The pasture’s low spots had gone white overnight, and the boat’s polymer bottom slipped effortlessly across the marsh. Van sat next to me, his gaze forward, locked in by his layers. The sun split the horizon and its palette of orange and yellow reflected off the water like it was still.

The airboat settled and it felt warm for a moment. Dalva jumped off the front deck and went straight into the ditch coming out black to the shoulders. I had become immune to Van’s comments about little brown dogs being an aperitif for the marsh’s scaled gatekeepers. When his Lab, Ruby, passed I opted to get our next dog. Weston and Mel had been begging for a puppy, but Mel wanted something smaller than a lab — Boykin Spaniel was the compromise. She’s the best dog we’ve ever hunted over, though Van won’t admit it.

The mud grabs at the boots’ heel and hands it back a half second later than you want it. You learn to walk from the hip. Three steps, stand, three steps, stand, until you find the hard bottom. Dalva remains unaffected as she floats in front of us. Snipe wait until they decide you have seen them, then they fly, cursing, like a man arguing with himself. Van insisted you had to shoot them before they shit, or else save the shell. Dalva flushed the first bird at eleven yards. I shot behind it twice.

“Good start,” Van said.

“It’s early.”

“It’s eight-thirty.”

Cattle had been through in December and the trails were cut to soup, with the ground firmer between them. The birds were holding in the firm parts where the maidencane thinned. Two Sandhill Cranes flushed out of the pickerelweed and complained on their way out. Dalva worked close. She turned nine in November, is deaf on the left side and likes to range close enough I can see her, which suits me fine.

Mel filled the thermos at five while I packed my blind bag at the kitchen table. She watched in the doorway wearing my sweatshirt with her arms crossed and told me Weston had set his boots out next to mine the night before, hoping. Weston is twelve. He asked me Thursday, and I promised next weekend. His expression said he knew there was no next weekend, and I told him to go finish his math.

I left my phone, face down, in the console under a few cans of Copenhagen. That is where I keep it now.

We took the long way in from the south, off 192, which is nine miles longer than the Duda road past the sod farms. I said the sod trucks tear the road to pieces. Van has a paperback of Ninety-two in the Shade on the dash of his truck, swollen from the rain. He’s never got past the part where Skelton burns the skiff. He has been reading it since his divorce. He says he likes to know the book is there.

By eleven we had six to hand. Snipe come apart in the hand if you are rough with them. Van shot a double out of a brush pile and hollered about it like a man half his age. Dalva walked back with a mouthful of both birds. I gave her my open hand and she dropped them at my feet, then went and stood in the ditch to cool off. Van said she was the only thing on the river with any sense.

We ate sitting on the deck of the airboat. Mel put two sandwiches in the bag when I only ever eat one.

“Van, I have got myself into something.”

He didn’t stop chewing and looked out over the marsh. Two cabbage palms leaned in opposite directions and frame the sunset in the summer.

“Money,” he said.

“No.”

He nodded like I said yes, then told me about his brother Ray, who put his new Chittum Skiff on a second mortgage in 2019 and then listed his house to cover the boat, and how their mother had to be told, and how Ray sat in the kitchen and cried. A grown man of fifty-one with a Burt Reynolds mustache.

“You’ll figure it out,” he said, “you always do.”

He whistled the dog up. I said Van’s name again, but he was already fifty feet out and did not turn around. I let it go and loaded two shells and went after him.

I winged a bird and it sailed towards the horizon. Dalva brought it in alive. It lay in my hand, warm through the glove. The long bill and the eye set back so far it looks to be assembled wrong. Four ounces of bird flown from Canada on its own steam, twice a year, every year all its life, and it looked at me sideways. I stood in the muck longer than I needed to and put the bird in the game bag with the others.

Van watched from the fence line.

“You okay?”

“Cold.”

At three the wind laid down and the birds got jumpy and started flushing outside of our twenty gauge’s range, which is their way of telling you the day is over. Ten birds. A good day, but neither of us said so.

The truck turned two hundred thousand miles in September. Mel keeps the service log in the glovebox in her handwriting. Oil changes, dates, tire rotations going back to when we bought it. I have taken to doing the oil myself in the driveway. She says it saves us forty dollars. It saves us forty dollars.

I pulled in at dark. Weston’s bike was on its side blocking the driveway where he leaves it, and the porch light was on. The kitchen window glowed yellow through the blinds. I cleaned the birds on the tailgate of the truck with Dalva leaning wet against my leg, shaking, pleased with herself. Ten birds is hardly a meal. I breasted them and placed them in a row.

Mel came out in a lobster-patterned apron she stole from her grandmother years ago and stood on the step.

“You find them?”

“Found them.”

She counted the pile on the truck bed nodding her head from bird to bird, and said that Weston had waited up and was pretending not to have waited up. I put the cleaned birds in a gallon Ziploc bag, handed them to her and she went inside and the door shut. After a few minutes the yellow went black.

I ran the hose over my hands until I could no longer feel anything. I stood there for a while longer, and the dog leaned on my leg, and up the road someone was burning a brush pile and you could smell it coming across the yards

.

Want to fish? Book a fly fishing trip with me. Dates available now.
Want to hunt? Book a snipe hunting trip with me. November-February.
Message me directly for details.

Nobody had read a word of it.

He carried two notebooks everywhere, black ones with elastic bands, made in Japan, and he stacked books on the tailgate like a boy building a fort out of encyclopedias. Neruda. Some Merwin. A biography of Rimbaud with the spine cracked open to a photograph, always the same photograph, like he’d practiced cracking it there. At the bar he’d set the books down first, then his beer, so the order of operations was clear to anyone paying attention. Micah paid attention. Curt did not.

“Let us see something,” Micah said, maybe once a month, always in the same tired key, like a man asking his brother-in-law to finally pay him back.

“I don’t show unpublished work,” Denny said. “It isn’t personal. Bukowski didn’t show anybody either.”

“Bukowski showed everybody. He read out loud in bars for tips.“

“Different era.” Denny drank like the subject was closed, and it always was, because nobody had the appetite to keep pushing a boulder that clearly enjoyed where it sat.

“Look up the stuff I published. It’s out there.”

It was, technically, out there, like a coin at the bottom of a well. A poem in a journal called Sagebrush Quarterly that folded the year after it ran him, a chapbook he’d self-financed with money that was supposed to go toward a new Abel reel. Nobody looked. That was the arrangement, unspoken but sturdy as a wading staff: he’d point, they’d nod.

He was, by any angler’s accounting, terrible. He tangled leader in dead calm. He set the hook on refusals no self-respecting trout angler would have committed to. Once he set the hook on a submerged log and fought it for thirty seconds before announcing it was the biggest brown he’d ever felt, while Curt sat on the bank and let him have it. When they landed a good bow that afternoon on the Madison, two of them working the net like men handling a stretcher, Denny stood back taking notes, actual notes, pen moving while the fish thrashed itself calm against the rocks.

“You’re gonna write about the fish we caught,” Curt said, “instead of catching it.”

“Somebody’s got to witness it.”

“We’re all standing right here witnessing it.”

“Not the way I witness it.” He said this without a flicker of doubt, like a man announcing his blood type. There was something almost holy in how little it embarrassed him.

They came into the Grizzly that evening smelling like mud and marijuana, three men and one who’d contributed mostly moral support and a sunburned squint. Denny set his books on the bar how other men set down keys. A woman two stools over was reading the spine of the Rimbaud upside down, which took some doing, and doing it upside down was, Curt thought later, the first real sign of trouble.

She was dark-haired, cut close on one side and long on the other like she’d made a decision and then changed her mind halfway through, with a denim jacket covered in pins that looked like a map of countries that didn’t exist yet. Her name was Del–“Yes, after McCoury.”

“You actually read this,” she said to Denny, “or is it a decoration.”

“I read everything twice. Once for the story, once for the bones.”

“That’s a good line.”

“It’s not mine. I stole it from a guy who’s dead now, so he can’t ask for it back.”

She laughed, and something in the register of her laugh made Curt look at Micah and Micah look at his beer, the universal signal among friends that a man is about to make a decision none of them can veto. Del ordered a whiskey neat like she was closing a business deal. She asked what he wrote about, and Denny said the river, mostly, and the failures of men who wade into it thinking they’ll come out changed. She said that sounded like every country song ever written and Denny said maybe country songs know something poets forgot, and she laughed again, louder.

By eleven they were the only people at the bar still speaking in complete sentences. By midnight Denny had his jacket half on and one notebook tucked under his arm like a running back protecting a football, and Curt watched them go out the door together into a parking lot lit up orange by a bug light the size of a hubcap, and thought, not unkindly, that his friend looked like a heron trying to walk gracefully on land, all legs and conviction and no clear plan for where they were taking him.

Nobody heard from Denny for two days. This wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was Del walking into the Grizzly on the third afternoon, alone, wearing the same jacket with a different shirt underneath, and setting one black notebook down on the bar in front of Curt and Micah like a cat delivering something it had caught and wasn’t especially proud of.

“He left this,” she said. “Tell him I don’t have his number. Tell him it was fun, though. Genuinely.”

“You didn’t want to give it back yourself?”

“I’ve got a shift.” and then she was gone, and the two men were left looking at the notebook. A locked box somebody’s uncle left them in a will.

They didn’t touch it for an hour. Micah bought a round he didn’t need to buy, just to have something to do with his hands that wasn’t reaching for the elastic band. Curt turned his stool toward the window and watched a magpie work over something in the gravel lot that appeared to be a fish head.

“We should give it back unopened,” Micah said. “Man’s got a right to his own notebook.”

“Man’s had four years to show us one line of it.”

“Doesn’t make it ours.”

“No,” Curt agreed, and reached over and slid it toward himself anyway, the elastic band giving with a small sound like a held breath finally let out. Micah didn’t stop him. That was its own kind of answer.

Most of the pages were nothing, fly patterns, a few phone numbers and a sketch of a drift boat hull that looked more like a shoe. Hatch charts. A recipe for something involving capers that neither of them could picture Denny cooking. Then, near the middle, in handwriting smaller and more careful than either man expected, appearing to belong to somebody else entirely, somebody who’d been hiding inside Denny this whole time waiting for a quiet room:

My father’s ashes
sink in the Madison.
The first and last time
we shared a river.

Dead men raised me.
Hugo taught me anger
Harrison taught me to eat
to read water, to forgive
almost everything.

My father taught me
nothing about knots.
Forty years alive
somewhere in the house.

Now the river carries him
places he never took me.
A brown trout rose
through what was left of him.
I didn’t cast.

Curt read it twice. Once for the story. Once, he supposed, for the bones. Micah read it over his shoulder without asking, his lips moving slightly on each line. The bar sound going on around them, ice against glass, a ballgame nobody was watching with the volume too loud.

Curt closed the notebook and slid the elastic band back into place, careful, like closing a door on a room he wasn’t sure he’d been invited into.

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