Ben's partridge hunt in the desert

Ben Givens’s late-October hunt for Chukar in the breaks is both a return to a practice he has resumed after bereavement and the intended final outing of a man planning to end his life. As he follows the birds with his dogs, the familiar routines of hunting expose a conflict he has carried since childhood: skill in killing does not settle whether killing is right. By the end of the day, the hunt no longer seems an adequate ending, and Ben recognizes that suicide is also at odds with the life he has lived as a doctor, husband, and father.

Background and Purpose

Ben enters the hunt with a terminal cancer diagnosis and a firm expectation of what untreated disease will bring. The cancer has spread from his colon to nearby lymph nodes and sites in his liver; his medical experience makes him confident that he understands the likely progression. He anticipates severe pain and decline, including eventual care in a nursing home, and believes that ending his life first would spare him that suffering. His decision is not presented as a settled philosophical answer so much as a response to the future he fears.

The hunt takes place within that plan. Ben has chosen to die in the sagebrush country after hunting small birds, imagining the outing as a final earthly act. But the meaning he attaches to it begins to falter while he is still out on the land. The landscape and the hunt do not simply provide a setting for his intention: their particular demands bring him face to face with what he is doing, and with the inadequacy of the ending he has arranged.

Following the Birds

In the low evening light, Ben hears the Chukar calling as they feed along a ridge crest. He pauses to locate them, holds his shotgun ready, and brings his dogs close. After he advances, Tristan reacts to the birds’ scent and Rex follows it down into the breaks. Ben anticipates that the birds may flush over the slope with the low sun in his eyes. He moves carefully, adjusts his position, and waits; Tristan eventually points, while Rex has to be checked and held back.

A lone bird flushes first, flying low over the sage and away above the river. Ben lets it go. That restraint recalls a habit from his teenage years, when he sometimes passed on the first shot because a single bird could be acting as a sentry for the covey. For him, the pause had also carried a more personal weight: watching a bird escape left room for the unease he felt about taking its life.

The dogs then point together in the bunchgrass. When a Chukar rises near Rex, Ben fires. More birds flush, and he shoots again, striking a second bird at a distance. He is surprised by how well he shoots with only one eye, and the success does not feel like a simple triumph: he sees it as chance, with the cost borne by the birds. After the wounded bird moves into the sage, Tristan pursues and retrieves it. Rex brings in another bird, and Ben places both in his coat pocket before continuing the hunt.

A Practice Shadowed by Doubt

The hesitation before firing belongs to a much longer history than this outing. Ben remembers shooting mourning doves with his father when he was eight and feeling, even as a boy, that something was amiss. Hunting had become easier in his teenage years, but the unease had not disappeared. After the war, when killing had become part of his experience, he gave up hunting and fishing altogether. Following Rachel’s death, however, he returned to hunting; during the two autumns before this outing, he again shot birds in canyons and sage country and hunted waterfowl.

The dogs’ work is essential to the action rather than incidental to it: their points locate the birds, their movements shape Ben’s approach, and they retrieve what he shoots. Yet their effective partnership with him cannot resolve his moral uncertainty. Ben praises them, pockets the birds, and proceeds, while the narrative keeps the practical competence of the hunt beside his discomfort at its results. The scene therefore refuses to make either his skill or his dogs’ service a justification for killing.

He continues downhill, misses one bird, then takes others, including one after a second shot and another after a long, patient swing. He calls this his last hunt, but the declaration does not give the day the finality he expected. Holding the last bird, he considers the circumstances he had chosen for his death: alone in dry sage country, after killing small birds. The act seems cruel and insufficient to him. The hunt and the land cannot make that ending meaningful merely because he intended them to be his final setting.

Reconsidering the Ending

Ben’s recognition is double-edged. He sees that hunting as his final earthly act is misdirected and incompatible with his life as a doctor, husband, and father. But he also sees that suicide conflicts with that life. The realization does not amount to a clear decision to abandon his plan; rather, it breaks the apparent logic by which he had joined the hunt to his chosen death. Neither killing birds nor killing himself can stand as an adequate summary of who he has been.

The physical effort of the return leaves him tired, in pain, and short of breath. As darkness falls, he climbs toward his rucksack and waits when he is too exhausted for the long walk back into Vantage. The hunt thus ends not with a resolved declaration but with his immediate purpose unsettled. Its significance lies in that interruption: a man who had treated his death as inevitable and carefully chosen encounters, through the very activity meant to accompany it, a reason to doubt the ending he had planned.