“I remember when your dad used to tell you that sound was coming from a cat trapped under the hood of the truck,” Dan said to Luca, who, now in the first semester of his fresh-man year of college, had joined me for a day of hunting birds along the Rocky Mountain Front. My son and I were both craving a brainwashing of sorts, a Saturday escape from faculty meetings (mine) and project deadlines (his); the tracking of departmental budgetary shortfalls replaced by the tracking of our 10-year-old setter Zeke through the reddened fall grasses, the repeated walk from dorm to dining hall replaced by the singular walk up a snowberry-draped spring creek to-ward a dog on point with, hopefully, the makings of a feral meal under his nose. “You and Zeke were pups back then,” Dan added.

For two decades, I’d been hunting Dan’s land — ever since his daughter, then a freshman in one of my university courses, heard about my rabid obsession with upland birds and asked me if I had any interest in hunting her family ranch. “There’s about 800 acres with lots of pheasants and Dad only hunts deer there.” Forgive the interruption, students, but class is hereby canceled for the remainder of the semester. When I arrived soon after, bearing gifts of wine and venison summer sausage, Dan greeted me with a stout handshake and a map that included not only a detailed sketch of his property, but also the phone...