Chasing the Quiet Pull

The canvas is not yet light, only that deep muted purple that belongs to the Northern Plains. The stove has given up in the night, and three dogs have migrated under the blankets to negotiate for warmth. Then two logs, a clump of dryer lint, two clicks of a lighter, and a percolator set on the stove. Paw balm before anything else. Bacon in a skillet. The dogs know what comes after the collar bag. This is the part of a hunt most people never see, and the argument that it was never outside the hunt at all.

It arrived as an email from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks in the middle of a late July workday, and within minutes there was a calendar on one screen, regulations on the other, and October dates running down a notebook page. The season had started. Not the legal one. The other one, the one that lives in color-coded spreadsheets, a Browning Sweet Sixteen given its August oil, and a specific unremarkable piece of North Dakota ground where the first walk always begins. Sixty-three days out, and counting on purpose. On being forty-four and still carrying a number in your...

A collar weighs about 132 grams. You can set it on a kitchen scale and read the number yourself. But no scale can weigh a puppy’s first collar waiting on the counter, or a field collar being retired, or the one that has returned to emptiness after the dog who wore it is gone. Three collars, held at once. The essay to close the first ten on.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Weight of an Empty Collar”

Fifteen miles of north-central Montana, not far from the Canadian border, and not one bird came up. Two good dogs hunting like it was still first light. Three sheds in the grass, a jackrabbit the size of a small car, and a small voice by midday insisting the day was wasted. Then a tailgate at sundown, where the frustration did not vanish so much as lose its authority. On the days that give everything except the thing you came for.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author's own voice.

The original essay...

Every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, in an Indiana parking lot full of Labs and Shorthairs, someone asks why these particular breeds. The joke in the title has answered for years, because the joke is faster than the truth. This time the truth gets its turn. It runs through an eight-hour drive to Iowa, a bearded wirehair who looked like Father Time at three, a piece of mail that found the author in Afghanistan, and one sentence at a Virginia kennel that decided everything after it.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s...

The sun catches him near Beckley, West Virginia, twenty-six hours from North Dakota, a dog in the passenger seat where he sometimes imagines his father. And a memory from a Kansas lakeshore: a young man in blaze orange, four days into hunting, walking in front of another man’s gun because no one had ever stood close enough to tell him not to. On what the passenger seat used to teach, and who is supposed to fill it now.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can...

A message left unread for thirty minutes out of small cowardice. A garage in Winston-Salem, and strangers who had already read a letter to the author’s father and found their own waiting inside it. A leather top that turned out to match a puppy’s collar. About how a place to write found its way home, and the quiet ways guidance arrives when a man has stopped expecting spectacle.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Desk”

It begins with a fistful of wildflowers, a kitchen turned into a laboratory, and a bottle of ammonia passed under the nose of a five-year-old who felt nothing. The author was born unable to smell. Not rain, not smoke, not one of his dogs. He has spent twenty years watching scent at work anyway, reading its punctuation in the bodies of the animals working ahead of him. This is the fact underneath every essay in this publication, and the first time it has been said aloud.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s ow...

October 2022, northeastern Montana. A soft dog who has never once refused a signal peels off toward a hill his handler has already judged worthless, and lets every beep, buzz, and whistle go to voicemail. Then the handheld chimes a different chime. Sixteen hundred and seventy yards away, Henry is on point, and he has been holding for a man who briefly forgot he existed.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “When the Dog Chooses the Bird”

A letter to a father lost when his son was barely twenty. About sleigh tracks pressed into a snowy roof, a ball field carved beside an Indiana cornfield, and a photograph a mother produced years later that rearranged everything the son thought he had discovered on his own. This one is a letter, read aloud, to a man who cannot answer. Some listeners will want a quiet place for it.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “A Love Letter, Volume Two: Dear...

Every evening around 5:45, Dunham becomes aware of an emergency no one else in the house has noticed. What follows is a four-part performance: an old statesman’s failing bark, a setter’s official notice, a young wire’s silent chomping, and a puppy learning the whole arrangement from the floor. A lighter one, about the small certainties a house full of dogs is built on.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Dinnertime Symphony”

A Montana prairie, twenty-eight degrees and nearly still. Three dogs asleep in a canvas tent warmed by a stove. And a man in a zero-gravity chair under more sky than the mind can hold, learning again how to wait for the dark to open. There is a smallness that humiliates a person, and a smallness that heals. This is the second kind. The place to begin.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Night Above Bird Camp”

Something new lives here now.

This is the trailer for Chasing the Quiet Pull in audio form. The essays, read aloud, in my own voice, the way they sounded in my head when I wrote them. It opens August 17 with ten of them, and it is free.

Press play. It will explain itself.

Until the next cast….Stay steady, trust the dog, and chase the quiet pull.God bless,Abram