See! From the brake the whirring pheasant springs, and mounts exulting on triumphant wings; Short is his joy! He feels the fiery wound, flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.
— Alexander Pope
This dry creek bed is surprisingly deep, the exposed soil loamy and lovely and rumpled with ropy cottonwood roots. I walk beneath the trees, passing in and out of the dwindling sunshine, dipping into the cool of settled air where trees spent the day casting shadows, breaking the bond between light and earth.
I watch Tater work in swooping parabolas through tall thistles and blond grass, over fallen trees, up past the edge of crop stubble and backdown again, recovering a wide history of scent and filing it away or discarding it depending on the route it takes through his olfactory pathlines. He’s not a dumb beast — few beasts are. Tater is precise. His nose and mind create a bank of processed data; each inhalation generates a record of scent. Somewhere between his nose and brain an enormous array of smells is expertly shuffled and neatly stacked; Tater cuts the deck and draws a single card from the bouquet of possibilities, a lone scent, and follows it. This is not chance. This is educated choice. He chooses the smell of running feet, long tail, red wattle, turquoise hackle, cackle on the wind, and then follows it like iron driven to a magnet. The scent grows stronger as he closes on his quarry. When the whiffs wobble and fade in the breeze, he quarters, slicing the space into pieces until he discovers the fresh aroma of running feet once more. He increases his stride, he’s gaining, and then the efflorescent moment he’s been chasing occurs — a sudden bloom of body scent pooled before him in tall
