage, usually his elbows make it on the first pass. After that, he rolls from side to side, inching his way up until he can pull up his feet. His whole body is involved in the maneuver. He wouldn’t win any agility competitions.

Because his considerable bulk and locomotion style resembling that of his aquatic spirit mammal, I have affectionally called him “the Walrus” or my flippered buffalo. A setter could launch onto the counter the way a cat might do it, but for Rigby, it would be a personal record, lifetime achievement, and marvel of the civilized and domestic worlds combined.

The day before his appointment, Steve and I took Rigby to the Flats. It was the middle of the day, after most of the morning duck hunters had cleared out and the ducks along with them. Steve carried a shotgun, but we didn’t have decoys or a plan to set up anywhere for hours. Our purpose was to take Rigby to his favorite place to do his favorite thing (duck hunting). If he showed any signs that he didn’t have the energy, we would head back. We didn’t want him to try to retrieve any birds that would cause him to have to go into the deep mud of a slough or the outgoing tide. We ought not to have worried.

He ran ahead of us, swashing through grass and jumped a flock of teal that all flew away well out of the range of a shotgun. A lone widgeon remained, and it was clear this bird had been wounded and would not likely survive. Steve shot the widgeon and Rigby ran out to retrieve the bird. For the first time in his life, despite all his previous retrieves, it occurred to Rigby that a duck was food. It seemed that this realization came just as I was trying to take the widgeon from him and he tugged back. Our eyes locked in one of those numinous moments of connection when two species regard each other from opposing positions.

At his appointment with the vet oncologist, I reported on Rigby’s intense appetite. While we waited for his bloodwork results, I gave the uncharacteristic examples of extreme hunger: his post in the kitchen, the counter shopping feat, and the attempt to eat a duck on the retrieve. Just as I was wrapping up my case, we got the results. My fears that he was suffering from an insatiable appetite were replaced with tremendous relief. The bloodwork showed Rigby was responding well to treatment and going into remission.

I don’t know when the idea that a dog’s age can be determined in human years originated, but it might have stayed with us because there is some solace in measuring. This measuring might be considered a human weakness, since we do it in terms of what we already know.

What I have yet to figure out is infinite. (That’s a lot of dog years).

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“It’s up to us to save the world for tomorrow: it’s up to you and me”

Jane Goodall

(April 3, 1934 – October 1, 2025)

(That’s how it is when you are driving by the ocean instead of heading out in it).

Maybe, it was early March when you first saw a moose calf along the highway, and saw him again each morning on the way to work. You saw that he was having difficulty finding food, growing weaker, until one morning he laid down. The next morning, he was in the same spot, not having moved. A few miles down the highway, you pulled over and cried. It wasn’t just because of this young animal’s death. It was because everything felt like it was dying and, if not dying, struggling and suffering. You might have wondered if you would ever feel safe and happy again if it was at the expense of so many who will never see another summer day. It was all so heavy.

“Lighten up,” someone told you, which is never helpful. Cheer up, calm down, the feeling passes. My reason for sharing this bit of misery is not because it was a big misery – while the moose calf faced the end of his life, my circumstances were trivial. I was not thrown overboard on a fishing vessel, trapped in an avalanche, or starved and cold next to a highway with thousands of people driving by me on their way to work. I could not rescue the moose calf because I didn’t know how, didn’t know if it was even legal – the wild must stay wild, despite our paving over it. No one could rescue me because nothing in my life warranted a rescue effort.

I bet few suspect a girl in their office who has showered and showed up for work, dressed appropriately, and doing a good job is silently falling apart, warrants any attention. Even if you see her car parked behind Safeway because that day the thing that made her cry was watching two ravens fight over a piece of discarded garlic bread.

But somehow, back in 2020, as COVID expressed itself as a masked scream, an expression of mass human sickness, isolation, and alienation, you might have had a moment where you looked down at your phone and saw a text from your partner. He had been looking at Labrador puppies, and sent you a message: “We’re going to meet Rigby tonight.”

Rigby, a four-week-old very plump chocolate Labrador pup, saved me. Just to see him made me feel like my heart opened up. I felt like I could breathe. I smiled, laughed. I felt all of my bodily aches, mental anguish, and spiritual woes suspend. There was only this beautiful, adorable, delightful little creature. Just the sight of him was pure joy. We took him everywhere with us, and five years later, he is still as wonderful as he was on that first day.

That’s what I mean when I say he rescued me. I was at no risk of harm to myself or others. All scientific measurements of my physical, mental, and even spiritual state had been checked out by professionals. Some of the kindness people I have ever reached out to for help assured me that I would be just fine. They said this even as I despaired and they could do nothing to help me. But Rigby, just by virtue of being himself, kindled a spark of joy. The spark that can keep you alive no matter how dire or mundane your circumstances.

He is just a dog, as they say. In common usage, the word “just” as an adverb so often means “merely” – “just a flesh wound” instead of exactly or quite. In common language a rescue dog is one that a human saves from a perilous situation or who is trained to “search and rescue.” When a rescue dog also rescues a person, the story is “just” another ordinary story of civilization meeting domestication in our all too human world even if, for those involved, even without formal rescue, the sudden meeting of two random souls can be lifesaving.

I prefer to think of rescue as epitomized by a Massachusetts dog named Milo who lived at Egg Rock’s first lighthouse along with its keeper, his wife and children, chickens, goats, and a tame crow. Milo was famous for the rescue of several children as depicted in Landseer’s painting “Saved.” The keeper claimed his dog was “as useful as the light.”

I prefer to think of rescue, not as a single act of valor in the face of peril but as any variety of expressions of and encounters with the beauty of life, such as seeing a sunrise or a sunset, in which no matter how much we rely on each other or wall ourselves into dark places, there is an ever present light that contains not just warmth but a need to connect with other light, to crack open the shell, as the mystics might say.

If you are lucky enough to find this connection – call it love, call it duty, call it anything but another blind drive to work in traffic for a day at the office – you will, in turn, find yourself wanting to return the gift you were given. And so here you are, with me, wondering how to face the complex task of taking your hero, the one who carried you through stormy seas in strong jaws with the biggest paws you have ever seen, to his chemo appointment.

You will be here with me, with a lump in your throat in front of a screen as the big lug of a dog, kind-eyed, sweet-souled, sleeps after a good breakfast, wondering what else you can do for him. Because we are all still living in that broken world that attempts to cure every uncured malady. Instead, perhaps, of resting on the shore together in realization that, for at least this moment, we have been saved.

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When I first heard about Rigby’s diagnosis, his vet told me that Steve and I would need to take Rigby to a vet oncologist for chemotherapy. “There are a whole bunch of different levels, some elaborate, some basic,” he said. The shock of the news sent me into a kind of desperate data drive – I spent hours on the internet as if it would soothe my nerves to be doing something, as if there was such a thing as a data spa. I joked with a friend that I started keeping a “poop journal” for Rigby, but I wasn’t joking. The side effects of all the prescribed drugs included the full range of gastrointestinal disturbances.

I struggled to understand the complex protocol, called a LOPP Treatment, which uses four drugs – Lomustine, Oncovin (vincristine), Prednisone, and Procarbazine. Vincristine was administered intravenously on day 0, Lomustine was given on week 2 by the vet, Prednisone was prescribed and given at home in tapering dosages, and Procarbazine would be delivered by mail in a biohazard bag one tablet at a time after bloodwork. He was also prescribed medications for chemo-related side effects (Maropitant/Cerenia, Proviable, Metronidazole) as well as Trazodone, Prilosec/Ormeprazole, and Gabapentin, to be used instead of Carprofen/Rimadyl, which is a NSAID and cannot be taken with Prednisone.

The plan involved days, weeks, and cycles, so I had to learn what each of these meant so that I could plan days off work and trips to Palmer from Kenai, a distance of over 200 miles. As I laid all of this information out on a spreadsheet and found contradictions in the 4-page instructions, I wrote down questions for the next appointment that sounded like ridiculous abstractions: “Is day 2 different in week 1 of the first cycle? For future cycles (2 -5), are vet visits only expected in weeks 1 and 3, and not week 2?”

I read forums where dog moms recommended giving Maropitant/Cerenia before Procarbazine to help with nausea, but the instructions I was given said to give 1 tablet by mouth once every 24 hours if needed for low appetite, nausea, or vomiting. Should I give it before the nausea to prevent it or only if there was nausea? I typed up all of my questions, feeling a growing sense of frustration, panic, and even anger. My hands were shaking, and I couldn’t be sure if I was making things too complicated or if they really were too complicated for anyone to understand. I felt like I did in elementary school math when given a story problem I could not possibly compute. I don’t know how fast the train should be going. I don’t want to be on a train.

“Let’s take Rigby to the Flats,” Steve said.

Almost instantly, I knew this was the right thing to do. Rigby had been more energetic and acting more like himself. He brought me his favorite ball a few times, which was an improvement over the vacant stare he had just a week before. His appetite had improved, and he seemed more awake and alive.

When we imagine cancer care as an elaborate medical protocol rather than an elegant act of living, we risk missing what healing can mean. I found myself chasing control through complexity – dosages, spreadsheets, calibrated responses – forgetting that some cures are not engineered but felt. There is a kind of elegance in letting a duck dog run the Kenai flats, in the wind and the mud, where presence, not precision, is the cure. Some healing isn’t prescribed or calculated. It must be felt. It is not cogito ergo sum, but sensito ergo sum – I feel, therefore I am.

We walked out on the flats in the middle of a sunny day without anyone else around. Rigby ran out ahead of us in his way. The cadence of his gait is so joyful, a love of the splash through a pond. I imagined how the place, which I know is his favorite – it is my favorite place too – felt. All the salt smell, the tall grass, the ponds that he disturbed, the slough he swam, looking up at us as if to share it.

Four teal were startled from a pond by a jogger near the road, and they flew directly for the blind we sat in for a break. Rigby spotted them in the sky and sat alert. We watched as they flew straight for us and splashed into the far side of the pond, a hundred yards away, before lifting up almost immediately again and flying away. Rigby’s body was alert, and he looked at us with his bright eyes. Those big bright eyes. So full of life.

All three of us felt better. So much better.

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Rigby was born in September, five years ago, and he joined Steve and I in the field as a chunky pup I often carried while Cheyenne, one of the best duck dogs I have ever loved, ignored us in her pursuit. She was small for a Lab, not what some would call a ‘pocket lab,’ because no one could put Cheyenne in a pocket, and she had eaten through most of ours anyway. She loved to hunt and retrieve ducks.

After Cheyenne passed away, Rigby became our duck dog. He is also a chocolate Labrador, but of the English variety, which is to say that he is rather large and wide set, weighing in at 109 pounds for his last appointment. He has the most wonderful underbite that pushes out his bottom lip. It’s not a toothy underbite, just enough to give his protruding jaw a resolute plumpness and softness that makes you want to grab both his ears and kiss his face in a completely motherly way that in no way makes you a “crazy dog person.”

His hunting style was unlike Cheyenne’s in almost every way imaginable. Cheyenne was itchy in the blind, making impish chirps and glancing at you as if she were a child on Christmas morning waiting for the signal to open presents and mistaking the signal as given at any moment. When she marked a fallen duck, she ran to it without once looking back, even if she had to search—she didn’t want your help. This was the stage of her life, where she showed all of herself. I loved to watch her intensity and often thought, that’s my girl, my little ducker. When she brought back a duck, she walked around me with the duck in her mouth at least three times as if the crowd were going wild. The crowd was Steve and me, and it was the best of times for us.

Rigby loves the wet world of the flats and being out there with us, but he does not have the same interest as Cheyenne. He will take a nap in the blind, and he behaves as if retrieving is a team activity. For example, he will amble out as if to retrieve and stop to look back as if to say, “Are you coming? Let’s go find this duck.”

Most of the time, contrary to any written advice on the subject, Steve and I will join him, each of us pointing as we walk. Steve likes to say that I retrieve Rigby’s ducks, which in practice looks like me finding the duck and Rigby being delighted to pick it up and then drop it again or, if it is in water, for Rigby to swim out and perhaps in circles while I point from shore, until he finds it with a burst of joy (“We found it!”). Steve has even waded out into a small lake as I watched Rigby swim beside him and enjoyed this uncharacteristic partner method for water retrieves.

For some of us, a hunt has not ever been about technical proficiency, but a way to share a deep love of being alive, with all that life and death entails.

There is nothing I love more than going out for ducks with Steve and Rigby. It is part of so many other days and times when we may have gotten an earlier start before we had dogs, sat and watched the tide with Gunner, crawled through the grass with Cheyenne, or wished we were back there so many more times than we get to go.

All of this is to say, I belong out on the flats, and so does Rigby.

He still has a shaved band around his front leg from his first appointment last week. The medical notes say, “We are going to just give Vincristine this week and see how Rigby is doing next week.”

When Steve took the bandage off, and I saw the shaved leg, my stomach turned. It would be a constant reminder that things were not normal, not that I need a reminder.

One night in late August, I noticed Rigby standing next to the kitchen table. It seemed odd. He is usually either excited about food or a trip to town or he is flopped in a dog bed, positioned like a tipped cow on the tile floor, or draped across my lap in the recliner and providing the best weighted therapy blanket I have ever known.

He doesn’t normally just stand there with a vacant stare. I walked over to him, and said, “Hey buddy, what are you doing?” He didn't respond.

“Something’s wrong,” I said to Steve, and he agreed.

A day later, we were in the exam room watching a vet feel him all over. This vet, who was not Rigby’s regular vet, had asked me to put a muzzle on him because he had growled at her. I couldn’t help feeling like I had to explain that he wasn’t properly socialized as a pup due to his being born during COVID-19. He is a good boy, and he has made friends with new people and dogs since, it’s just, he is on edge when things are weird, and this was weird.

She didn’t feel an obstruction and she moved to his hips, articulating the joints. “Do you hear that?” she asked. There was a click in his right hip. She made the noise several times so that the technician, Steve, and I could each separately agree that we heard it and then once more so she could hear it again. I was paralyzed by politeness, and wanted to say, “Can you stop clicking his joint now for crying out loud we heard it.” But, I just sat there holding my breath wishing she would stop.

She prescribed Rymadyl to address the inflammation in his hip and asked us to monitor him closely. If he stopped eating or vomited, we could bring him back in. It didn’t feel right.

A few days later, Steve brought him back in and asked for an x-ray and blood tests, not because he stopped eating or vomited, but because nothing had changed. Something was wrong.

Steve brought Rigby by my work office with the results. The x-ray showed two things. First, Rigby had hip dysplasia on both sides. Second, he had a large mass near his heart. The vet suggested taking a sample while Rigby was sedated for the x-ray, and this was sent off for testing.

That Friday, two days before the opening of the waterfowl season, I got the call that the sample said the mass was a lymphoma. “Do you know what that is?” the vet said.

I had been searching the Internet and had hoped the mass was an imaging mistake or thymoma, a mass that is less likely to metastasize and not lymphoma, an aggressive cancer that affects the lymphatic system. Rigby’s bloodwork showed that his calcium was high, which happens with lymphoma. “It’s a common big dog cancer,” the vet went on to say. There was not a vet oncologist in Alaska, but there were two options for chemotherapy treatment—one in Palmer and one in Anchorage. Both coordinate with an out-of-state oncologist. “We are trying to get remission,” the vet said. “You just want the longest remission.” Then he said some remissions can be over a year.

After I hung up the phone, I stared at my work desktop in front of me. I stared like Rigby had been staring. Now I knew what he knew. Something was wrong. His young life was being shortened.

We stayed at home on opening day, and I listened to Rigby snore. His breathing was louder, possibly due to the mass near his heart affecting his lungs. I listened to the rain on the metal roof and the snoring. What else could so perfectly express how I feel?

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