Ben's decision to resume hunting in the Wanapum River valley

Ben Givens’s decision to resume hunting in the Wanapum River valley reverses a retreat set in motion by an accident. Stranded outside Vantage with Tristan and Rex, he had accepted that the expedition was thwarted and that he must get home before reconsidering how to meet his end. Yet at the far side of the Columbia River, when a drifter points him toward another chance to hitchhike, Ben instead chooses to hunt chukars. The choice does not resolve his crisis; it gives him a different immediate course, one that leads out of the roadside impasse and into the open country he had come to enter.

From Thwarted Expedition to Retreat

The turning point begins beside the river, where Ben sits with his dogs and weighs the prospect of spending time in a motel. He strokes Tristan’s flank and Rex’s belly and withers, and gradually accepts that the accident has defeated his expedition. Rather than pass time in Vantage, he decides that he must get home by whatever means he can, retreat, recover, and later reconsider how to meet his end. His decision is practical, but its sequence matters: recovery and reconsideration are deferred, not abandoned.

Ben gathers his rucksack and duffel and leads the dogs back to the highway. Hitchhiking, which he has not done in fifty-five years, becomes his apparent necessity. With his bags on the shoulder and the dogs restless beside him, he holds out his thumb, but passing drivers do not stop. He had assumed he would be able to get home; instead, he is stranded. His difficulty is sharpened by the contrast with the world he remembers from boyhood in orchard country, where wanderers could fall in with other wanderers and find a ride. Now traffic rushes past, and he recognizes himself as one of the strangers drivers fear. The failed attempt makes the plan to retreat less like a straightforward return than another uncertain undertaking.

Crossing the Columbia River

A drifter helps Ben cross the highway bridge. Carrying Ben’s duffel over his shoulder, he leads while Ben follows with his rucksack and keeps both dogs on tight leashes. They proceed single file along the narrow way, with traffic coming toward them on the north side. Below the bridge, mallards rise in a slow flush and settle farther downriver. The crossing is at once a practical passage and a change in Ben’s view of what remains possible: on the eastern side, the breaks rise toward the plateau, and he thinks of hunting chukars there.

The country is new to him, a stretch he has never hunted. Ben briefly measures that unfamiliarity against the larger uncertainty of his situation, then recognizes that it need not prevent him from doing what he came to do. At the intersection with Highway 26, the drifter sets down the duffel and tells him he has made it. Ben acknowledges that he is there without knowing exactly why. The remark leaves the purpose unsettled: he has reached the far side, but has not yet decided whether to continue toward home or resume the expedition.

Choosing the Hunt

The drifter’s practical suggestion is to leave the dogs in the bushes and try hitchhiking again. Ben refuses. He believes there may be chukar in the breaks and says he came to hunt, so he will hunt them. The drifter identifies the change in course; Ben accepts it plainly, adding that changing one’s mind happens. Their exchange makes the reversal explicit without presenting it as a grand resolution. A moment earlier, getting home had seemed unavoidable; now Ben chooses the uncertain terrain in front of him over another attempt to secure a ride.

The drifter says that changing his mind is normal for him, then wishes Ben happy hunting and advises him to take care of the dogs. Ben sets Tristan and Rex free, and they range ahead as he starts uphill. The decision is therefore enacted in a series of concrete movements: the bags and highway are left behind, the leashes are released, and Ben follows the dogs into the desert country. He does not claim to have solved the question of his life or death. Instead, he commits himself to the activity that brought him there, now in a place he does not know.

The Landscape and Its Effect

The climb makes the renewed hunt bodily demanding. Ben passes bands of basalt marked by pale streaks of bird droppings and stops twice to catch his breath, bent with his palms on his knees. From above, he can see the bridge, the silver-tinted Columbia River, and the dam at Wanapum. The terrain is not merely a backdrop to his decision: its steepness tests his injured, unsettled body, while its open distances give the hunt a real direction and scale. The drifter remains visible below, still hitchhiking, a reminder of the alternative Ben has declined.

As Ben climbs, the prairie’s sage and the dampness held in the earth become more immediate than the unresolved question of his end. The sky stretches unbroken above the canyon walls and basalt flows; Ben feels momentary vertigo, then takes courage from the desert’s pungent smell. His life and death grow, as he had expected they might, less disturbing and somehow inconsequential. That shift is temporary in scope but decisive in the scene: he has not found a final answer, yet attention has moved from abstract deliberation toward the present work of walking and hunting.

He continues north along the ridge, with the river below to the west and the dogs working at an angle to the October breeze. Rabbit brush, purple sage, and bunchgrass frame their search. The dogs flush sparrows repeatedly; Rex rousts them again after they dart into cover, sending them away across the hills. A hawk crosses the land in shadow, circles on the river breezes, and moves south across the breaks. Ben stops to remove his rucksack and drink water, feeling less raw and fragile despite a ligament behind his left knee bound by the climb. The hunt’s renewed purpose lies in this sustained engagement with place, animals, exertion, and observation: after the accident made retreat seem necessary, Ben has chosen to keep moving through the country on his own terms.