Author’s Note: This is the fifth installment in a monthly series called A Love Letter. Each month I write one piece in the true form and spirit of a love letter, to someone or something that has shaped me, taught me, or earned my gratitude that I can no longer keep to myself. I used to write love letters often, many years ago. This series is me bringing that old part of myself back to life, and turning it toward the people, places, and things that have quietly shaped me.

Volume One was for bird dogs.
Volume Two was for my father.
Volume Three was for home.
Volume Four was for leather.
Volume Five is for my faith.

My Faith,

I have known you for as long as I have known anything, and I am not sure I can truthfully say you belonged to me for all of these years.

At first, you belonged to my parents.

You lived in the Bible that was part of our home, in Sunday school, in Mass, in prayers I learned before I was old enough to understand what their words meant. You were in the kneeling and standing, the folding of hands, the stories of Christ and His sacrifice, and in the simple childhood assumption that God existed because the people I trusted most in the world told me He did.

There is something beautiful about that kind of belief. A child has not yet accumulated enough reasons to complicate what he has been handed. My parents believed, so I believed. God was real, Jesus loved me, prayer mattered, and somewhere beyond what the physical world could see there was a Heaven where the people we lost eventually went.

You were part of the structure of my childhood before I knew to call you anything at all.

But you were inherited.

It took most of my life for you to become something I feel I had to earn the right to call mine.

For years, I confused knowing you with the rituals associated with you. I thought faith meant believing God existed, reading His Word every so often, praying when I needed something, and retaining enough of what I had been taught to generally know where I stood. I did not understand the relationship inside you. I certainly did not understand how easily a relationship can weaken when one continues claiming its importance while giving his attention to everything else.

Life, and this world, eventually complicated the childhood version of you.

My father died when I was twenty, and while I did not become angry with God, I remember asking why. Dad was too young, and I certainly felt too young to lose him. Eventually I stopped asking for an explanation and decided the only useful response was to try to build a life he would have been proud of. I stumbled plenty while doing it, but the decision gave grief a place to rest.

Then I joined the Army, went to war, and was carried deep into some of the darkest corners of this world. I spent years in places where I watched human beings do terrible things to one another in the name of religion, while beliefs, culture, power, and tribal identity tangled themselves together until I had difficulty seeing where one ended and another began.

I never stopped believing in God. That distinction matters to me. But I did begin questioning everything mankind had constructed around Him.

So I did what I tend to do when I encounter something I cannot understand: I tried to out-study it.

I wanted origins. I wanted to know where religion began, what people believed before the traditions we recognize existed, and why cultures separated by oceans and centuries carried fragments of strangely similar stories. One book led to another, and one theory opened three more questions. I approached it the way I approach most complicated problems: gather enough information, sort the variables, find the pattern, arrive at a defensible conclusion.

There must have been moments when you wondered whether I was ever going to stop questioning and simply listen. Eventually I did.

On September 20, 2023, in the back of an ambulance, I felt a hand take mine when my eyes told me there was no hand there. The rest belongs to The Day God Held My Hand, but what matters in this letter is much smaller.

For years I had been searching for evidence, and that day I came away believing I had been given it. Something changed between us after that. You were no longer something inherited from my parents, or something I practiced because childhood had taught me to. You were no longer an intellectual position I was trying to figure out against my own questions.

You became mine, and it was then that I began to understand what had actually changed.

I had never stopped believing in God. Even through all the years of questioning religion, doubting interpretations, and wondering what mankind had added, altered, misunderstood, or built around Him, His existence was the one thing I never truly abandoned.

What changed in that ambulance was the distance between belief and reality. I had believed God was real. Then, for me, He became tangible.

That forced me to reconsider everything else I had spent years holding at arm’s length. If God was that real, if His presence could reach into the back of an ambulance and become something I could physically feel in my own hand, then Christ, Scripture, prayer, the Holy Spirit, His teachings, and His will could no longer remain interesting religious claims I endlessly investigated from a safe distance.

That was where I finally began to understand what having my own faith actually meant. The searching had not ended because I suddenly possessed every answer. It ended because I no longer believed every answer had to pass through rigorous analysis before I could trust what God had already revealed.

And from there, the harder work began: learning to live accordingly, because knowing someone exists does not constitute having a relationship with them. I should have understood that much earlier. My entire life is full of relationships that make the point obvious.

My dogs know I exist. That fact alone would mean nothing if I never spoke to them, touched them, made time for them, walked with them, or noticed when something was wrong. I could tell anyone who asked that I loved them. My behavior would tell a different story.

I came to realize I had treated my relationship with God with that same complacency.

I believed in Him, and I would say so without hesitation. Meanwhile, I could give fifty or sixty hours to work, more hours to a glowing screen, and then offer God what remained, which was often nothing. But at least I believed He existed, I ignorantly proclaimed as I continued on with my life.

If I treated my wife that way, nobody would call it a strong marriage. Yet somehow I believed simply acknowledging the existence of God was enough to call the relationship strong.

You made that contradiction harder for me to ignore.

So my prayers changed. They became less like going about a checklist with God and more like talking with Him.

I still pray in my old familiar ways, but my most meaningful prayers now sound far less polished than anything I learned to recite as a child. I talk while driving, walking our property, or when I am alone in the field. Sometimes I ask questions, sometimes I give thanks, and sometimes I am confused and say exactly that. Occasionally I catch myself trying to explain something to God before realizing the absurdity in feeling the need to provide Him the proper background and context.

And more than anything, I ask for guidance. I seek help with living His will, not mine. I ask Him to show me the path He needs me on, and to help me recognize His will before I mistake my own for it.

I wish I could say I have become especially good at this. I have not. You have taught me many things, My Faith, but patience may be the lesson you have had to repeat most often.

Waiting for God is hard for a person who wants to know what he is supposed to do. There are things in my life right now that I pray about constantly and still do not understand, directions I want Him to make clear, and questions I would gladly accept an answer to tonight. There are things I have wanted for years that I have had to accept may not be part of the life He intends for me. Other things may still come, just not according to the schedule I once assumed.

I do not know, and I am fine with that conclusion.

There was a time when saying those words felt almost like admitting defeat. Now I am learning they can be an expression of you. I do not know why a prayer I have carried for years remains unanswered, but I believe He has heard it. I do not know whether silence means wait, no, not yet, look somewhere else, or simply that I am still too busy supplying my own answers to recognize His. I believe He will show me what I need to know when I need to know it.

That is you.

My Faith, you are not certainty about the outcome. You are the trust I lean on while the outcome remains unknown.

This has been extraordinarily difficult for me to learn because I have spent so much of my adult life relying on the opposite instinct. If something is wrong, identify the problem and solve it. If circumstances are unfavorable, change them. If a route closes, find another one. Intelligence, preparation, access, persistence, effort, toughness, all of those things served ME well for a long time.

Then life eventually hands everyone something they cannot muscle into submission, and you have carried me into those places differently.

I have learned that surrender does not mean I become passive, stop trying, quit working, or sit around waiting for God to perform the portions of life He has clearly given me the ability to handle. It means I stop pretending the final outcome belongs to me.

That distinction has become one of the hardest and most important changes in my life. I can do the work and release ownership of where the work leads. I can pray deeply without feeling the depth of my desire makes it God’s obligation to provide the answer I want. I can ask for direction without forcing the first available path into being the answer. I can say, His will, not mine, and try to live the second half.

There are days when I do. There are also days when I say those words and immediately begin developing my preferred version of His will. My Faith, you know me well enough by now to recognize the difference.

Perhaps that is why I have found increasing comfort in the book of Job. Not because my life resembles his suffering. It does not. What stands out is that he wrestled honestly with circumstances he could not understand and never received the tidy explanation we would have preferred. God did not hand him a memo and sit him down to explain every action and the purpose behind it. He was asked to trust the character of God beyond the limits of his own understanding.

Years ago, that would have driven me crazy. I wanted the memo.

Now I am considerably less interested in having every answer than I once was. I still find those old questions interesting, but I no longer need them settled before I can go to sleep. If there are answers I need, I trust I will receive them. If some belong on the other side of this life, I can wait. I realize the irony of writing that sentence inside a letter containing several thousand words about how bad I am at waiting.

We are making progress, slowly. You have also become much less flattering as you have become more important to me.

I used to picture strong faith as something that made a person feel increasingly certain of his own goodness. The opposite has happened. The closer I try to live to God’s teachings, the easier it becomes to see where I fall short of them.

My tongue remains a problem.

There is a reason Scripture spends so much time warning us about what comes out of our mouths, and apparently I am committed to providing supporting evidence. My work places me inside conversations where opinions are expected, and I have caught myself talking about other people in ways that I would struggle to describe as loving, gracious, or particularly Christian. Sometimes the words are true. That does not automatically make them necessary.

I also struggle to love everyone the way my faith tells me I should. There are people who annoy me, people I judge, personalities I have less patience for than others. I can know what Christ teaches and still walk into a room where one particular person is already talking and feel every ounce of that lesson disappear before I have reached my chair.

You do not let me feel especially righteous about any of this. I appreciate that about you.

Forgiveness has been another long lesson. I once thought forgiving meant saying, “I forgive you,” and considering the matter closed. Life taught me that the words can come much earlier than the actual release. Real forgiveness means resisting the urge to weaponize an old wrong because it suddenly becomes useful in a new argument, refusing to turn grace into a loan that can be called due whenever I feel injured again.

I am still learning that one too, among many more. Patience. Forgiveness. Surrender. Ego. I believe those are some of the lessons God is teaching me right now because I continually find myself enrolled in the class. You have never made me believe I am finished. You have made me care more about the work, and the dogs have helped.

I am careful saying that because I do not want to turn four animals sleeping around my house into theological props. They are dogs. They steal food, roll in things I wish they would not roll in, ignore instructions when a better opportunity presents itself, and place enough absurd objects in their mouths to complicate any divine lesson I would try to use them to help make.

Still, they make certain teachings harder to overlook. Forgiveness looks different when you live with something incapable of weaponizing yesterday. Loyalty looks different when a dog waits at a door for the same person every day without considering whether someone better is out there and may arrive. Patience looks different when an animal will lie beside you for hours waiting for the moment you finally put down what has been occupying your attention and notice them. Love looks different when it arrives without a scoreboard.

None of that makes a dog living Scripture. But it does make them very good reminders and teachers, especially about one thing I have come to understand differently in my relationship with God: attention matters.

My dogs are always ready for mine. They wait for a hand, a word, a look, a walk, a few minutes on the floor. They do not stop belonging to me on the days I become distracted. They simply wait for me to return to the relationship.

I have wondered many times how much of my life God has spent waiting, doing the same with me. Not absent, just waiting. That is a difficult thought to dismiss once it takes hold, and maybe that is also why open country has become so connected to you for me. I do not require the prairie to believe.

You live inside me whether I am driving to work, sitting at this desk, walking behind the house, or standing in a grocery store. You are not geographically dependent. But the farther I get from everything people have built, the easier it becomes for me to notice what God has.

A sunrise still stops me. So does a sunset. The night sky can make whatever I was thinking about five minutes earlier suddenly seem embarrassingly small. On the prairie, there are moments when I look up from the dogs and the horizon simply keeps going, and gratitude arrives before I have done anything to summon it.

My prayers have become more conversational out there. Sometimes there is no prayer beyond a simple “Thank You.” I have come to believe that is enough. Adding more words would only try to improve a moment that does not need improving.

Somewhere inside those conversations, I also began to understand the phrase the quiet pull differently.

I have come to believe what I call the quiet pull is one of the ways I experience the Holy Spirit working in my life. Not as a booming instruction or unmistakable voice telling me exactly what to do, but as a persistent drawing of my attention toward some place, thing, or chapter. A thought that keeps returning. A direction that refuses to disappear. A sense that there is something I should notice, pursue, leave behind, or at least stop long enough to consider.

That does not mean every desire I have deserves to be credited to God. I am perfectly capable of generating ambition, fear, ego, impatience, and plenty of terrible ideas without divine assistance. That has become part of what you ask of me too: learning the difference between something I simply want and something I genuinely feel led toward.

I still struggle with that distinction, but I am trying.

Is this His will, or am I trying to make mine sound spiritual? Am I being patient, or am I afraid? Am I being prudent, or have I found language for avoiding something difficult? Is this calling, ambition, ego, or an uncomfortable combination of all three?

I do not always know. What has changed is that I listen longer before deciding.

Some desires arrive loudly and disappear once the excitement wears off. Others remain after practicality has made its argument. They return in prayer, follow me on walks, and surface in the quiet hours when there is nobody around. Eventually, certain things become harder for me to dismiss than they are to pursue.

This publication was one of those things.

That is why Chasing the Quiet Pull has never felt like a clever title to me. It is closer to a description of how this came to be, and how I am trying to live.

Chasing because I am still moving toward something I do not completely understand. Quiet because the things that have mattered most in my life have rarely announced themselves with certainty or spectacle. And pull because that is what it has always felt like to me. Not being shoved toward a predetermined destination, but being drawn toward something, sometimes gently enough that I could have easily ignored it.

For years, I did. I am trying not to anymore.

I know I feel pulled to write about the field, the dogs, my own journey, and the faith that increasingly runs through all of them. I know there are stories I feel compelled to put into the world because somewhere, someone may find one at the exact moment they need it. And when I am writing the ones that require me to be extremely vulnerable, the work feels connected to something that spent years stirring without knowing what it ultimately meant to become.

I do not know where Chasing the Quiet Pull ultimately leads. Increasingly, I think demanding that answer would miss the point of its own name.

There was a time when I would have wanted to define the desired end state, establish the milestones, determine what success looked like, and measure my progress toward whatever future I had selected. Writer. Consultant. Something in the outdoor world. Whatever else I set my sights on.

You have made those labels far less interesting to me.

I still have hopes for this work. I would be lying if I pretended otherwise. I want it to grow. I want more people to find it. I would love for writing to occupy a larger portion of my life one day. But I am far less interested in deciding exactly what the work must turn into before I am willing to follow where it is leading.

I used to believe “becoming” required a destination. Now I am learning it can also mean paying attention to the next thing God places in front of me, doing that work faithfully, and trusting that He understands where all of it is headed even when I do not. Where that eventually puts me is His concern before it is mine. That may be one of the greatest forms of peace you have given me: purpose without requiring me to know exactly where the purpose ends.

I should thank you for that, although I should thank you for much more.

You found me at a point when my view of the world was becoming increasingly cynical. I had seen enough cruelty and hypocrisy to make pessimism feel intelligent, and accumulated enough success, possessions, hobbies, and worldly evidence of a life going well to know that none of those things were particularly good at filling what felt empty underneath it all.

You changed the scale.

You gave gratitude somewhere to go besides back toward myself. You gave me a way to endure things I could not fix with intelligence, toughness, money, access, or self-reliance. You gave me a reason to examine the person I was rather than simply defend him, and a moral standard that does not shift according to what is convenient for me on a particular day. You returned a kind of calm that does not require everything to be going well, only the ability to stand inside what remains unresolved without believing I have been abandoned.

I used to think you were lumped into the things that made up my life.

Career. Family. Marriage. Dogs. Hunting. Writing. Faith.

Like one stone among many in a wall. I do not think that anymore.

I strongly believe you are the mortar.

You run between those things and help hold them upright and together. You affect how I understand my marriage, how I treat people, how I care for the dogs, how I approach work and writing, what I do with grief and gratitude, and how I make sense of stretches when the future refuses to reveal itself.

You are not one item among everything else. You are how I hold everything else together.

For that, I owe you many thanks, although I also owe you an apology.

I am sorry it took me so long. I am sorry for the years when I believed acknowledgment was enough, for the times I remembered God mainly because I wanted something, and for the questions that were arrogance pretending to be intelligence. For whatever bargains a younger version of me offered from faraway places. God, if You get me through this, I promise… For the ways I lived and now understand were badly out of alignment with what He asks from me. For the times I asked Him to show me the path forward while hoping it would resemble mine closely enough that I would have to change very little.

I am sorry for all of that, and there is very little from those old ways that I miss.

Before you became mine, I think part of me assumed a life in faith would feel like a life of subtraction. Things removed, pleasures denied, rules stacked around our existence until obedience slowly squeezed all of the fun and interesting parts out.

Instead, the opposite happened.

My world became larger. Sunsets, dogs, my marriage, and time afield all meant considerably more. My own behavior became something worth examining. Even uncertainty changed. It stopped being just the empty space between things I knew and became a place where trust could exist.

Loving God has not cost me anything that I would ask to have returned.

Humility, perhaps?

I have had to admit I was wrong about A LOT of things, and very wrong about some of them. If another person forced those admissions out of me, I would likely resent them for years. With God, the response is considerably easier. Yes. I was wrong. Please forgive me. Show me the way. There is freedom in being willing to say that.

There is another reason I hold you in such high regard, and this one is less poetic.

I have thought about two different perspectives, and I wish others would see this as well.

If I spend my life believing in God and reach the end to discover I was wrong, then I will have spent my years oriented toward something that was never there. I will have tried to live with love, repentance, forgiveness, meaning, hope, service, and a moral understanding that ultimately pointed at nothing beyond the grave. I will have been wrong about the largest question I ever tried to answer.

That would be an extraordinary error, but it would be finite.

I can accept having spent a life being a fool for something beautiful.

The other possibility is dramatically different.

If I spend my life refusing to believe and reach the end only to discover that I was wrong, then I will have walked past the one reality that mattered most. I will have spent whatever years I was given turning away from the God who made me, loved me, waited for me, and offered me a relationship I decided I was too clever or skeptical to receive. That is an error I cannot make right later.

Between those two risks, I know which one I am willing to take.

I would rather risk having believed too deeply than discover too late that I refused to believe at all. And perhaps even that explanation is becoming unnecessary, because you are no longer only an argument I make about what happens after I die.

I still have questions. I suspect I always will. But I no longer see them as cracks in you, places where belief has failed and certainty needs to be poured in before everything can hold together again. Some questions are simply part of realizing how little of the whole story any of us can actually see.

What has changed is what I do with them.

I can carry them now.

I can pray over something without demanding the answer arrive before I go to bed. I can stand in the middle of uncertainty without believing that uncertainty itself means something has gone wrong. I can feel the quiet pull toward something I do not yet understand and faithfully make the leap toward it without requiring God to show me the entire road first.

That is not the faith I inherited as a boy. It is the faith that became mine, the one that survived my questions, endured my neglect, corrected my pride, asked me to forgive when I would rather remember, taught me to wait when I would rather act, and changed the way I understand nearly everything I have been given.

You are in the dogs sleeping throughout this house, in the work that supports us and the writing that keeps pulling at me after the workday ends. You are in the prairie I cannot stop longing for, in the gratitude that rises before I have found words for it, and in the prayers I am still waiting to see answered.

You are in the man I was, because I can finally look at him without needing to defend everything he did, and in the man sitting here tonight, because I know how unfinished he still is. I trust you will be there in the man God is slowly asking him to become.

For most of my life, I thought faith was one of the stones, among many others, from which a person built a life.

I know better now.

You are the mortar.

You have found your way into every part of mine, holding together things I once thought belonged in separate rooms: grief and gratitude, doubt and belief, love and forgiveness, ambition and surrender, the life I planned and the life God continues to place in front of me.

I spent years searching for answers because I believed understanding would finally make faith possible.

Instead, you taught me something much harder.

There will always be things I do not understand. I do not need to understand them all before I follow. I do not need to know exactly where the quiet pull is leading before I chase it. And I do not need to see the man waiting at the end of this long walk to becoming before I trust the One shaping him.

My Faith, you began as something handed to me. You became something I chose. Somewhere along the way, you became the way I live.

I spent years trying to determine whether everything I had been taught about God was real.

Now I have a much more difficult responsibility.

To live the rest of my life according to what I now know in my heart to be true.

With gratitude,
Abram

Dunham, taking in Southwest Florida from a different vantage point.

When this arrives Monday morning, I will be on the road, somewhere between Southwest Florida and North Carolina, with four tired dogs, and considerably more seafood attached to my waistline than before we left.

I am also heading home feeling lighter.

Not physically, obviously.

The last several days were needed.

Sometimes life gets crowded enough that it becomes difficult to tell which problem actually deserves your attention because everything seems to be asking all at once. Work. Home. Decisions. Obligations. Things you are building. Things you are questioning. The normal collection of people, places, and responsibilities that make up a life can become so loud that eventually you are standing in the middle of it all, trying to think your way through the very thing preventing you from thinking clearly.

For most of my life, my answer was usually to keep going. Carry whatever it is, and work through it, and solve whatever could be solved and learn to coexist with whatever could not. I am getting better at recognizing when that approach has reached the limits of its usefulness.

So last week I stepped away for a few days.

I went south to spend time with my sister and her husband, two people whose company has always had a way of lowering the noise around me. We ate extremely well. I made my famous crab cakes that I spent two years trying to perfect while living in Baltimore. We laughed, and enjoyed sitting around a pool while watching the boys be themselves.

There was nowhere else we needed to be.

That was probably the larger gift of the week.

I am not heading home with every question answered or every difficult thing neatly resolved. Whatever waits for me in North Carolina is still there. But a little distance gave me enough room to look at some of it differently.

I know six days in Florida is not always available for everyone when life becomes heavy. Sometimes the available version is an hour walking somewhere without your phone. Thirty minutes on a porch. A drive. A church pew. A patch of woods. A chair somewhere in a place where nobody needs anything.

Whatever yours is, I encourage you to find it. I am a firm believer in finding those places before life becomes so loud that you can no longer hear yourself inside it.

The Boys

The Florida delegation. From left: Henry, Boone, Theo, Dunham, and Tiki.

Fortunately, the dogs needed to spend no time contemplating their lives, as all four boys made the trip to Florida for the first time, and each found their own occupation almost immediately.

Henry became head of lizard security.

From shortly after sunrise until the inevitable afternoon storm rolled through, he patrolled the lanai perimeter searching for anything small enough to scurry into palms, potted plants, or on the outside of the lanai screens. I have no idea how many lizards live around my sister’s house, but Henry was convinced the number needed reduced.

Boone explored everything and spent a large portion of the week playing with my sister’s dog, Tiki. The five-month-old Vizsla is still learning that a smaller dog may not appreciate being played with using the same tactics developed against Theo, Henry, and Dunham.

Dunham, meanwhile, reacquainted himself with one of his great loves: The pool.

There are not many things Dunham would choose ahead of a swimming pool. Birds. Food. His spot in our bed. Possibly me, depending on what treat is readily available in my hand.

He has also invented his own game of fetch.

Dunham’s self-play system in operation.

Dunham carries a tennis ball to the edge of the pool and carefully places it just above one of the return jets. Then he stares at it. Eventually he nudges the ball into the water, watches the jet carry it toward the middle of the pool, walks the perimeter while calculating his entry point, and launches himself in after it. He climbs out, and starts over. He will do this by himself for as long as he is allowed. Thirteen years has finally taught him that if nobody is available to throw the ball, doing it yourself is also an option.

But Theo may have been my favorite to watch this week.

The second youngest adult dog in the house appears to have promoted himself.

Whenever Boone became too rough and one of us called his name, Theo would stop what he was doing, walk over, interrupt the wrestling match, and guide Boone back toward us. Boone barked at a passing boat. Theo handled it. Boone wandered toward something we did not want him investigating. Theo went after him. A correction came from one of us, and Theo apparently heard it as a call to action.

The funniest part is how Theo remains fully committed to producing his own chaos. He has not suddenly become the mature, dignified elder of the household.

But he seems to understand when play needs to be stopped and somebody needs him to step in and help.

I wrote in Gentleness Gets Handed Down about the things older dogs seem to pass onto younger ones without anybody formally teaching them. This week I watched that process happening in front of me once again.

Theo is still one of the boys, and still loves to be goofy and playful, but he has also realized he is no longer the puppy in the room.

September

September, my favorite month, is finally here.

Well, technically tomorrow… but close enough.

September is when I finally allow myself to begin speaking openly about fall without feeling ridiculous for connecting dots that are not ready to be connected.

North Carolina will continue allowing summer to persist with seemingly no expiration date, but farther north the first cooler mornings are beginning to arrive. Fall foliage maps are beginning their annual migration across our feeds. Weather forecasts in the Dakotas are becoming slightly more interesting. And, soon, gear will start coming out of storage.

Monday puts me 44 days from leaving for North Dakota.

The maps, packing lists, and the rest of the spreadsheets have been open for weeks. The routes are set. The dates have been circled, and the steady drumbeat to October gets louder by the day.

September is when preparation becomes physical.

The piles start. Dog gear and medical supplies get checked. Camp gets pulled out and inspected. Lists get revised. Things needed for this years trip will begin arriving on the doorstep.

I am also thinking differently about how much of this season I want Chasing the Quiet Pull to carry with it.

Not just the essays written after everything is over, but some of the preparation, road, camp, dogs, mistakes, discoveries, photographs, and small moments while they are actually happening.

I have an idea that is beginning to take shape… more on that in a few weeks.

For now, September’s arrival is enough.

The Upcoming Week

This week’s writing widens the lens a little. The dogs have occupied plenty of space around here recently, and rightfully so. However, both upcoming essays begin somewhere more interior. One looks at faith. The other looks at pursuit, and the things we decide are worth spending pieces of a finite life chasing after.

Here is what’s on point this week:

Wednesday, September 2, 7:00 AM (free): “A Love Letter, Volume Five: Faith”

The fifth entry in the Love Letter series turns toward faith.

I do not intend for Wednesday to be a sermon, a defense of Christianity, or an argument about what anyone else should believe.

I want to write about my own relationship with faith. What it has carried. What I have asked of it. Where I have struggled with it. What I still do not understand. And why, after everything, I remain grateful to have found it.

Friday, September 4, 7:00 AM (free): “The Things We Spend Our Lives Hunting”

I spend a lot of time hunting birds.

Most people do not.

But I increasingly believe the difference between us is much smaller than it appears. We are all pursuing something. Security. Achievement. Recognition. Peace. A different life. A version of ourselves we hope exists somewhere farther down the road. Friday’s essay begins there, but I think the harder question is not simply what we are hunting, I think it is: Is the thing we are pursuing worth what it is costing us to chase it?

That is the question I want to spend the week wrestling with.

Chasing the Quiet Pull Audio

Thursday, September 3: The Packing List

September seems like the appropriate time to pull this one out of the archive.

The Packing List begins with my first North Dakota trip, when I prepared for bird camp with roughly the same basic knowledge I had applied to a deployment to Afghanistan.

It was a disaster. But, I learned from that and the lists have improved since then. Once you learn about the lists, you will ask ‘is he a sane person?’ That is debatable. But, this story does discuss the importance of investing on your future self.

Sunday, September 6: “The Toys They Never Asked For”

After a week spent discussing faith, finite lives, and worthy pursuits, Sunday is an appropriate time to remember that my dogs own an unreasonable number of toys they never requested.

This one was a lot of fun to write.

It was equally joyful to record.

Where to find Chasing the Quiet Pull

The written essays remain the heart of this publication, with new writing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

If you are new and working your way through the library, Start Here is the easiest place to find a handful of stories that show the different sides of what CTQP has become.

The narrated essays live alongside the writing at The Essays, Read Aloud, and you can also listen wherever you already find your podcasts:

Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Amazon Music/Audible · YouTube · Pocket Casts · Overcast

And if you want the smaller moments between publication mornings, photographs from the dogs and the field, short stories that never become full essays, and whatever piece of nonsense happened around the house that day, Substack Notes has increasingly been where those live.

You can also find Chasing the Quiet Pull on:

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If something here means something to you, pass it along. That remains the best way this place grows. One reader finds something familiar in a story and hands it to another.

Thank you for continuing to support this endeavor, and thank you for walking with us.

Until the next cast....

Stay steady, trust the dog, and chase the quiet pull.

God bless,
Abram

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Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

Three dogs. Three names. Their collars would suggest it is that simple. It is not.

According to the tag hanging from his collar, our three-year-old Wirehaired Vizsla is named Theo.

This is technically correct.

It is also an incomplete telling of his story.

Depending on the day, the room, the behavior in question, and whether we happen to be addressing him, Theo may also answer to Nugget, Knucklehead, Jerry, Schnoz, Schnozoldoodle, or Theo Ono-mano-peo.

His tail is named Vern.

Vern deserves a separate name because we no longer consider everything that happens behind Theo’s hips to be entirely the young dog’s responsibility. His tail operates with an independence that strongly suggests an alternate command structure. It has knocked things over, cleared low tables, struck cabinets, and, during Theo’s first two years, repeatedly split its own tip open against walls hard enough that he would walk through the house leaving little brush strokes of blood behind him.

When something crashes and Theo turns around with the same startled expression as everyone else, we have learned to reserve judgment.

Vern did it.

This arrangement makes perfect sense inside our house.

Outside this house, most of it would probably sound ridiculous. Theo, however, seems to know exactly who we are talking to.

Call him Nugget and his entire body begins moving. His shoulders twist. His wiggle-butt begins to swing vigorously. His head drops. The whole dog starts gyrating as though he is attempting an Olympic ribbon routine without the ribbon.

My wife can sing, “Theo, Theo, Theo Ono-mano-peo,” and what little dignity was ever inside his curl-haired body has completely disappeared.

Schnoz is newer.

But the nickname has taken hold quickly.

Theo communicates with his nose. If he wants affection, the nose appears against your hand or elbow. If I am lying down, it may arrive directly in my face. We have, over the years, developed a high-five in which I hold out an open palm as he runs by and he taps it with his nose. The gesture even follows us into the field. When he reports back, he will give my glove a tap and then bound forward again with newfound confidence.

So he became Schnoz.

Then, as more and more strangers have mistaken the Wirehaired Vizsla for some variety of doodle, Schnoz morphed into Schnozoldoodle.

“There’s my Schnozoldoodle.”

He loves this.

Again, none of this appears on the collar.

The collar, along with our contact information and a promise of a reward if he is lost and returned, simply says THEO.

There was a time when I would have considered one name sufficient for a dog. We spend an absurd amount of energy choosing them in the first place. Before Boone came home this summer, we discussed possibilities for weeks. We knew his name before we knew much of anything else about him. The breeder could still hold him in one hand, and somewhere in North Carolina two adults had already decided this tiny red dog would spend the next decade-plus answering to Boone.

Then the dog arrives and starts showing you who he actually is. Before long, the perfectly good name you chose is no longer the only one that fits.

Dunham came home as Dunham and, almost immediately, became Biscuit.

I cannot explain Biscuit.

I wish I could offer some charming origin story involving a dropped piece of breakfast sandwich during Sunday morning, or a puppy curled into the precise shape of something served with sausage gravy.

Nope.

He was golden and fuzzy, and I guess I thought he looked like a biscuit, and somewhere along the way I started calling him one, and thirteen years later, when the old man leans against me and presses the top of his head into my chest, Biscuit still occasionally comes out.

Some of Dunham’s other names have explanations that carry legitimacy.

Urlacher came from the field.

Years ago in Kansas, I showed up to hunt with a group of friends and someone asked where Urlacher was. I had no idea who they were talking about.

“Who?”

“Dunham.”

Why, I asked, was my bird dog suddenly being referred to as an NFL linebacker? Because, they explained, he was a tackling machine.

They were not wrong.

For years Dunham possessed an astonishing ability to catch running pheasants before a shotgun ever became necessary to put one in the bag. A bird would run through cover, Dunham would disappear after it. He would close distance considerably faster than the bird expected, and a few moments later, reappear with one in his mouth. It was truly a spectacle to behold.

So the nickname stuck, and the dog who now spends much of his day sleeping around the house is still Urlacher when old hunting stories are told.

That is one of the useful things about a nickname. It can preserve a version of a dog from a particular chapter of his life, long after time has changed him.

Henry, by comparison, has resisted much of this nonsense through sheer dignity.

He is Hen sometimes, Hen-Ben occasionally, The Gentleman when accuracy matters. Often, The Sheriff is used after he spends portions of his day patrolling our property as though the place has been placed under his jurisdiction. And, The Ferrari whenever the subject turns toward what happens after we put him in open country.

But Henry is still mostly Henry.

The name fits him too well.

Though, I have to admit, he did briefly suffer one nickname that is likely the worst error in nickname issuing in the history of our household.

When Henry first came to us, I was taken by how small and incredibly fast he was compared with the Vizslas. He was compact, light, and made running look effortless. The setter is capable of going from standing still to full speed with very little transition.

So naturally, I began calling him Pocket Rocket.

I thought this was clever, and I used it with everyone who we crossed paths with for roughly a week straight.

Then my wife informed me that “pocket rocket” had another meaning and was, in fact, a term commonly associated with adult recreational products.

Pocket Rocket was immediately retired.

There are not many more embarrassing experiences than discovering you have spent a week cheerfully introducing your bird dog to strangers by the name of a sex toy. Every once in a while, my wife will use it simply to witness the regret wash over my face as I recall a version of myself uneducated enough to name his dog Pocket Rocket.

Boone is only beginning this process. He has not lived here long enough to generate a full linguistic ecosystem, although we are working on it.

I started using Peanut because he was once a tiny puppy, a nickname becoming increasingly ridiculous as he rapidly turns into a substantial Vizsla. My wife has contributed Boonie-Butt to the household. Boonesford has made occasional appearances, vaguely inspired by Woodford Reserve and our apparent belief that adding syllables to an existing name makes absolute sense.

I have also referred to him as a spider monkey, too. Although that is less a name than a description of what happens when he begins pestering Theo with the energy of a creature who has recently discovered gravity but does not yet respect it.

Give him time.

The household will ruin his perfectly good name soon enough.

Gus went through the same process.

His official name became Gus-Gus to almost everyone who knew him, although I have no recollection of who started it. Gustaf appeared when I wanted his attention, particularly in the field. Jiminy came from what eventually became one of his signature noises, a strange little whine that sounded enough like a cricket to earn the name.

For a period of time after my wife and I moved in together, the ornery Vizsla’s full legal name appeared to be Gus-No.

Simply because I must have heard the phrase approximately six hundred times a day.

“Gus, no.”

“Gus, no.”

“Gus, NO.”

Eventually I suggested we simplify the paperwork and just acknowledge that the dog’s name had changed.

With Gus, there was also a phrase we would pull out rather than a nickname. The phrase produced one of the greatest domestic performances our household has ever hosted.

“You’re a big baby”

He hated it.

Say it once and he would begin whining. Say it again in a patronizing voice and he became visibly upset. Draw it out into something like, “Oh, look at you, you’re such a big, biiiggg baaabbbbyyy,” and situation in the room rapidly deteriorated.

Once Gus had heard enough, he would enter what we called a grunt run, a slower and angrier relative of the zoomies in which he charged around the house making a noise every time his front feet hit the floor. If sufficiently provoked, he would run to the couch, grab a pillow, shake it violently, and throw it at us.

I realize as I am writing this that there is no portion of this paragraph that makes us sound like mature adults.

For all the nonsense, there are rules we have never had to write down, and yet have held firm with.

Commands get the real name. Always. Nobody has ever said “Biscuit, sit” or sent Nugget after a downed bird. In the field the real names even sharpen up, the syllables getting shorter and more pointed, because out there a name is not affection, it is information. The nicknames belong to everything in between. The couch. The kitchen. The greeting at the door. The long stretches of ordinary life where nothing is being asked of anybody.

The dogs seem to understand the arrangement likely better than most people would.

The problem is that the dogs have learned considerably more English than we ever agreed to teach them.

We can no longer say the word outside in casual conversation, because four dogs interpret it as the next thing we are doing, and chaos almost always ensues. For a while we solved this by spelling it. O-U-T. Then they learned that too, so we moved on to yard and deck and whatever words remain temporarily outside their vocabulary.

You cannot say dead bird in this house without triggering a full investigation. “What’s that?“ has similar consequences, because it is field language, and saying it indoors will send three bird dogs looking for something they did not realize existed under our roof.

Even the names themselves have had to go underground. “Have you seen H?” “Where’s B?” “Did D get his meds?” The system is not especially secure, and I suspect in due time they will crack the code.

Our mistake was believing we were the only ones learning language.

Through all of it, the official names remain. Dunham. Henry. Theo. Boone. Those are the names engraved on the tags, the names on the files stored at our vet’s office, the names attached to records, registrations, and microchips, the names that make a dog administratively identifiable. I love every one of them, and we chose them carefully.

They just no longer capture the whole story.

If someone found Theo wandering and read his collar, they would learn his name, find two phone numbers, and see that there is a reward waiting for whoever brings him home.

It would tell them almost nothing about the dog they had found.

They would not know that Nugget makes his whole body move. They would not know his nose is a Schnoz, or that there is a high-five involved with the right hand placement. They would have no way of knowing why the tail behind him has its own name, or why blaming Vern occasionally absolves the rest of the animal’s misconduct. They would not know that Jerry is the version of Theo we imagine showing up to high school with a fake ID, facial hair, a mullet, cutoff sleeves, and a late-seventies Firebird with the T-tops off and REO Speedwagon blaring.

All they would know is Theo.

My wife said “Gus-Gus” the other day. I do not remember what we were talking about or why it came up. I only remember hearing the name and feeling a lump begin to migrate north into my throat. Gus is what the paperwork said, but Gus-Gus belonged to everyone who knew and loved him.

Perhaps that is why one perfectly good name eventually becomes insufficient. We choose a dog’s name before we know almost anything about them. Then they come home and spend years becoming somebody, and the language scrambles to keep up.

One name belongs to the puppy they were. One comes from the field. One comes from something ridiculous they once did that nobody forgot. One belongs only to my wife, another somehow only to me, and a few that would never be shouted across public ground under any circumstances.

A dog comes home with one name and spends the rest of his life adding chapters to it.

The collar gets the title.

The house writes the chapters.

For now, Boone’s book remains relatively short. Boone. Peanut. Boonie-Butt. Boonesford. A few others are beginning to circle.

He is still new here, and we barely know what to call him.

Give us time.

Until the next cast...

Stay steady, trust the dog, and chase the quiet pull.

God bless,

Abram

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Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The man he thinks I am, apparently, is one with a face covered in pie. Dunham enjoying the Toilet Bowl, one of the few days he ever came to work with me.

One of the few times Dunham ever came to work with me, he spent the day watching me lead an organizational fun day.

I was still in the Army then, a senior leader at a school in Baltimore, and we had organized a daylong event called the Toilet Bowl. It was a joint-service competition with more than a dozen sports, each with its own tournament, culminating in a Land and Air versus Sea Services flag football game with a halftime pie-eating contest.

Everything seemed simple while the effort lived on a planning calendar and inside In-Progress Review meetings in the months and weeks leading up to kickoff. Once hundreds of people arrived and the starting gun finally went off, things became considerably less so.

Kickball, basketball, soccer, CrossFit, disc golf, dodgeball, cornhole, and a long list of other events were taking place at venues scattered across the installation. A cookout sat near the center of everything while trivia, raffles, water-balloon fights, and the various competitions contributed points toward a cumulative service score somebody had to keep. Most of my day consisted of walking from one place to another while someone briefed me on how the portion they were responsible for was going.

Dunham was there because we were leaving for Montana the moment the trophy presentation ended.

My wife had driven him and Henry north to Richmond the night before, met me halfway, and handed them over so I would not have to make the long detour through North Carolina before pointing the truck west. Henry was still relatively new to us then and not ready for a large, loud crowd, so he spent the day comfortably behind a fan in his crate. Dunham, being the social butterfly he has always been, joined the festivities and went everywhere with me.

The wirehaired Vizsla with an old soul has always loved people without ever appearing to need their approval.

He can sit beside me at a restaurant while strangers approach one after another, happily accepting every friendly hand on his head and every good boy with the comfort of somebody who has spent his whole life making public appearances. The Toilet Bowl was no different. I walked the grounds with him beside me, and he collected affection from whoever happened to notice the rust-colored wirehair attached to the man carrying the clipboard and radio.

Throughout the morning, people approached with updates.

Most were routine. Events were happening on schedule. Services were competing for bragging rights. People were enjoying themselves. A row of grills was turning out enough food to feed more than five hundred people.

Then someone walked over with an update that placed a small bit of heat beneath my ribs and sent it climbing toward my neck.

Something had gone wrong.

A few moments later, word came that someone had broken an ankle playing basketball, and the vehicle we had identified to transport somebody to the hospital had, at that exact moment, been sent to the grocery store for more hot dog buns.

I could feel the frustration rising before I had decided what to do with it.

And then I looked down.

Dunham was sitting against my leg, enjoying every minute of whatever strange field trip I had brought him on.

He had known me for eight years by then, but he had never known this version of me. He knew the man who came through the door at night, loaded the truck before sunrise, threw the ball until he decided the game was over, and always made a place for him to lie down nearby. Now, for the first time, my dog was at work, watching the man he had always known operate inside a part of life he had never seen.

One thought crossed my mind with unusual clarity: Be the person he thinks you are.

It is a familiar sentiment now. Some version of the saying has been printed on shirts, coffee mugs, signs, and enough bumper stickers that repetition has created a cliche from what was once a pretty good idea.

But there is nothing particularly sentimental about it when someone is standing in front of you with a problem, irritation is climbing into your throat, and your dog is sitting on your boot.

I do not believe Dunham was conducting a character assessment that afternoon. He was not looking up and grading my patience, restraint, leadership, or emotional intelligence. More than likely, he was wondering when somebody would drop a burger or some chips.

Dogs are less complicated than many of the stories we tell about them.

But I am certain of this: they are paying attention.

Always.

They are lifelong students of The Person.

They learn the cadence of our feet entering a room. They learn the difference between the hurried reach of a hand and the slow one coming to scratch behind an ear. They learn the pitches and changing inflections of a voice associated with something good, a correction, or something they should reconsider doing immediately. They learn who comes when they are frightened and who sits with them when they hurt. They learn which person in the house has less patience and which one is more likely to share something from the cutting board. They know which bag means a trip, which gear means bird camp, which clothes mean the field, and which ones mean I am leaving for work.

Eventually, enough ordinary moments accumulate into expectation.

That is the part that interests me most.

Because dogs do not know the full story of the people they trust. They do not know about the doubts carried into the house, the decisions regretted afterward, the seasons of life that ended in disappointment, or the private suspicion that we have occasionally been something less than what we hoped to be.

A dog sees only what reaches them, and over enough years, that partial record becomes the person they know.

Each of my dogs seems to require a slightly different version of that man.

Theo, our three-year-old wirehair, is the least socially confident dog in the house. At home he is happy, ridiculous, and endlessly goofy. Take him somewhere unfamiliar and uncertainty arrives abruptly. When something frightens him, he cowers and looks for me. Even inside a home he has no reason to fear, he sometimes puts himself into his crate and waits there until I come to tell him everything is fine. I can crouch at the opening, soften my voice, tell him he is a good boy, and watch the worry leave his body. He comes out wiggling from one end to the other, relieved by information I cannot prove he understands beyond the tone in which it was delivered. A raised voice, even one that has nothing to do with him, can shake his little world.

So with Theo, I want to be safe.

Henry needs something else.

The first two years of his life taught him reasons not to trust people, particularly certain men, and when he came home with us we inherited the responsibility of showing him what life could be when love was offered freely. That required patience, consistency, and a light hand because anything heavier would have undone the very thing we were trying to build. Five years later, the dog who once carried fear into ordinary encounters now accepts strangers with gentleness and ranges a thousand yards across prairie knowing I will still be there when he looks back.

So with Henry, I want to be dependable.

Boone is still a puppy, convinced the world was constructed for his personal investigation. He is not repairing old trust. He is building his first understanding of it. He needs boundaries, guidance, and apparently limitless forgiveness when his enthusiasm outruns his judgment. Mostly, he needs room to keep becoming whatever is already starting to take shape in him.

So with Boone, I want to be worth following.

And Dunham, at thirteen, asks for very little now. A hand on his head. Cream cheese that appears with suspicious regularity after dinner. A place to sleep beside me. Someone willing to listen when the old man decides the household schedule has drifted beyond acceptable tolerances.

With him, I want to be gentle.

And now, more than I used to understand, present.

None of them needs me to be impressive.

That is where the bumper sticker gets the message slightly wrong while otherwise getting something important right.

I have no desire to be worshiped by anything on four legs. Their joy when I come through the door is one of the best parts of my day, but I do not confuse it with evidence of greatness. I do not need them following me from room to room because being needed makes me feel important.

I simply want them to know I am their person.

There is an enormous responsibility inside that small sentence.

When a dog comes into our home, I do not think of his trust as something I am entitled to keep just because he lives there. It becomes one more thing placed in my care.

From the beginning, I am responsible for the environment he enters. For what he is exposed to and how he learns to carry himself around people. For what goes into his bowl. For the medical decisions he cannot make. For where we travel, what conditions I put him into, when I ask more of him, and when I decide he has had enough.

Most of those decisions are completely invisible to the dog.

For years, my dogs knew only that I came home around the same time each afternoon. They had no idea I worked in an office where staying late sometimes carried its own strange currency, even after the day’s required work was finished. The hour you left could become a measure of how committed you were to the mission. I never understood it. If the mission needed me, I stayed. No question. If the work could wait until tomorrow, I went home. My wife often worked later than I did, and the dogs were waiting. My boss disliked the consistency with which I made that choice, and I am confident it cost me in the near-term trajectory of my career. I did not care.

The dogs never saw an eval. They did not understand organizational culture, perceptions of commitment, or professional trajectories. They knew that sometime late in the afternoon, the door opened and I stepped through it.

To me, that was success.

Last October in North Dakota, a friend who lives there told me about a field not far from his home. He knew the landowner, made the arrangements, and promised the place was loaded with pheasants. He was right. I could hear birds crowing from different parts of the field before I ever opened a truck door. But when I walked toward the edge to scope out the grounds, I found foxtail, and lots of it.

Farther in, the foreground fell away into a river bottom choked with thorns, vines, and enough nasty cover that I stopped imagining pheasants flushing from it and started imagining what a veterinarian might eventually have to dig out of a paw, ear, or nose.

The birds were there. So were three dogs sitting in my truck who would have gone straight into all of it if I had opened the door.

I walked back, climbed into the driver’s seat, looked at the boys and said, “No dice,” and drove away without a second thought. They will never know I passed a field full of pheasants because of them. That is the thing about being responsible for another life. Some of the most important ways we love it happen entirely outside its awareness.

Responsibility does not make a person infallible, though.

Sometimes it only makes the failures hurt more, and last longer.

Several years ago, on my first day working from home after retiring from the Army, I had a ninety-minute Zoom call and needed the dogs to be occupied.

The day before, I went to our local farm store and bought Dunham a large bone, congratulating myself on the elegance of the solution. The size of the thing would keep him busy for hours. I could take the meeting without a dog interrupting because he had decided it was time to play fetch.

When the call ended, I walked out and found half the bone gone and sharp fragments scattered across the floor.

By that night, Dunham was crying while trying to relieve himself.

He spent the next five days at NC State’s veterinary hospital while doctors removed pieces from his stomach and digestive tract. I made the forty-five-minute drive every day and sat on the floor beside his kennel. I would put my hand through the door, and even through heavy sedation his eyes would find me. Then he would slowly crawl toward the door, get as close as he could, lie down, and let me pet him until somebody told me it was time to leave.

I had given him the bone.

That is the part that still stings.

The intention had been harmless. Affectionate, even. I bought my dog something I thought he would enjoy, and he accepted it because things handed to him by me had always been things he was allowed to have. Inside that completely ordinary exchange sat years of trust. And without meaning to, I made the wrong decision for him, and he could have died from it.

He recovered, and as far as I can tell, Dunham has never once thought about that bone again.

But, I have.

Maybe that is part of being worthy of somebody else’s trust. Not never failing it, because that standard does not exist. Remembering the failures long enough to make sure they change something afterward.

I am far more careful now about what goes into a dog’s mouth than I was in January 2023. When one of them moves strangely, stops eating, or gives me any real reason for concern, I would rather be the person explaining to a vet why I may have overreacted than the man later trying to reason with himself about why he waited too long.

I should also confess that the trust between us does not run in only one direction.

Behind our detached garage, the terrain drops steeply into the woods across a slope covered with large rocks placed there to control erosion. One afternoon Dunham’s soccer ball got away from him, rolled down the concrete walkway beside the garage, bounced through the rocks, and finally came to rest against a tree maybe a hundred feet below us.

I walked Dunham to the edge and pointed.

“Go get the ball.”

He stood there looking at me.

I told him again.

Nothing.

This is a dog who, nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, would have been halfway down the hill before I finished the sentence. I reached down for a rock to toss toward the ball, one of those old signals I have used forever to show him where I want him to go.

That is when I saw the copperhead.

It was coiled in the rocks less than two feet from where my hand was headed, watching both of us. I grabbed Dunham by the collar and backed us away.

I have no idea whether he smelled the snake, sensed it somehow, or simply decided for once in his life that the errand was beneath him. I know only that I gave a command twice, and the dog I trust more than any dog I have ever known looked at me as though I had lost my mind and refused.

His refusal is also probably why my hand never reached that rock, and thank God, avoided being bitten.

So no, he does not think I am infallible. He watched me point at a spot and tell him to fetch, all while a copperhead patiently waited for what we would do next.

Whatever runs between a human and their dogs, it is not worship in either direction. It is attention. He pays it to me and I pay it to him, and on our best days, one of us catches what the other one missed.

My faith has given me language for many qualities I spent much of my life learning the harder way.

Patience. Forgiveness. Faithfulness. The discipline to answer anger with something other than anger.

I will not claim that every wagging tail carries a theological lesson, and I am not going to argue that God gave humanity dogs as a living example of Scripture. Although, there are evenings when the thought does not seem far-fetched at all. I am often skeptical to call it a coincidence they are called “man’s best friend,” when they are so often our best teachers on how to live a proper, good life.

I know this much: The virtues my faith asks me to practice are demonstrated daily in my own home by creatures who have no idea they are teaching anything.

Maybe that is precisely why they have become such good teachers.

And maybe that is why looking down at Dunham in the middle of the Toilet Bowl mattered.

He had no idea what leadership was. He did not understand rank, evaluations, organizational culture, or the problem someone was standing there explaining to me.

He knew only the man at the other end of the leash.

Looking down at him did not make me decide what sort of character I wanted to display that afternoon. It simply reminded me that character was already being displayed, whether I was thinking about it or not.

Dunham knew me through what I did. Not what I said about myself. Not what was written on an eval. Not whatever description of my leadership I might have offered if someone asked.

He knew the accumulation of actions.

And standing there with him beside me, that tired bumper-sticker slogan suddenly felt less like a compliment and more like a reminder. If I wanted to be the man I hoped he already knew, my actions needed to keep agreeing with the story I had spent eight years telling him.

This past weekend, halfway through recording material for an upcoming podcast episode, I stopped for lunch. When I finished, I headed back upstairs toward the room where I record. Theo followed me.

There is a pet gate at the top of the stairs because, without it, he and Dunham will sit outside the bedroom door and pound on it like a landlord, and the microphone is sensitive enough to capture their opinions about being excluded from the operation.

Theo climbed the stairs ahead of me and stopped at the gate. I opened it. He waited, tail going. Then I stepped through and closed it between us. His tail kept moving, but everything else on his face asked the obvious question. Why can’t I come? I tried explaining that I was going upstairs to talk for another hour about dogs and trust.

This did not improve the situation.

Theo had no idea what I was doing on the other side of that gate. He did not know I was spending hours talking about something partly revealed by the way he looks at me.

He only knew that I was leaving him downstairs. And from everything his life with me had taught him so far, he apparently believed I would eventually come back. When I finished recording, I opened the bedroom door and walked toward the stairs. Theo was lying at the bottom.

Waiting.

I came through the gate, and that was enough for him.

For most of my life, I heard be the man your dog thinks you are as an instruction to become some better version of myself. More patient. More loving. More loyal. Somehow worthy of the impossible opinion we like to imagine our dogs hold of us.

I think I understand it differently now.

My dogs do not need me to become a hero.

They need the man their lives have taught them to expect. The one who comes home when he can. The one who notices when something hurts. The one who learns after getting it wrong. The one who leaves a field full of pheasants untouched because the dogs waiting in the truck matter more than the birds inside it. The one whose hand means safety instead of fear.

Not perfection. Not sainthood. Just thousands of ordinary decisions made often enough that another living thing begins to trust what will happen next.

And once you realize a dog has built that kind of certainty from the way you live, it becomes difficult not to wonder what everybody else around you has been learning from the same life.

Maybe character is not the person we say we are.

Maybe it is the person those who know us best have learned to expect.

I want Henry, Theo, and Boone to be right about me. I want Dunham, after thirteen years of collecting evidence, to have been right all along. And I suppose that is the real responsibility now.

Not becoming the man they think I am someday down the road.

Rather, giving them another reason tomorrow to believe I already am.

Until the next cast...

Stay steady, trust the dog, and chase the quiet pull.

God bless,

Abram

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The rubber ducky has officially been removed from active duty.

Last week taught me something about the difference between momentum and simply refusing to stop moving.

The weekend before the audio launch, I learned releasing ten narrated essays at once was a considerably larger undertaking than I had convinced myself it would be. Friday night disappeared into its production. Saturday morning went the same way until it was time for us to leave for a family event at my wife’s company. Sunday afternoon’s work bled into Sunday evening, then Sunday night, and by 5:45 Monday morning I finally clicked publish on the last episode.

I never went to bed.

There was enough time left to shower, get dressed, and leave for work.

Monday night I slept. Tuesday brought the realization that Wednesday morning was still coming whether the person responsible for publishing The Toys They Never Asked For was prepared for it or not. So Tuesday night disappeared into the morning without sleep as well. Thursday was another all-nighter finishing The Long Road West. By Friday, I was operating mostly off of coffee, stubbornness, and deadline anxiety that remained available after seemingly everything in my brain had turned into mashed potatoes.

These deadlines, I should point out, belong entirely to me. Nobody has required Chasing the Quiet Pull to publish Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Nobody demanded ten audio episodes arrive on the same morning. There is no editor calling at midnight, no publisher waiting for copy, and no angry mob gathering outside the house because an essay has not been formatted.

I built the schedule. Which means I am also responsible for learning how to live inside it.

This weekend, the bill came due and the exhaustion I had postponed all week finally found me.

I spent much of Sunday trying to put this coming week into a position where it will look nothing like the one before it. That matters because I want this publication to keep leaning forward, and… I also want to be awake enough to enjoy where it is going.

There is probably a larger lesson buried in there somewhere about the difference between building something and allowing the thing you are building to consume every available hour. I am not sure I have learned it yet. What I do know is that the work will be better if the person doing it occasionally sleeps.

Fortunately, life around our home provided some considerably less philosophical developments, a lot more laughs, and I am now prepared to make a public admission that will please my wife enormously:

She was right about the pool.

All summer she has been building a saltwater stock-tank pool overlooking part of our property. When she first floated the idea (pun intended), I was skeptical. When the stone started arriving and we began, I became even less certain that the amount of effort being invested would eventually produce something worthwhile.

Then North Carolina became brutally hot, which removed me from much of the physical labor altogether and left her carrying the project forward. She’s a trooper, and the household MVP.

Eventually the water arrived. The pump went in. The salt followed. Three days later, we climbed into a surprisingly warm stock tank, looked across our property, and discovered that the thing I had questioned for most of the summer was, in fact, wonderful. We are going to enjoy the heck out of it.

I would prefer that nobody tell her I wrote that.

Last week I also mentioned that the yellow rubber-duck thermometer floating in the pool was under siege, and Dunham and Theo's ongoing effort to figure out how to steal it became their newfound obsession.

The duck lasted four days.

One morning, Dunham came walking into the house carrying it, and the duck has not floated correctly since; it currently resides on the kitchen counter, removed from active duty.

Rubber ducky: 0 Bird dogs: 1

The other good news from the week came from the veterinarian.

Theo was the final dog through our group of annual appointments, which completed the yearly round for all four boys. Everyone came back in exceptional health, at excellent body weight, with no new concerns in their bloodwork or examinations.

Henry, Theo, and Boone have been cleared for bird season. Dunham has been cleared to continue enjoying retirement without any new medications, follow-up appointments, or interventions. There was no reason for me to expect anything different. They are active, eating well, moving well, and behaving exactly like themselves. Still, there is a relief that comes when bloodwork returns and confirms what the eyes have been hoping is true.

The annual blood testing I request is probably overkill, and I am comfortable admitting that. I like having another data point on the timeline. I like knowing whether something has changed from the year before, even when a change has not yet made itself visible. If nothing has changed, I get another year’s worth of peace of mind. There are worse things to spend money on.

And with those clean reports behind us, October has begun feeling considerably less theoretical.

The fall plans are beginning to take shape. The route is set, and so is the calendar.

I will leave North Carolina October 14th, and reach North Dakota the night of the 15th. Then, Friday morning, October 16th, we will wake up in bird country. If everything goes according to plan, we will be in the grass by sunrise.

Around lunchtime we will move to camp and spend the afternoon turning a pile of canvas, poles, gear, food, dog beds, coolers, and assorted equipment into the place we will call home for more than a week. If camp comes together quickly enough, I hope we can get back into the grass during golden hour that first day.

Starting that Saturday morning, the real rhythm begins: First light prep. Move. Hunt. Lunch. Hunt. Move. Hunt. Catch a sunset. Move back to camp. Feed dogs. Pour bourbon. Rest. Sleep. Repeat again.

For that week, the clock will not matter mostly because daylight does the work of telling us what time it is, and how much of it we have left for whatever is next.

On October 24, camp comes down and the truck will continue west into Montana. We will hunt near the Canadian border for another six days before beginning the long trip back to North Carolina, hopefully reaching home around November 1. I am excited to say the least.

But one thing feels different about this year’s trip.

Chasing the Quiet Pull is coming too.

Not just because I will be carrying a camera, notebook, recorder, and enough electronic equipment to make bird camp considerably less disconnected than it once was. The publication has been traveling toward October for months. You have already seen the maps come out. You have read about the packing lists, the waiting, the dogs, the routes west, the longing for another healthy season, and the reasons I begin counting days like it is Christmas while summer is still holding North Carolina hostage.

Soon, all of that preparation becomes the trip itself. I hope the journey from concept to planning to packing to traveling and finally walking those plains becomes something you get to experience alongside us through the essays, photographs, Notes, and audio.

At the end of every narrated essay, I say, “thank you for walking with us.”

In October, I hope those words will mean a little more.

Here is what’s on point this week:

Wednesday, August 26, 7:00 AM (free): “The Man He Thinks I Am”

There is a familiar saying about trying to become the person your dog thinks you are. It has been printed on enough signs, shirts, mugs, and bumper stickers that whatever truth it once carried can be easy to overlook.

Wednesday’s essay tries to get underneath it.

Years ago, Dunham spent a day with me at work while I was still serving in the Army. He had known me for eight years by then, but he had never watched me lead people, solve problems, absorb frustration, or handle the parts of my life that existed outside our home and the field. At several moments that day, I found myself looking down at the dog beside my leg and thinking the same thing: Be the person he thinks you are.

The essay that grew from that memory is not really about trying to become impressive enough for a dog. It is about the quiet responsibility created when another living thing learns to trust who you are.

Dogs never know the complete record of the people they depend upon. They know only what reaches them, the hand that comforts them, the person who comes home, the decision made on their behalf, the response when something goes wrong, and the thousand ordinary moments from which trust is eventually built.

Wednesday is about what we owe that trust, what happens when we fail it, and whether character is sometimes revealed by the creatures who simply expect us to remain who we have taught them we are.

Friday, August 28, 7:00 AM (free): “The Names We Never Put on the Collar”

According to his collar, our three-year-old Wirehaired Vizsla is named Theo.

This is technically correct. It is also an incomplete accounting of the situation. Inside our household, Theo may also be Nugget, Knucklehead, Jerry, Schnoz, Schnozoldoodle, or Theo Ona-mano-peo.

His tail is named Vern.

Friday is considerably less serious than Wednesday. It is about what happens after we spend weeks choosing the perfect name for a dog, bring him home, get to know him, and then apparently decide that one perfectly good name is nowhere near enough.

Dunham becomes Biscuit and Urlacher. Henry briefly suffered the unfortunate nickname Pocket Rocket until my wife explained something to me that I really wish I had known before saying it aloud around strangers. Gus spent part of his life answering to Gus-Gus. Boone’s collection is only beginning.

The official names tell us who the dogs are.

The ridiculous ones tend to tell the stories of what happened after they became family.

Chasing the Quiet Pull Audio

Thursday, August 27 (free): “The Long Road West”

Friday’s road essay is headed into your ears.

Thirty-seven saved pins. A route Google Maps continually tries to correct. Breakfast beside a little lake in southern Ohio. A thunderstorm outside Watertown that accidentally revealed we were firmly standing inside bird country. Three dogs whose needs add hours to an already long trek.

The Long Road West is about why the quickest way to North Dakota has never been the way I drive to get there.

If everything about the trip is built around the dogs once we arrive, why should the road be any different?

Sunday, August 30 (free): “A Setter’s Way”

Sunday goes back into the library for Henry.

A Setter’s Way is about the particular dog underneath all that black-and-white field work, the Llewellin Setter who came into our home carrying a past that had taught him reasons to distrust people and slowly became one of the gentlest, most independent, and most extraordinary dogs I have ever followed through grass.

If you have met Henry only through recent essays and Notes, Sunday is a good place to get properly introduced.

Where to find Chasing the Quiet Pull

The written essays will always remain the heart of this publication. New writing arrives here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

If you are new and working your way through the library, Start Here is the easiest place to find a handful of stories that show the different sides of what CTQP has become.

The narrated essays live alongside the writing at The Essays, Read Aloud, and you can also listen wherever you already find your podcasts:

Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Amazon Music/Audible · YouTube · Pocket Casts · Overcast

And if you want the smaller moments between publication mornings, photographs from the dogs and the field, short stories that never become full essays, and whatever piece of nonsense happened around the house that day, Substack Notes has increasingly been where those live.

You can also find Chasing the Quiet Pull on:

Instagram · Facebook · YouTube · LinkedIn

If something here has meant something to you, the kindest thing you can do for this publication is hand it to somebody else.

That is still how this place grows. One reader finds something familiar in a story and passes it to another.

Thank you for continuing to do that, and thank you for walking with us.

Until the next cast….

Stay steady, trust the dog, and chase the quiet pull.

God bless,
Abram

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Hour Before First Light”

A stop near Watertown, South Dakota, found only because the dogs needed somewhere to run.

Google Maps and I are currently in a disagreement.

According to the blue line glowing on the monitor in front of me, there is a perfectly reasonable way to get from central North Carolina to north-central North Dakota. It takes me through Charleston, Dayton, Indianapolis, then north toward Chicago, across Wisconsin, past Minneapolis, through St. Cloud, into Fargo, and west from there. The computer has considered distance, interstate speeds, traffic, construction, and whatever else gets fed into the navigational calculus behind the number estimating when I should arrive.

It is probably right about the fastest way.

I am still not taking it.

On the left monitor of my desk, Google Maps sits partially over an OnX map of the country between home and North Dakota. On the other screen are tabs for The Dyrt, iOverlander, and Hipcamp, along with a running page of notes. I have spent enough evenings staring at some version of this arrangement that the route itself is no longer much of a question. I know the roads I prefer. I know the cities I want to avoid.

What changes are the stops.

Pulling a trailer changes how far I can go between fuel stops. Weather can eliminate sections of the route I intend to travel. A closed access road or a crowded parking area can send me to Plan B. But the long arc of the route stays remarkably consistent because, of all the ways I have found to reach the Northern Plains, this one gives the dogs the most opportunities to get out of the truck and actually move.

Google Maps is solving for the fastest arrival.

I am trying to make sure three bird dogs arrive there ready to be bird dogs.

That difference adds roughly three hours to my trip before I begin accounting for the stops themselves.

Instead of turning north after Indianapolis and threading my way through Chicago, Madison, Eau Claire, Minneapolis, and St. Cloud, I stay south and west. I cross Illinois, pick up Interstate 80 near Davenport, follow it across Iowa, then turn north near Omaha and take Interstate 29 through Sioux City and Sioux Falls toward Fargo. It is longer on paper, but it keeps me out of several major cities while pulling a trailer and, more importantly, carries me through country scattered with wildlife areas, state ground, public lakes, underdeveloped industrial parks, and other pieces of open space where the dogs can spend an hour remembering that their legs were made for something more than the back of a truck.

That matters more to me than the hours.

When I am pulling the trailer, the truck gives me roughly 225 to 250 miles before I begin thinking seriously about fuel. Years ago, I started dividing the drive into those increments, marking the general areas where the tank and I would eventually agree it was time to stop. Then I added another rule: every other fuel stop needed to be more than fuel. It needed to be near a place where the dogs could get out, stretch, run, eat, drink, relieve themselves, and spend enough time outside that climbing back into the truck did not feel like another jail sentence being handed down.

That rule eventually changed the entire map.

I now have a folder saved in Google Maps called Rest Areas for Dogs. There are thirty-seven pins in it. Zoom far enough out and the individual markers begin to bleed together, forming a second route beneath the interstate system, a private map of the country built almost entirely around places many travelers have no reason to notice.

Some are wildlife management areas. Some are small public lakes. Some are industrial developments that appear to have been planned with more optimism than tenants and now end in wide, mowed fields without much traffic. Every stop gets researched. Public-land regulations checked. Roads studied. Satellite imagery gets enlarged, then I switch to street view to see whether a turnaround will accommodate the truck and trailer, if homes sit nearby, are the fields actually open, and whether another place twenty minutes down the road ought to become Plan B.

I know a surprising amount about places I have absolutely no reason to know anything about.

There is a little lake near Rio Grande, Ohio, for example. Years ago, I could not have invented a reason to leave the highway at that particular exit, drive nearly fifteen minutes along a winding road, and disappear into a small state wildlife area. There is no family waiting there, no famous restaurant, no landmark I had hoped to visit. There is just a lake and, east of the boat ramp, an old circle drive that once served a primitive camping area. It is mowed, quiet, removed from traffic, and always empty.

Which makes it perfect.

If everything goes according to plan this October, I will leave home sometime around two in the morning on a Wednesday. The roads through North Carolina and Virginia will still be dark and mostly empty. The dogs will settle immediately because they are extraordinarily good travelers, and for the first several hours there may be music, a podcast, an audiobook, or nothing at all. I like the silence before the world wakes up, when few headlights accompany me along the white lines, the truck hums through the mountains, and my only real obligation is watching carefully for deer along the shoulder.

There will be fuel stops along the way, but the Ohio lake will be the first real stop. By then we will have been traveling for roughly six hours. I will turn down that familiar road, pull into the empty loop, lower the tailgate, put collars on the dogs, and let them out.

Bird dogs, after several hours in a vehicle, do not leave the truck politely.

They eject.

Within seconds, the grass around the truck will have dogs moving through it in several directions, stopping briefly to take care of the most urgent business before widening their circles. Henry will wear his GPS collar because, given enough space, he has always considered whatever space is available more of a suggestion than a boundary. Theo and Boone will disappear into whatever interests them nearby while I start pulling food and water from the truck, set their bowls down, and let them enjoy breakfast.

Then I feed myself. A camp stove comes out. Water goes to boil. A freeze-dried breakfast involving eggs, potatoes, and bacon gets reconstituted, and to make my pallet happy, I usually make sausage gravy to pour over it. A French press goes to work and replaces the coffee that disappeared somewhere in Virginia.

Breakfast somewhere in southern Ohio along the road west.

For the better part of an hour, that is the whole deal. The dogs eat. I eat. They wander. Everyone drinks and stretches. I wash the bowls and dishes from a six-gallon water container carried specifically for these stops. Eventually everything disappears back into its assigned box, the collars come off, the dogs load, the tailgate closes, and we return to the highway.

By the standards of modern travel, we have just lost an hour and a half.

I have come to believe we gained time.

I did not always travel this way. Years ago, a dog stop was more likely to happen at a rest area or truck stop. I would find a strip of grass, put the dogs on leashes, let them relieve themselves, load them again, and keep going. It was efficient. It was also a poor imitation of what they actually needed. A leash around the edge of a parking lot may empty a bladder, but it does almost nothing for the body attached to it.

These are dogs built to move across open country. Their normal work involves running fields, climbing draws, searching cover, changing directions with the wind, and spending hours using bodies designed for considerably more than walking twenty yards beside parked semitrucks. Give them forty-five minutes on open ground and something changes. They stretch. They investigate. Their minds work again. Equally important, when they return to the truck, they settle almost immediately and sleep through the next leg.

There was another reason I began avoiding the obvious places.

On some early trips, the dogs arrived at camp with stomach problems after using the same little patches of ground visited by hundreds of traveling dogs before them. Whether the rest areas were responsible every time is impossible to know, but I stopped seeing much value in testing the theory. If I can give them open space away from the traffic, noise, waste, and commotion of a highway rest area, I will.

So the pins accumulated. A dead-end road near Dayton. A wildlife area outside Farmer City, Illinois. A quiet piece of public land near Cedar Rapids. Another outside Onawa, Iowa. A stop near Watertown, South Dakota. What once looked like blank space between cities began acquiring names and memories.

By late afternoon, a stop outside Farmer City usually becomes another reset. The dogs get dinner while I make mine. They run while I stretch my hips, back, and legs and try to persuade my own body that sitting behind a steering wheel all day was not an act of hostility against it. Then everything gets packed again and we return to the road with food in my stomach, water in one cupholder, fresh coffee in the other, and three dogs asleep around me.

That rhythm is how I think about the drive now. Not as one enormous block of twenty-some hours separating my house from North Dakota, but as a series of legs. Home to Ohio. Ohio through Indianapolis. Illinois to Iowa. Iowa north toward Watertown. Fargo to the final turn toward camp.

Years in the Army probably have something to do with the way I see them as phase lines, small marks showing that one part of the thing we are doing has been achieved and the next has begun. The Army also left me with an enduring suspicion of any plan containing only a Plan A, which is why nearly every area that has a pin dropped onto it, has an alternate waiting nearby.

Sometimes the alternative becomes better than the original.

Last year, a thunderstorm disrupted the place I intended to use south of Watertown. Rather than force the issue, I kept driving toward my backup. When I stopped for fuel near town, I noticed open country in the distance, pulled up OnX on my phone, and saw public ground wrapped around water.

It looked better than the backup.

So we went.

The place opened into a picturesque prairie scene almost too beautiful to be real. It was also the type of location where it nearly made this upland hunter forget he was only looking for somewhere to let the dogs out. A sizable prairie pothole filled the middle. Rich, thick golden grass covered the hills that rolled off in every direction around it. There was a boat ramp, picnic tables and bathrooms, a quiet loop road, and most importantly, nobody there.

I let the dogs out and grabbed my phone to photograph the place.

Then Henry stopped.

The setter stood at the edge of the road, rigid and looking into the grass. When I walked toward him, several pheasants flushed from their hiding spot with a cackling burst of copper and emerald, tearing the quiet golden hour apart. Not long after, Dunham found another group of birds on the other side of the truck.

We had spent the day driving toward bird country and, entirely by accident, had apparently stopped in it.

The dogs were thrilled. So was I.

I saved the pin under a new name: Plan A From Now On.

Had the storm not changed the schedule, I would never have seen that place. Had I been traveling without dogs, I would have driven past the exit without knowing there was anything there to miss. The same is true of lakes and old recreation areas in southern Ohio, empty industrial roads in Indiana, wildlife ground in Illinois, and river bottoms in Iowa. None of them are the place I am trying to reach, yet the dogs have made them part of the country I know because caring for them keeps forcing me to stop long enough for those places to become more than just the miles in between.

Eventually, after roughly eighteen hours of traveling on the first day, I reach the place where I have selected for us to camp for the night. I use the word sleep generously. The bed of my truck has a drawer system beneath the cap, leaving around thirty inches between the platform and ceiling. The bed is about five feet eight inches long. I am six feet three inches tall. Geometry has become part of my bedtime routine, sleeping diagonally on an air mattress, leaving the dogs to negotiate for whatever real estate remains.

“It is not glamorous, but it works.” Sums it up perfectly.

It is not glamorous, but it works.

I would rather sleep the night away on a quiet piece of public land than wrestle three dogs through a hotel where every closing door and hallway conversation is an event they feel the need to address. More than practicality, though, truck camping simply fits the trip. We are headed toward weeks where life will take place inside a canvas tent. Crawling from the truck beneath a dark sky, brushing my teeth beside the tailgate, making coffee while the dogs move through unfamiliar grass, and packing the whole operation again feels like part of the migration west. A hotel just doesn’t feel right, no matter how great the amenities are.

Experience over time has also changed my definition of making good time.

There was a period when making good time meant exactly what it sounds like: beat the ETA. Keep moving. Stretch the fuel. Do everything needed in one stop. Push another hundred miles if you can.

I have learned from all those things by doing them badly enough through the years.

Years ago, driving home from North Dakota, I tried to force a long day beyond the point where responsibility ended. Fog settled south of Indianapolis. I kept telling myself I could reach Lexington. My speed dropped, my eyes began burning, and eventually I started seeing double. The fog thickened until the shoulder itself became difficult to find, and somewhere inside the white wall I saw the faint blue glow of a Bud Light sign.

I turned toward it because it was the only landmark I could see.

The gas station was closed, but the parking lot was open. I pulled in, shut down the truck, let the dogs out, climbed back inside, and slept. When I woke several hours later, the station was doing business around me and my truck and trailer were sitting off to the side like a mud covered exhibit someone had installed during the night.

Nothing about the miles I forced myself to drive was worth what it took to gain.

Making good time means something different to me now.

It is less about how quickly the truck travels toward our destination and more about whether we use the time well enough to arrive ready for what we came to do. The decisions made during three days and two nights of travel do not disappear when we reach North Dakota. They follow us into the first field. If I cut every stop short, the saved time can reappear as restless dogs, stiff bodies, dehydration, stress, or a dog that is not physically ready. If I ignore my own fatigue, that follows me too.

Arriving sooner means very little if the odometer becomes more important than the very reason behind the trip.

So the dogs get their stops. If an hour on a wildlife area means the schedule moves, then the schedule moves. There is no argument, and no compromises when it comes to the dogs.

Everything else about these trips is built around asking these dogs to do what they were made to do. It makes little sense to spend two days asking them to endure my priorities before we arrive and suddenly expect the entire trip to become about theirs.

Perhaps the greatest thing those stops have changed, though, is not the schedule.

It is what I notice.

If I could place the truck, trailer, dogs, and every piece of gear instantly in North Dakota, I would reclaim six days each October. There would be obvious advantages. More hunting. More time at home. Less fuel. Less fatigue.

I would also lose the country between the places.

I would lose the long stretches of quiet with enough uninterrupted time to think thoughts all the way to their endings. I would lose phone calls to people I have not spoken with in too long, made simply because there are hundreds of miles ahead and nothing preventing the conversation. I would lose the future houses and pieces of land I have designed in my head somewhere across the midwest, the shop, the writing room, the place for the dogs, all constructed and reconstructed through hours of windshield time.

I would lose the stretch north of Sioux Falls that I have come to love for no reason other than the way the land looks through the windshield.

And I would lose watching autumn unfold across the country.

When I leave North Carolina in October, much of home will still be green. By the time daylight reaches the higher Appalachian ridges, color begins appearing in the trees. West Virginia and southern Ohio move deeper into it. Indiana and Illinois can be nearing their peak. Iowa carries it farther. By the time I reach North Dakota, much of what was hanging from branches in September has already reached the ground.

In less than three days, I drive through several versions of the same season. I watch fall marching south by traveling north through it.

That will never appear on Google Maps.

Neither will the Ohio lake, or the pheasants outside Watertown, or coffee made on a tailgate while three dogs explore a place I did not know existed until I started rearranging everything because they needed somewhere to run.

The computer only knows that I chose the route it did not recommend, and will attempt to orientate me back onto.

Eventually, sometime late Thursday, Interstate 94 will fall behind us and the truck will turn north onto two-lane roads. After two days at interstate speed, the world outside the windows will slow. The highway hum will disappear. The music may get a little louder, and I will start talking to the dogs because the excitement will be harder to contain.

We’re getting close, boys. We’re almost there.

There will still be a couple of hours ahead, but that turn has always felt like crossing the final phase line.

The major highways are behind us. The country opens. Somewhere ahead is the piece of ground where we will sleep, and beyond that is morning, when the truck gets packed one more time and the dogs finally step into the grass we have spent all those miles moving toward.

By then, Google Maps will have been right about one thing.

There was a faster way to get there.

But everything else about these trips is built around the dogs. Where we hunt. When we stop. What we carry. How we camp. How long we stay. Much of why I go in the first place.

Why would the long road west be any different?

Until the next cast…

Stay steady, trust the dog, and chase the quiet pull.

God bless,

Abram

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Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “October Begins in August”

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Weight of an Empty Collar”

Theo, with his toy of choice, even if the cow was for him.

Somewhere between the time I left the dog-toy aisle and found myself waiting in line to check out, I looked down and realized I might have a problem.

In my cart, next to a bag of bull sticks, there was a green dinosaur, a brown Highland cow, and a rainbow trout. Each one had been picked out with a specific dog in mind. Theo was to receive the cow because its shaggy hair looked suspiciously like him after a day outside in the North Carolina humidity. Boone got the dinosaur because the stuffed toy seemed like a perfect representation of the little velociraptor currently running around our home. And the rainbow trout was for Dunham because, well, it looked cool, and I figured he might appreciate a small replica of a freshwater game fish.

I had selected each one carefully without any of them being there.

There was no toy shortage at home, nor had I received a request for reinforcements.

In fact, sitting beside our fireplace is a large woven basket overflowing with dog toys. Across the living room is an antique oak bucket that looks as though it once spent its life being lowered into a well, also overflowing with dog toys. Between the two are probably thirty stuffed animals, balls, ropes, ducks, pheasants, monkeys, and assorted creatures whose classification falls somewhere between myth and extinction.

There are more under the furniture.

If a tennis ball can physically roll beneath something in our home, there is a better than average chance one is currently beneath it. The couch, chairs, dressers, nightstands, dining-room table, my desk. On Sundays, while doing our weekly house-cleaning chores, we walk through and put everything back where it belongs, an effort whose results usually last until about Tuesday.

The scattering isn’t limited to inside our home either. When the weekend arrives and lawn duties are on the to-do list, I have to make sure the mower has one of those long-handled grabbers used to collect roadside trash so I can pick up dog toys without stopping every fourth or fifth pass.

Apparently, my midlife has reached the point where lawn maintenance requires specialized equipment because our dogs own too many stuffed animals.

And yet, there I stood inside our local pet store with a dinosaur, a cow, and a trout.

That was when the thought hit me.

My childhood love for stuffed animals apparently never stopped.

I only thought it had.

Sometime in the mid-eighties, when I was five or six, my favorite stuffed animal was a Pound Puppy. I loved that thing and carried it with me everywhere until it was eventually replaced by a baseball glove and toy guns. Like most mothers who hold onto pieces of their child’s early years, mine kept it. Eventually, when I was much older, she pulled out the stuffed puppy and handed me a relic of my childhood. That artifact from a version of myself I assumed I had outgrown sometime around the first grade lives somewhere in our home today.

For the next thirty-eight years, I believed my love for stuffed animals was merely child’s play and had ended long ago.

Then, at forty-four years old, I found myself standing in a pet store with three of them staring back at me from inside a shopping cart.

Apparently, I was wrong.

I had simply begun laundering the habit through dogs.

This explains quite a bit, actually.

Years ago, when we lived in Kansas, my wife and I found what could be described as one of the greatest monuments to poor judgment in the history of our dog ownership. It was an enormous stuffed peanut, around three feet long, with a face near the top and absolutely no reasonable purpose for existing.

We loved it and the story of its introduction that we had built.

We stood in the aisle laughing as we imagined what would happen if we brought it home. We pictured Dunham and Gus walking into the living room, seeing this gigantic peanut standing among their toys, stopping dead in their tracks, going into a barking frenzy, and creating a scene that would put us into stitches. If my memory serves correctly, there were even a few snorts mixed between laughs.

We basically directed an entire movie scene as we stood there.

The thing cost several times what a normal dog toy cost.

So, naturally, we bought it.

We snuck the three-foot-long stuffed toy into the house, stood it upright among the other toys while one of us let the dogs outside, and then prepared our phones to record as we waited for the day’s entertainment to begin.

The patio door slid open and both dogs came in. We rushed around them to make sure we had front-row seats to the spectacle about to unfold. Both boys looked at us with perplexity as to what the rush was for. A few moments later, they walked into the living room and stopped.

Gus paused, confused and unsure what he was even looking at. Dunham studied the pile of toys for a moment, walked over, pawed the three-foot peanut onto its side, reached behind it for a duck, and left.

That was it.

No barking. No confrontation. No confusion. No viral-video moment to send to America’s Funniest Home Videos. Dunham simply moved our expensive joke out of the way so he could reach the thing he actually wanted.

Neither dog ever played with the peanut.

We still have it stuffed away somewhere in our detached garage, and I cannot give you a reasonable explanation for why it made the move to North Carolina or how, after twelve years, it is still with us.

This should have taught us something.

It did not.

Over the years, we have continued selecting toys for our dogs with a confidence unsupported by a single speck of evidence that would suggest we actually understand their preferences. We stand in a store and decide that this particular raccoon seems like a Boone toy, that Dunham will certainly appreciate a stuffed fish, and Theo obviously needs something shaped like a monkey.

Then we come home and conduct the distribution ceremony.

Here, Dunham. This trout is for you. He takes it because I have placed it directly into his mouth, drops it, and walks away while watching what the others are getting. Theo, look what we got you, a cow that looks like a mini version of you. Same result. Boone, here is a dinosaur. Nope.

Give the room thirty seconds and whatever order we imagined has collapsed entirely onto itself. Dunham now has the cow, Theo has the dinosaur, and Boone is running through the room with the trout.

Five minutes later, nobody has any of them and Theo has gone into the bedroom to steal one of my flip-flops.

Dogs have been conducting this consumer survey for years. And, this entire time we have simply refused to read the results.

Each of them, in fairness, has his own relationship with toys.

Dunham has always loved them, although his interpretation of what they are for has changed over the years. When he was younger, he had an insatiable appetite for playing fetch with anything that could be tossed a meaningful distance. If the thing had a ball in its name, he loved chasing it down and returning for another throw. More often than not, the game ended with a sore arm long before he was remotely close to calling it quits.

At thirteen, he prefers the canine equivalent of a short passing game. He brings selects a stuffed duck or monkey from the basket, drops it into our lap, backs up several feet, and waits for us to toss it gently toward his mouth. He catches it, takes two steps forward, drops it into our lap, and backs up again.

He will continue this for as long as the other participant is willing to play.

The old man has also long believed stuffed animals make excellent pillows. I have years of photographs of him asleep in hallways, on couches, across floors, while he rests his jaw perfectly on whatever duck or monkey happened to be nearby.

The old man, demonstrating the correct use of a stuffed bison.

But all of those toys compete for a distant second place to his real love.

Dunham has always loved a tennis ball.

Give him access to several at once, and he will fit as many as three into his mouth because he firmly believes allowing another dog to possess one of his prized treasures is truly a failure in resource management.

Henry, meanwhile, views the entire dog-toy category with a high level of contempt.

Henry came to us when he was nearly two, after a young life built around kennels, training sessions, and birds. After years with him, it is obvious toys never made the syllabus. We spent a considerable amount of time believing we would eventually find the one that unlocked something in him.

We have given up on that experiment.

Hand Henry a stuffed animal and he will accept it politely because he is a gentleman. The moment your hand leaves the toy, his mouth does too. It falls to the floor, and the setter quietly walks away.

There is, however, one exception.

An alligator.

Not a stuffed one. A little alligator-shaped dental chew.

Give the other dogs one, and they immediately begin the obvious task of eating it. Give one to Henry and his entire expression changes. His tail starts wagging vigorously, his eyes brighten, and his excitement makes him begin to huff. He takes the alligator from your hand with extraordinary gentleness, trots directly to his crate, places it between his front paws, and settles beside it.

He will stay there for hours with his prized possession.

He does not eat it. He guards it. He rests with it. He occasionally adjusts its position. Because Theo believes he has property rights to everything, we have learned to close Henry’s crate so he can enjoy uninterrupted time with his alligator.

Eventually, however, something changes.

I have never witnessed the moment or understood the decision-making process. There appears to be no argument. No deterioration in the relationship. No visible betrayal. But, at some point, Henry simply looks at the creature he has treasured for the past two hours and decides their time together has reached its natural conclusion.

Then he eats him.

Henry eventually emerges from the crate without explanation for why their love affair ended.

Theo is considerably less complicated.

Theo wants everything.

Toys are not so much possessions to him as they are portable accessories for whatever he happens to be doing. He likes carrying things. He likes collecting things. He likes having something in his mouth while walking through the house. Most importantly, he likes possessing anything another dog might potentially want or currently has.

His strongest preference, however, is not for the hundreds of dollars’ worth of toys we have purchased on his behalf.

The quirky wirehair’s favorite thing are house slippers.

My wife has lost several pairs to this arrangement. Once a set reaches a certain point in its domestic life, she formally surrenders them to the dogs and places them into the toy pile, where they enter a second career far more prestigious than the first.

My flip-flops are equally desirable. If they are not on my feet, I have learned to put them somewhere Theo cannot reach, because a thick, cushiony flip-flop apparently offers something the dog-toy industry has been unable to reproduce.

Boone, our newest focus group, has only strengthened the case against us.

Boone, working through his inheritance.

When he came home, we introduced him to the overflowing baskets of toys accumulated across the lives of the dogs before him. Here, little buddy. Behold your inheritance. He was mildly interested.

Then he found a stick.

Boone approaches sticks with the commitment of a wood chipper. He carries them around the yard, brings them toward the house, and shreds them. If my wife is pulling weeds, he joins the landscaping effort, removing weeds on his own and proudly carrying it around the yard.

We bought stuffed animals for a puppy who apparently prefers yard debris.

There have been exceptions, of course, which is why I cannot declare the entire dog-toy industry fraudulent with a clear conscience.

Gus had his ducks.

When he was a puppy, I once took him into a pet store and let him wander the aisle with me. He reached down and selected a stuffed duck himself. The fake mallard even sounded like a duck call when squeezed. He carried it around the store, making his preference extraordinarily clear. This one, please.

So I bought it.

He loved that duck. Then, several weeks later, he murdered it.

Completely.

A wing in one room, another somewhere else, stuffing spread widely across the floor. Squeaker extracted. The entire scene looked less like play and more like a crime scene.

I assumed something had happened. Perhaps he had been bored. Maybe I had left him alone too long.

So I did the natural thing any reasonable person would do and bought him another identical duck. He loved that one too.

Then, the repeat offender killed it.

We bought another. Same result.

It is embarrassingly apparent how determined I was to learn nothing.

Eventually, the ducks became a subscription service before subscription services were really a thing. My mother would give Gus several for Christmas. Other people bought them for him too. We kept replacements in reserve because everyone understood that whichever duck currently occupied his affection was living on borrowed time.

It became a running joke.

He would carry one around happily for a month or six weeks, and eventually one of us would remark that the duck was nearing its expiration date. Within days, there would be stuffing everywhere. I defend every dollar we spent on those ducks. They were funny. Which may be the answer to this entire thing.

The dogs are not the only ones playing.

I did some back-of-the-napkin math while writing this essay and concluded, across all the years with these dogs, we have probably purchased at least two hundred stuffed toys. At an average of eight dollars each, which may be charitable, we are somewhere around sixteen hundred dollars into an investment portfolio currently scattered between two baskets, the backyard, several pieces of furniture, and one enormous peanut in the garage. Doing the math and its eventual calculation hurt.

And still, I understand exactly how it happened.

I walked into Buc-ee’s for the first time, bought myself a brisket sandwich and some beef jerky, and somehow left with three dog toys. We once bought Dunham a stuffed poop emoji primarily because we thought the photograph would be funny. It was. We bought another toy shaped like a flask with an embroidered patch that said, “ruff nights call for hard licker.” Again, for a photograph that also turned out to be hilarious.

Purchased entirely for this photograph. Worth the $8.99.

The dog-toy companies have figured us out.

Put a ridiculous face on something, give it a squeaker, hang it at eye level, and some idiot like me will stand there imagining how funny his dog will look carrying it through the house. Captain America. Spider-Man. A rainbow trout. A pink unicorn. A beer bottle. A taco. A Highland cow. The dog doesn’t care, nor do they have a preference on who they prefer from the Marvel Universe.

The person holding the credit card does.

This would look hilarious in my dog’s mouth.

Sold.

And I cannot even blame the industry for it. They know we love these animals, often beyond what reasonable people would consider reasonable, and that we are forever looking for some physical way to express it.

So, among other things, we buy the toy.

We bring it home, call the dogs into the room, and announce that we have something for them as if they have been anxiously awaiting their surprise. Then we hold up a stuffed Highland cow. This is for you, Theo. He might play with it for a little while. And, a short while later, after whatever little thrill came from gifting it, we have likely failed to notice that they have gone back to the same house slipper they have been carrying around for months.

The ridiculousness extends beyond ordinary days.

At Christmas, stockings hang from our fireplace for my wife and I, and next to ours hangs one for each dog. We fill them with treats and usually a toy or two, gifts we curated for them as though they have been watching the calendar and wondering whether Santa found their address this year.

The dogs have no idea what Christmas is.

Their principal concerns that morning are whether breakfast will occur on schedule and why the hell the humans are permitted to tear paper apart while they are repeatedly told not to.

But we include them anyway… because we want them there.

We want them part of it.

And maybe that is enough explanation for the cow and the trout and the dinosaur, the dead ducks, the sacred alligator, the enormous peanut surviving inexplicably in our garage, and every other ridiculous object we have carried through the front door convinced somebody on four legs was waiting for it.

I would like to tell you this realization has changed me. That, from this point forward I will walk confidently past the dog-toy aisle, secure in the knowledge that our house already contains everything four dogs could possibly need.

No more stuffed animals. No more novelty toys. No more spending nine dollars on something because I can already picture how funny Theo will look carrying it. That is the mature and financially responsible conclusion.

Unfortunately, Christmas is four months away, and there are four dog-themed stockings in the closet.

And I still have my Pound Puppy.

So I would not bet on it.

Until the next cast…

Stay steady, trust the dog, and chase the quiet pull.

God bless,

Abram

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The rubber ducky thermometer has no chance of survival.

Good morning.

I am writing this a little after three o’clock Monday morning, which probably tells all you need to know about how the final hours before today’s launch have gone.

There has been recording. Editing. Recording again. More editing. Listening to things I was certain were finished, then discovering they were not finished at all.

But by the time this reaches your inbox, they finally will be.

Chasing the Quiet Pull Audio is officially live.

All ten essays that make up the initial launch are out in the world this morning. The essays read aloud in my own voice, after months of thinking about this, planning it, building it, recording it, learning how to do things I had never done before, and occasionally wondering why I created so much additional work for myself.

I am incredibly excited about this next chapter for the publication.

The written essays will always be the heart of Chasing the Quiet Pull. The audio platform does not change that. Instead it simply allows these stories another way to be discovered and enjoyed, whether you are driving, walking the dog, mowing the yard, sitting somewhere quiet, or crossing a few hundred miles of interstate with time to spare.

The first ten episodes are:

1. The Night Above Bird Camp

2. The Dinnertime Symphony

3. A Love Letter, Dear Dad

4. When the Dog Chooses the Bird

5. The Sense I Was Never Given

6. The Desk

7. No One in the Passenger Seat

8. Life Is Too Short to Hunt With an Ugly Dog

9. When the Hunt Is Enough

10. The Weight of an Empty Collar

I hope you enjoy hearing them as much as I have enjoyed making them.

A Fuller Room

There is something else I want to say this morning.

Friday’s “Our Last Walk” experienced a weekend I am still trying to comprehend.

The response on Substack has been overwhelming. So many of you wrote about Dunham. Many of you told me about your own dogs, some still beside you and others you have been missing for years. Many shared names, photographs, final hunt stories, old memories, and pieces of lives that did not have to share with me.

I am truly humbled. It is difficult to properly express how grateful I am that Dunham and I’s story, and our final walk, opened a door for so many others to tell their stories.

Something else happened over the weekend too… Chasing the Quiet Pull grew by nearly 25 percent.

Which means there are quite a few people reading their first What’s on Point this morning.

Welcome.

I am sincerely honored something you read this weekend connected deeply enough that you decided you wanted more of these stories arriving in your inbox. That fact is not something I take for granted, or lightly. However……

Though, I should probably forewarn you and explain what you have wandered into.

Chasing the Quiet Pull is a publication in every sense of the word. It launched in March, and the rhythm here is pretty simple: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Every Monday, the weekly What’s on Point is sent out. It is part look-ahead, part life update, and occasionally a report on whatever ridiculous thing one of the dogs have done in the last week. Wednesday and Friday are the essays.

I know inbox fatigue is real, so I would rather tell you plainly what you signed up for: Three mornings a week, and I hope you enjoy being here as much as I enjoy producing it.

The room is a little fuller this Monday than it was last Monday… whether this is you’ve been since March, or new, I am glad you are here.

Around Here

Most of last week belonged to the publication and getting everything ready for this morning, but normal life still went on around me.

Thanks to my wife, the stock tank pool is finally filled, the pump is running, and the saltwater system is doing whatever mysterious work saltwater systems do. The hope is that by tomorrow we should actually be able to get in it. The thermometer floating in the pool read 87 degrees this weekend. It should feel amazing in this North Carolina heat.

Equally noteworthy, the thermometer is also a yellow rubber ducky, and Dunham and Theo are completely obsessed with it.

They spent an unreasonable amount of time standing beside the tank staring at that duck, apparently trying to determine how one might retrieve something floating and get away with it cleanly.

So far, the duck remains alive, but I don’t think it’ll last long unless we put a weight on it in the center of the pool, and far out of reach of the boys. Until then, its life is in peril.

Boone also went to the veterinarian to get weighed for his monthly preventatives. Thirty-five pounds. I respectfully asked the vet tech to check again because surely there had been a misread. There had not. Our little puppy is somehow already thirty-five pounds, and I am increasingly convinced that the twenty-three-pound version of him that existed in what felt like four days ago was part of a different reality. The hope is that we will get him on some wings and possibly quail soon.

And because life around here cannot remain charming for too long, baby copperhead season has arrived in North Carolina.

Theo nearly stepped on one in our driveway as he walked directly past it without ever realizing what was literally inches from him.

We are always snake-conscious with the boys, but that encounter raised the household threat level considerably. Every trip outside now includes four dogs, several flashlights after dark, and two humans inspecting the ground like its fine print.

North Carolina Summers. All the fun.

Here’s What’s on Point This Week

“The Toys They Never Asked For,” Wednesday, 7:00 AM (free). We humans spend ridiculous amounts of money on dog toys designed largely to delight ourselves, while the dogs remain perfectly content with a tennis ball, a flip flop, a stolen sock, or whatever object they've been told not to touch. After the emotional weight of the last couple weeks, Wednesday gets to laugh a little.

“The Long Road West,” Friday, 7:00 AM (free). Before there can be prairie, birds, campfires, and dogs disappearing into grass, there are a whole lot of miles between our driveway in North Carolina and the places we love to hunt. Friday is about crossing the country with bird dogs, the strange logistics that shape the route, and how somewhere along the way the drive itself became part of October rather than simply the obstacle standing between us and it.

This Week in Audio

Today begins with all ten launch episodes waiting for you.

After that, the audio side begins settling into its regular rhythm.

Thursday: “The Hour Before First Light”

One from the library about the dark canvas tent, coffee, restless dogs, and those few hours before a hunt begins, when nothing has happened yet and somehow almost everything already has.

Sunday: “October Begins in August”

Last Wednesday’s essay about the season before the season, when the maps come back out, conditioning begins, and October starts exerting its pull long before the calendar actually gets there.

From here forward, that will be our rhythm: something from the current lineup, and something pulled back into the light from the library.

If something you have read here has meant something to you, the kindest thing you can do for this publication is hand it to someone else. That is how Chasing the Quiet Pull has grown from the beginning. One person reads something that stirs them, then sends it to somebody they think might understand. I remain grateful every time you do.

And if you want to find CTQP in the spaces between the essays, you can find me on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Or, you can follow Chasing the Quiet Pull wherever you already listen:

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, Pocket Casts, and Overcast

Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in this.

And, beginning today, thank you for listening.

Until the next cast….

Stay steady, trust the dog, and chase the quiet pull.

God bless,

Abram

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Fifteen miles of north-central Montana, not far from the Canadian border, and not one bird came up. Two good dogs hunting like it was still first light. Three sheds in the grass, a jackrabbit the size of a small car, and a small voice by midday insisting the day was wasted. Then a tailgate at sundown, where the frustration did not vanish so much as lose its authority. On the days that give everything except the thing you came for.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “When the Hunt is Enough”

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “Life is Too Short to Hunt With an Ugly Dog”

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “No One in the Passenger Seat”

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Desk”

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Sense I Was Never Given”

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “When the Dog Chooses the Bird”

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “A Love Letter, Volume Two: Dear Dad”

Writer’s Note: This is the second installment in a monthly series called A Love Letter. Each month I write one piece in the true form and spirit of a love letter, to someone or something that has shaped me, taught me, or earned a gratitude I can no longer keep to myself. I used to write love letters often, many years ago. This series is me bringing that old part of myself back to life, and turning it toward the people, places, and beings who have quietly remade me. Volume One was for bird dogs. Volume Two is for my father.