Читать книгу Never Cry Halibut. and Other Alaska Hunting and Fishing Tales онлайн

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After high school, I ventured beyond Juneau, and my shotgun and .22 collected dust in my parents’ closet. While I tried to navigate college, work, and travel, I felt remorseful for leaving Buff behind. While I tried to figure out what to do with my life, I forgot how much our hunts and explorations meant to me. When I visited home, I could tell the strength of our bond had weakened. Buff became horribly arthritic, and I blamed myself for working him too hard. I cringed when he yelped while climbing the stairs.

For our last hunt, my little brother, Reid, and I took him grouse hunting. He gimped up the hill but happily retrieved the birds we shot. Afterward he could barely walk for days. Two autumns later, he could hardly walk at all. Reid would sometimes carry him to a duck blind. While he and Buff waited for a flock to fly overhead, he massaged Buff’s atrophied, shivering hips. After a shot, when a duck plummeted from the slate-gray sky, for a moment Buff forgot how crippled he was, plunged into the water, and proudly retrieved the bird. That winter, while I was halfway around the world, I called my family from a dilapidated payphone. My dad told me he’d had to put Buff down.