In early March when much of the country sees signals of spring — a shift in daylight hours, a promise of warmth and even the first birds of a vast migration — an Alaska bird dog becomes anxious. Or so I imagine.
On the Kenai Peninsula, the upland bird hunting season is about to end while the alpine and subalpine bird country still beckons. When I am out on my porch shoveling snow, I can’t be sure if Hugo is impatient and anxious to go to the mountains or if it is me, projecting my desire to be elsewhere onto my dog while weather and human obligations prevent either of us from going anywhere.
It isn’t the tropical beaches of somewhere else that we love best. It’s the wide-open high country — perfect for a big-running dog. In early and late fall, the scale of a mountain landscape forces you to stop, submerged in a deep mountain valley like the bottom of an empty sea where lichen and bearberries light up the ground in red, yellow and green.
In winter, covered in snow, a mountain seems and may even be taller. Its pure white snow reflects an overpowering largeness. A mostly white dog is as visibly lost as the near-white ptarmigan he’s hunting. And maybe you both long to be thrilled by the sight of snow lifting as these birds take flight.
I don’t have much doubt Hugo would rather be in the mountains than watching me shovel snow, and I try to console him. Ever since he was a young dog and first looked at me with pleading eyes that I imagined said, “Please take me somewhere now,” I’ve consoled him with whispered promises of days to come.
Dogs may not understand definitions, but I see a flicker of recognition in his eyes for certain words — birds, mountains, go.
If Hugo had a language, I imagine most of his words would name bird varieties and their nuanced flights and smells, along with trace descriptions of places I’ve been but never knew so well. My vocabulary might seem limited compared to the vast sensory world he perceives.
Because circumstances don’t allow us to dash away to the hills for a day of hunting, I find myself musing on the porch with Hugo at my side. I have set down my shovel, and we watch the woods across the backyard.
I call this spruce- and birch-filled patch of grounds the “woods,” but there was a time I would have called it a forest instead.
The first time I gave my word choice much thought was when I wrote a story about a friend, and after reading it she objected to my use of the word “forest.” She said, “In Alaska, we call it the woods. Forest is what they call it in the States.”
I corrected the reference in the story but not without wondering if I might want to decide anew whether to call the forest the woods or not. The definition of both terms includes “an area covered with trees.”
I suppose my original notion of forest came from growing up on the Kenai Peninsula and seeing the Chugach National Forest sign many times while driving to and from Anchorage. As soon as I could read, I might have misread what forest meant because I thought it meant “an area like this one with lots of trees.”
The sign did not read Chugach National Woods.
If I was mistaken, my mistake is perhaps similar to one that has occurred over time (and an ocean) as the word forest has changed to become more specific than its original definition.
In medieval England, a forest was any area of countryside set aside for hunting. The establishment of a forest prevented the clearing and cultivating of land to allow for hunting.
In England, unenclosed pasture and treeless grasslands retain their names as forests today, as attested by the New Forest in Hampshire, once a royal hunting ground for William the Conqueror, or the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire.
Interestingly, the U.S. Forest Service manages diverse lands that could be called forests under the word’s earlier meaning. According to its website, Forest Service land includes grasslands and desert shrub ecosystems. Hunting is allowed in national forests, different from national parks, which have stricter regulations.
Hugo hunts for ptarmigan in the Kenai Mountains. (Photo by Steve Meyer)
If Hugo was able to ask me what I was thinking as we stared into the woods, we might both end up laughing at me but would agree that if a desert could be a forest, so could a mountain. In any case, that’s where we would rather be.
Lucky for me, Hugo prefers to listen to birds rustling in the branches than semantics. I love the way a sight, sound or smell will cause him to go on point, which in the field means he has found a bird.
Everywhere else, it means the same thing, just that we are not hunting. He is still finely attuned, an inch taller, pinned to the air like a ballerina. This dance makes up his language more than words.
When he tries to “talk” me into taking him somewhere, he communicates in body language what I can only read as a desire to go to his favorite place and mine. His second choice is to bolt out the front door and ambush the bird feeder.
“I promise,” I tell him as I have so many times before. “We will have adventures.”
I hope the words conjure meaning. I hope they console even as I know without a doubt I am more likely to learn something from Hugo than he is to learn anything from me.
Hugo and Christine Cunningham hunt for ptarmigan in the Kenai Mountains. (Photo by Steve Meyer)
After all, it took me until this late in life to figure out that venison at one time meant any game meat, meat was once any food, and a forest was once any land suitable for hunting.
A bird dog doesn’t worry about the things that don’t matter, even as the rest of us might struggle to devote ourselves to preserving traditions, learning every day, being worthy of the game we hunt and finding ways to share.
Spending a few minutes with Hugo midday watching the yard melt does not compare with doing what makes us both feel the most alive. We’d rather be hunting. But it’s also nice to sit and see the forest from the trees.
Christine Cunningham is an lifelong Alaskan and avid shooter who lives in Kenai.
March 14, 2021 at 08:14AM
https://www.adn.com/outdoors-adventure/2021/03/14/forget-semantics-alaskas-woods-and-mountains-beckon-at-this-time-of-year/
Forget semantics, Alaska's woods and mountains beckon at this time of year - Anchorage Daily News
https://news.google.com/search?q=forget&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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