SearchingEdit

By Greg McReynolds, Sportsmen's Conservation Project

I slam the door and the world contracts into a space no bigger than a refrigerator box lit by the cold blue light of the radio's LCD screen.

The numbers on the dash say 432 miles to empty. I'll do that and more before day breaks over the western prairie.

We're headed north east, out of the Snake River drainage and away from it's terminus with the Columbia and eventually the Pacific. We'll drive north of the Tetons and along the Gallatin Range, past the Absorkas and into the rolling hills along the Missouri River and a view uninterrupted for 360 degrees.

For now, the view is nothing but the checkered white line while the Rolling Stones sing "Gimme Shelter."

Sometime later, I let the dogs out to stretch and pee and whine in confusion over the pitch-dark bird country.

I throw out a bed roll on the ground a ways from the truck and whistle the dogs back to their kennels.

When day breaks over this country — new to me but old even when Lewis and Clark came to know it two centuries ago — I stand and stamp my feet into my boots.

While the dogs stretch and drink, I roll and tie the bed roll and splash water on my face. There's no time for coffee this morning. I'm in a rush to explore this place in the best way I know how, shotgun in hand, trailing a young bird dog.

We leave the truck behind and quickly forget the radio, the computer calculating miles-to-empty, the maps and the cell phone.

We are under our own power now, searching.