quail

Quail are the central quarry of Ben Givens’s autumn hunting, a pursuit that begins as a way to fill the emptiness after Rachel Givens’s death and becomes the cover for his intended suicide. The birds bind together two versions of his life: the boyhood country he shared with his brother, Aidan Givens, and the solitary journey he plans as an old, ill man. In the movement from patient pursuit to an imagined final meal, quail hunting carries both the habits of a lived landscape and the moral weight of Ben’s wish to disappear.

Return to Hunting

At seventy-three, Ben has taken up shooting birds on the wing for the first time since he was a teenager. He has been doing so for nineteen months, since Rachel’s death, after leaving his work as a surgeon and finding himself with too much idle time. Hunting offers a particular shape to the hours: he can walk the country, let his dogs search ahead, and wait for quail to hold when the dogs point. The pursuit is not a new hobby detached from his past; it reopens a landscape and practice already formed in childhood.

That renewed habit also gives Ben a plausible explanation for leaving home. He tells Renee and Chris that he is going over the mountains to hunt quail in willow canyons, without naming a particular canyon. He says he expects to return Thursday, perhaps Friday or Saturday if the hunting is good. The open-ended schedule is designed to keep his family from worrying for as long as a week, by which time he expects to be dead in the sage. He has just been diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, but withholds the news, imagining that telling them would bring the illness into a family only beginning to emerge from the grief of Rachel’s death.

The Country of His Childhood

The hunting ground belongs to a larger working landscape. Ben’s parents planted apple trees on the east bank of the Columbia River, where the orchards ended at a desert of buttes, coulees, and unnamed canyons. The family’s year revolved around demanding orchard labor: Ben made boxes, tended the garden, split wood, milked cows, helped clear irrigation ditches, and worked through the successive tasks of planting, thinning, propping, picking, and pruning. Beyond the cultivated rows, he and Aidan took dogs in search of quail, chukars, and sage grouse, occasionally shooting a jackrabbit.

The brothers’ outings joined hunting to movement through country they knew intimately. When they had horses, they rode with shotguns across their backs and canteens knocking against their saddles. Sometimes they camped among the sage, drew and spitted the birds, tucked sage sprigs into their emptied bodies, and cooked them over a small twig fire. Afterward they lay back, hands behind their heads, talking and watching the sky. Quail thus belong not only to the moment of the shot but to a repeated sequence of travel, camp, food, and companionship. In the remembered country, the hunt is part of a shared life with Aidan, set beside the work of the orchard and the open desert beyond it.

The Willow-Canyon Hunt

During a rainy pause in the cherry harvest, Ben takes the dogs into a willow canyon to hunt. The rain has stopped by noon; the air is fresh, the sun strong, and the dogs work with their tongues hanging out, pausing to drink at muddy springs. A game trail winds through the draw. They follow it steadily and plunge into thickets without needing Ben to urge them on.

About an hour into the outing, they flush a small covey from bramble and thorn. The hunt then breaks into pursuit of single birds uphill. The quail stream out across the sage, then turn back into the canyon’s cover, seeking shade among the willows. Within half an hour Ben brings four birds down. He rests by a spring, looking over the orchard country and the sunlit Columbia River, with snow still on the mountains’ north faces. The place has been a resting point before for him and Aidan; nearby are the charred remains of a fire ring where they once cooked birds on spits. In this present hunt, the remembered campsite makes the landscape double: Ben is alone with the dogs, but the ground retains the trace of an earlier companionship.

The Hunt as Cover and Farewell

Ben’s trip is carefully furnished to look ordinary. He packs his upland vest, shooting gloves, shotgun sling, and a box of twenty-five number 8 shells, along with the maps and equipment for an extended stay outdoors. At home he even leaves a quail-on-toast recipe card loosely turned in its box, beside the sink. Such details belong to his effort to make the house appear as if a man has left for a routine bird-hunting trip and expects to return.

The difference between that appearance and his actual purpose is stark. At the end of the day’s hunting, Ben intends to let his dogs go on the sage country, hang himself from strands of barbed wire, and shoot himself in the neck. He has considered how to make his absence seem accidental and how long it will take his family to search for him. The birds, in this plan, provide the reason for departure and the ordinary-looking frame around an extraordinary intention.

He also imagines eating a quail breast, spit-cooked over a fire, as his last meal. The image draws directly on the old practice of the brothers’ camps, but its meaning has changed: nourishment once shared after a hunt would now be food consumed by a man who expects his body to feed worms and maggots. The imagined meal makes the rupture between Ben’s childhood and present plan concrete. Quail hunting gives him a route into remembered country, yet he initially means to end that journey in the same wilderness that once held work, family, and companionship.

Narrative Significance

Quail recur where Ben’s two deepest circumstances meet: his enduring attachment to the Columbia River country and his attempt to make a final day look like another hunt. The birds are pursued through dogs, cover, and familiar terrain, so the hunt depends on attention to a living world rather than on abstract reflection. At the same time, killing them raises a quiet contradiction: Ben’s planned departure turns a sustaining practice—walking, hunting, cooking—into an instrument for concealing his death.

The remembered meals with Aidan and the present-day hunt therefore do more than establish a history of outdoor skill. They measure how far Ben has moved from shared life, while preserving the sensory and practical details through which that life remains available to memory. Even the recipe card and the intended spit-cooked breast carry the ordinary language of food into the shadow of his plan. Quail hunting begins as a return to an old pursuit after bereavement; in the book’s larger arc, it becomes part of the journey on which Ben confronts whether he still wants the world he set out to leave.