Refuge Notebook: If the goose honks high

Some mornings are darker than others, and then there are the mornings Steve calls “as black as the inside of a cow.” The first day of September this year was not one of those mornings. I wished it was. If clouds block out the stars and the moon, the ducks might be flying low. That’s a good thing for duck hunters.

Many years ago, when fall only made me think of school supplies, I didn’t consider the weather as the great composer of our lives. If the sun was out and the temperature was above 60 degrees, I might go for a walk outside.

Later, when I listened to Steve and his father talk on the phone, I would smile at the way their conversations went: a few minutes of introductory comments about the current weather, a review with commentary on the previous weeks’ weather, including a lengthy historical context, and closing with a detailed forecast for the season ahead.

I once thought talk about the weather meant small talk. But it isn’t small talk to hunters and farmers. Steve grew up in North Dakota, where his dad stood on the other end of the line — he still had a phone connected to a wall off the kitchen, where he leaned with a view of a wheat field.

If I thought they were a couple of guys incapable of a very deep or complicated conversation, that only revealed my shallow understanding. In the nearly 20 seasons that followed my adult-onset hunting life, I’ve learned that what I sometimes consider the deepest part of myself is more often an abyss of distracted and abstracted thought where the rule of weather is not a daily reckoning but something that happens “outside.”

In the early morning hours on the opening day of the waterfowl season, a 110-pound chocolate Lab whined from inside our vehicle. His sole desire, as best I can translate from the way he launched his heavy body from the floorboards into the sedge grass, splashed through a salt pond, and led us daringly into the dark morning at 5 a.m., was to be alive in that moment.

The sound of gulls filled the air like so much frothy salt. It wasn’t the noise of the indoors — the hum under florescent lights that becomes unconscious even as it obliterates living sound. As much as some might not think the clamor of gulls is particularly delightful, it is an irrepressible cacophony of a certain place and time. Unprocessed sound, like unprocessed food and weather, feeds our minds, bodies and spirits.

Rigby ignored the gulls in the sky and on the ground, preferring to explore the familiar as if it were the great unknown, nose into the grass in search of shrew nests, and read the smells left by the tide. When a flock of teal whisked across the western sky, his body jolted to a stop. Steve and I knelt in the grass beside him. Rigby dropped his rear into the mud, and we waited for the ducks to pass, though they did not.

It was another dog, Winchester, who showed me the dream Steve had of Alaska as a boy. I grew up here but never veered off trail enough to see the country. The way Winchester ran the high valleys and plateaus in the alpine, rounded a cirque in a wide-open run, his nose in the air, felt like the way we all ought to do it. The beauty of his joy for life did not just exceed the colors of fall on the hills; they complemented each other.

After saying goodbye to Winchester earlier this year and fearing the loss of the mountains as he revealed him to us, I was happy to spend early mornings and evenings on the duck flats with Rigby, who loves the same coastal marsh loved by ducks and geese.

Labs had always been our duck dogs — old faithful friends and skywatchers in love with all varieties of mud. It seemed apparent to me on that clear morning that mountain days following an English setter into the hills after elusive upland game birds were behind us. Why not enjoy the peace of a morning in a duck blind with the smooth pour of hot coffee from a thermos to knock off the chill and a good duck dog at your side?

Within a week of reconciling my plans, a new dog joined our family. Fausti, a five-year-old Setter-Springer mix who loves water and cannot stand to stay at home, was a ball of nervous energy her first family could not indulge. When Steve suggested we take her out on the flats, which Winchester would have loathed for its abundance of water, I wondered what a little black and white dog would do with so much marsh.

As I watched her exhilaration at being let loose in the wild, my heart began to open to the possibility that I was wrong about a pretty dog in a muddy place. The call of nature and water thrilled her. She bounded through the grass and bounced across the sloughs. She ran through water in a dazzle of white and black, nosing into the mud to buck it as she moved, more dance than a marathon. She circled back close enough to us not to jump ducks too far out as we made our way.

It proved that there is no such thing as the right kind of dog for the right kind of place or weather. There is only the richness of being outdoors — the warmth of the sun, the clean rain, the wind in your face, and the coming snow.

We are our best selves outside. Fausti can barely catch her breath to tell us how much fun she’s having, and Rigby’s tail wags as if to share the words we might say if necessary.

None of us share many words, but when we do, it’s about the weather.

Christine Cunningham, a lifelong Alaskan, and Steve Meyer, born in North Dakota and living in Alaska since 1971, have collaborated as outdoor writers and columnists for 20 years. They currently live on the Kenai Peninsula with a large family of hunting dogs. Their current book, “The Land We Share: A Love Affair Told in Hunting Stories,” is available from Alaska Geographic. Join them on October 11 at 5:30 p.m. at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center, Soldotna, for a conversation about the weather.