The Pup Who Flushed the First Rooster

“Dad thinks nobody sees him do it,” Tanner said. “He waits till Mom’s in the shower.”

Something in my chest turned over when he said that. I had been angry with Duane Rindahl for a long time, in the quiet way you are angry with your husband’s father, the way that never comes out of your mouth. But a man who carries his dog up the steps every night is not a man you can hate all the way.

“Is he taking Duke out on the opener?” I asked.

“He says so.”

“Tanner, that dog can’t walk to the mailbox.”

“I know,” my husband said. “I know, Kel.”

The week before the opener I took Dad’s gun out of the closet for good. I cleaned it at the kitchen table on newspaper, the way he did, and ran a patch through both barrels and oiled the action with the little bottle of oil that had been in the case for twenty years.

The smell of it brought him right into the room. I sat there with the gun across my knees and the rag in my hand and could not move for a while.

Tanner came in from the garage and saw my face, and he did not say anything. He just stood behind my chair with his hand on my shoulder until I was ready to put the gun back together.

I bought my small game license at the hardware store in Howard on Tuesday. The woman behind the counter was someone I knew from church. She looked at my name on the screen and smiled.

“Rindahl,” she said. “You hunting with Duane this year?”

“I’m hunting,” I said. “We’ll see who with.”

Friday night I set out my clothes on the dresser. My brown canvas coat. My jeans, my good boots. Dad’s old blaze orange cap, soft as a dish rag from all those Octobers. I did not own a blaze vest. I had not needed one in nine years.

Saturday morning I got up at seven. The sky outside the kitchen window was clear and pale, with frost on the windshield of Tanner’s pickup and on every blade of grass in the yard.

I sat at the table with my coffee and Penny’s head on my knee. I am not a big one for long prayers. But I said one that morning, the short one my dad used to say on the tailgate before we walked: Lord, keep us safe, and let the dog do well.

Then I added a line of my own. Help me stay kind.

I braided my hair and tucked the braid down under Dad’s cap. I put his penny in my left boot.

Tanner had gone over to his folks’ at six-thirty to help his dad and his brothers get set up. That was the plan, our plan. He would be there. I would come on my own.

I pulled into Duane’s yard at 9:35. The tailgates were down by the machine shed the same as every year. Duane, Tanner, his brothers Conrad and Merritt, and Duane’s two oldest friends from the co-op, Roger and Keith, were standing around in orange with coffee in their hands.

Duke was lying in the grass by the shed, his head on his paws. When he heard my car door he lifted his head and thumped his tail twice, slowly, and put it back down.