Some friends from Nashville had been down here visiting for the weekend, but they're gone now, off to the airport and headed for home with plenty of quail to eat and stories to tell. All of our garrulous good-byes at the end of the driveway have given way to silence, the kind of silence that can be found only ― or so it seems to me - in these pine woods that I have grown to love.
After they left I took a long horseback ride over the grass roads and down to the low bottom where the dogs like to wallow in the cool mud. The black mushrooms will be sprouting there soon. My landlady, Sally Sullivan, showed me the spot when I first rented the place, and I found out that those mushrooms are as good as any morel I have eaten in France. On the way back to the house I let the dogs run out far in front of me, and they flushed two coveys of birds, like kids chasing each other in a game of hide-and-seek.
The dogs didn't come back to me until I reached the tiny dogwood tree and the wooden cross with the faded blue collar draped over it that marks the grave of Spring, my prized springer spaniel. I traveled all the way to Scotland to pick him up from the Bracken Bank Kennels as a pup, and he had a great heart. One time he chased a crippled bird into the underbrush, both of us searching frantically for it with no luck. Just as I was about to give up, Spring dashed off in the opposite direction till he reached a gopher hole, then plunged down so far that only his wagging tail was visible. I immediately dropped my gun and ran after him, hoping I wouldn't pull him from the hole with a diamondback rattlesnake attached to his nose. As I grabbed for his hind legs, he backed out of the hole and there was the crippled bird, tucked softly in his mouth. Some quail hunters say that dogs mean as much to them as their wives and children. Crazy as those words look on the page as I write them, sometimes when I visit Spring's grave I begin to understand what they mean.
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