He liked bird dogs, with their handsome pedigrees and soft mouths. Fine heads, high strung, spots of liver, their colossal lungs banging against the basket of their ribs.

He liked the bright embers of goldfinch dipping from limb to limb. Dew in high grasses come morning.

German Shorthairs, English Setters. Quivering hysterics. He felt a flutter in his brain, wind behind his eyes. Surge of panic. The room grew small and smaller still. Green in the precincts.

He would ride it out.

He had survived his wife, his dogs. He had survived the admirable oak in the yard—torn out by its roots, the crown splintered. A century of living and wind felled it.

I give birth to a coming death, his wife had said. Three daughters. A sissy for a son. He had dispossessed them all. Dispossess, disown: call it what you like.

Great cumulus, forked lightning. What he would give now for a dog to lie across his feet, cold as two roots in a cellar.

The smartest man who ever left Fulton, his classmates would come to say. A man who loved his dogs. He was writing, he recognized, his obituary in his head. Family man. Devoted.

Words.

He remembers a young bitch, gun-shy, ribby, blasting through the glass door to die. Spit tore away in tatters from her mouth. Daft.

So much is daft, soft in the head. Smartest man who. Devoted.

He remembers the owl in the dark of the barn, quiet as silk when it flew. Dogs half-bird, erratic. Bird dog. Gundog. Horseman.

Fat breast of the meadowlark belting it out. Nighthawks at dusk feeding, feeding, the blue night addled with the iridescent blur of moths. Gone, all.

What he would give. Give?

Take—he would take it all back again. Three daughters. A sissy for a son. His wife read night and day and night and remembered exactly nothing.

He remembers pups in the barn, velvet bellies—docile, faithful retrievers of the north who take a beating without running away.

He plucked birds in the wind with his daughter and thinks of her small, blanched hands.

Dawn. Dew in the duck blind. Man in the wild. That was living.

And then the kill.

The light pearly, a painterly hour. His dogs were like gazelles—like frigate birds—shaking. Seized. Power in reserve.

And then the kill.

His freezer was taller than he was and jammed with birds he had bagged. Goose, duck, pheasant, dove. If he kicked it first, his wife used to say, she would carry them in buckets to the rubbish.

But he lived. Birds repeated his name. He sunned in the grass. His daughter whimpered. She came to him, feathers in her hair, feathers in her small pale hands.