Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/742011
I n my mind, it will always be remembered as "The Valley Where Our Footsteps Cannot Be Numbered," as I recall those long lost days when it was just me and my little Brit—and especially that unforgettable Thanksgiving morning when Betsy and I hunted from the bottom of the hollow, all the way up past the hanging rock ledge where I kept her water bottle hidden in a deep cleft next to the little waterfall. It was a soft, beckoning morning, and Betsy had been looking at me longingly ever since I went out to feed her at first light. The womenfolk of the family had been working for days on the homemade chestnut dressing and pumpkin pies and Mom's classic potato salad, and they were now performing their sorcery on the wild turkey and quail and pheasants and woodcock that my brothers and I had taken earlier that fall. But we had no grouse. Then Betsy spoke to me, from deep in her throat and heart, in her soft little spaniel voice that only I was meant to hear. And I alone heard her. Ramblings by michael altizeR It was a cold and beckonIng thanksgIvIng mornIng, one I wIll never forget. H er eyes widened, her body tensed, and her ears perked up as she caught my responding, affirmative glance, and minutes later we were in the truck, on our way up to Bluff Mountain. Betsy began weeping with anticipation, as she always did, when we turned off the hard pavement and onto the narrow, laurel-lined dirt road that snaked a mile up the mountain along the creek. I parked beneath a big hemlock, beside an ancient two-story white clapboard house, where Mrs. G usually had a cold biscuit waiting for Betsy at day's end when we'd returned from the mountain. Sometimes we'd give her a grouse. Wood smoke was coming from her burnished brick chimney as I stepped from the truck. Betsy watched and whined eagerly as I slipped into my old shell vest and pulled my side-by-side from its sheepskin case, and when I whispered "Okay," she charged up the cut cornrows that pressed up close to the mountain. We crossed into the wooded hollow where the brook began to widen as it spilled off the mountain, then worked our way upstream before easing back to the base of the ridge. Then Betsy climbed into the overhanging rhododendrons 20 feet above the trail, where I could follow her only by the soft tinkling of her bell. And then her bell went silent. I had taken barely three steps in the dry, crackling leaves when the drumming thunder of a rising grouse filled the woods from somewhere high above me. I tracked the sound with my ears, and the gun flew to my shoulder as the grouse rocketed up the hollow. But still I could not see him. I instinctively shifted my finger from the front to the back trigger that fires the tighter choke, and I took the shot as the bird appeared high against the pale overcast sky. The dull brown leaves clinging to a big box elder rustled violently as the shot pattern tore through, and the grouse flinched and dipped sharply downward before setting its wings and disappearing into heavy cover across the hollow. Betsy was off the ridge and tearing into the dense creek bottom before I could extract the spent cartridge. I tore after her, my gun broken open with the unfired shell in the skeet chamber as I fished a fresh load 68 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S