See that cloud, the one way off in the distance? One day in September, I tried walking to that far-off cloud shadow, just the dogs and I.
I told myself it was for the chance at a sage grouse, or maybe a covey of Huns, but it was really just for the sheer hell of it, the addictive freedom of walking into the void, the chance for an old man to feel like a young kid again, just like a character in an old Ray Bradbury short story.
So we ran for miles, chasing air. The dogs did, anyway. I walked. But the shadow was gone by the time we got there, and all that remained to wash over me in the vastness of the moment was sunlight and wind and the silence of questions unanswered.
It was enough. It’s always been enough.
I stayed in that empty, mute, cloud-spackled country for three days wishing it were three weeks, seeking private things which whisper in a language each of us hears differently.
I never saw another soul, never uttered a word to anyone but dogs and ghosts, never heard a sound that wasn’t the sound of place, never checked my phone, never wondered what I was missing in the prison of its glow.
I walked and hunted and slept. I shot wild birds over my dogs in moments of sublime perfection witnessed by no one but myself, recorded on nothing beyond my eyes, posted nowhere but my memory. I watched time drift across sagebrush, felt it pass over me in the shadows of evening.
At night, I sat in my folding chair in the dark, poured drinks from a bottle of cheap bourbon, had long conversations with the dogs and myself. I counted satellites tracking silently across the sky and witnessed the occasional meteor streaking through the velvet of space. I covered myself in the balm of isolation and the uncomfortable honesty of questions asked in the kind of solitude in which you cannot hide from the answers.
Just the normal clamoring of the multitudes contained within a single soul. We all ask such things, of course. We all feel such doubt. How else can you ever reconcile so many desires, so many longings, so many feelings? You may as well ask how can you resist being so human?
The simple—and honest—answer is that we can’t. We will always long for the new while clinging to the familiar. That is the fundamental dichotomy of human existence and human relationships, and there’s not enough bourbon in the world to change that fact.
Sometimes we do break free, of course, letting go of that which we know in order to grasp at that which we don’t. And I’ve always suspected that these long, solitary bird hunting trips are my way of doing that, of becoming untethered long enough to chase clouds both real and imagined, if only for a moment.
I never did catch that cloud. But I never did stop trying. And in the end, I guess that’s the point. Of most everything probably, and of bird hunting for damn sure.
When I broke camp and left that place, I hid what was left of the bourbon in a little cave in a rock face near where I had pitched my tent. I told myself that someday I would come back and finish it.
It’s just a thing I do, in those special places that have meaning to me. As a result, I’ve got a lot of bourbon stashed in secret places all over the plains and southwest. I tell myself it’s not littering if only you know where it is and you’ve promised to come back and finish it.
That bottle is still there, waiting in that little rock crevasse for me to return. So are the clouds, and the birds. And someday I hope to, if only that land, that moment, and those questions still belong to me.
About the Author: Chad Love is a freelance writer and unrepentant prairie rat bird hunter who resides on the plains of western Oklahoma. He watched his first cloud shadow drift across the prairie some 35 years ago and has been chasing them—and birds— ever since. You can read more of his work at chadlove.substack.com.
