chukar

The chukar is the quarry at the center of Ben Givens’s late-October hunt in the breaks above the Columbia River. Heard before it is seen, first encountered as a solitary bird and then revealed in a larger covey, it gives the hunt a living presence that resists Ben Givens’s attempt to treat it as a final, sufficient act. The birds are game, but they are not merely targets: their calls, evasions, and return to cover shape the pace of the encounter, while the weight of one in Ben Givens’s hand unsettles the purpose he brought to the landscape.

Place in the Hunt

The Winchester Model 21 shotgun Ben Givens carries has a history reaching back to his childhood. His father took him to shoot mourning doves at the edge of the apple orchards when he was eight, and the gun was later adapted to fit him. It was choked for quail and chukars, placing the chukar within a family inheritance of hunting even before the present hunt begins. That inheritance is morally divided: his father taught him how to shoot, while his mother objected to killing small birds for pleasure. Ben Givens remembers the birds he killed as a child and the regret that accompanied eating them, a memory that makes the present encounter part of a much older uncertainty rather than a new one.

The hunt takes place on unfamiliar ground. After crossing a highway bridge over the Columbia River, Ben Givens sees the breaks rising toward the plateau and decides to hunt chukars there. Mallards lift from the water nearby, but he has come for different birds. The chukars occupy the open country above the river, moving along a ridge crest where bunchgrass offers food and cover. Their setting is not simply a backdrop: the birds’ position on the ridge and their likely escape route over the breaks determine where Ben Givens stands, how he moves, and whether he can shoot without the low sun in his eyes.

Calls, Cover, and the First Flush

At early evening, as the light fades, Ben Givens hears the chukars before his dogs find their scent. The birds forage among the blades and seeds of the bunchgrass, separating as they feed and calling to one another. Their quick, social calls help him locate them, although he knows their sound can seem to come from everywhere at once. He pauses, listens, and calls the dogs close before moving toward the ridge.

The dogs then pick up the trail. Tristan grows agitated and advances into the breeze; Rex cuts down into the breaks, following the scent. The calls stop. Ben Givens anticipates that the birds will rise over the break and that the sinking sun will interfere with his view, so he moves carefully and prepares for a flush. Tristan eventually points, while Rex continues working through the cover until Ben Givens tells him to hold. In the stillness, Ben Givens recalls a habit from his teenage years: he sometimes passed on the first chukar, which could act as a sentry and rise apart from the feeding covey. Letting that first bird go had also carried a more difficult feeling, a sense of hesitation that hunting never wholly removed.

The lone chukar finally rises low over the sage and flies out above the river. Ben Givens lets it go. The dogs move on, and soon point together in the bunchgrass, each holding a different, fixed posture. This time a bird flushes close to Rex, and Ben Givens shoots. More chukars rise at once—at least a dozen, scattering from cover—and he swings the shotgun toward another bird. It flies higher and away wounded. The sudden abundance overturns the expectation of a controlled encounter: the covey’s collective movement has left Ben Givens astonished, and his effective shooting troubles him rather than gratifying him. With one eye impaired, he finds it difficult to regard his success as anything but luck, a result that makes the birds’ deaths seem especially unjust to him.

Retrieval and the Cost of Killing

After the flush, the remaining chukars settle below him. Ben Givens knows they may stay quiet for a time, then call as they seek to reunite. He wants to hunt them while they are still likely to hold in cover, but the wounded bird requires attention first. Tristan works toward it; when it leaves cover, the dog follows and retrieves it. Ben Givens feels sullied by the episode. The bird’s fate is part of the practical work of a hunt, yet it also sharpens the doubt already present in his mind about taking life.

At the crest, Ben Givens holds that bird while Rex brings another and places it on a flat rock. He praises both dogs, then pockets the birds. The detail of handling and carrying them makes the hunt concrete: these are not abstract shots or a tally alone, but animals that remain physically present after the shooting. Ben Givens drinks water, changes from sunglasses to his ordinary glasses, and continues, telling himself this will be his last hunt. He leaves his rucksack behind and moves slowly downhill, missing on one opportunity before taking further shots at birds that flush from different kinds of cover. The encounter continues through separate, uncertain chances rather than a single decisive burst.

The last chukar he holds is described by its dark eye band, barred flanks, chestnut tail, and layered feathers. Ben Givens notices that it is still warm. The description gives the bird a particularity that resists reducing it to game: it has markings and texture, and it carries the recent fact of life into his hands. He puts it in his coat pocket, as he did the earlier birds, but the act of keeping it does not make the hunt feel complete.

The Chukar and Ben Givens’s Reconsideration

The birds matter to Ben Givens because the hunt is meant to serve as his final earthly undertaking. Holding the last bird, he recognizes that he had chosen to die under circumstances he now finds cruel: alone in arid country, after killing small birds. He cannot make that ending fit the life he has known as a doctor, husband, and father. The chukar does not simply resolve his crisis, and the passage does not present the animal as a deliberate moral messenger. Instead, its living presence and the acts required to hunt it make the proposed ending newly difficult to accept.

Ben Givens’s doubts have roots in childhood, returned after his wartime experience, and persisted when he resumed hunting after Rachel’s death. Here they gather around the chukar. Hunting and suicide, which he had treated as parts of one intended departure, both appear at odds with the life and understanding he recognizes as his own. The bird becomes the immediate measure of that contradiction: a successful shot cannot supply meaning, and possession of the bird cannot make killing an adequate final act. As darkness falls, Ben Givens climbs back toward his rucksack, tired and in pain. The hunt has not delivered the clean conclusion he expected; the chukars have instead made visible the moral and personal incompleteness of the plan.