Reading the Dog Newspaper

This is a video of Chet Baker reading the dog newspaper. He’s sifting all the scents and sounds of a moist cool August morning in 2013. I call what he's doing Bunny Nosin’. I wish I could smell everything he smells, hear everything he hears. I have not a tiny fraction of the vomeronasal scent receptors he does, so I never will. But I can get an inkling what he perceives by watching him. I love to see him plunging through grass, following his nose, taking sharp turns as his vaporous, invisible quarry turns.

I can only watch him bunnynose for so long without moving in for a little caress. If this dog knows one thing, he knows he’s cherished. I often wonder what it would be like to be the vessel for that kind of love. Where everything you did was OK, where nothing you did could offend or hurt the person who loves you. Where it’s all just pure love, untainted by resentment or jealousy or regret. Maybe dogs get and give that kind of love because they live from moment to moment. They don’t speak. They sign up to be your one true love and they give it all they’ve got until death doth part you. People make a lot of noise about doing that, but our attention spans, I think, are considerably shorter than dogs’. Maybe we could stay on task better if we only had twelve years to get it right.

It’s bittersweet, knowing that Chet, right now, is just my age in dog years. If dog years mean anything. And that come December he’ll be 63, and December 2014 he’ll turn 70. How can that be? Then again how can I, the eternal eight-year-old, be 55? None of it makes sense to me. Life just rolls on and the years toll on and I’ve no choice but to accept it all. And to love the stuffing out of this little black dog while he’s here.

From a hotel room high over Denver...JZ

For a Moment, Happy

All too soon, it was time to head east, back to North Dakota. Oh, it was hard to leave Montana, so we made one last stop at Makoshika State Park, which is a paleontological site southeast of Glendive.

We never found the dig or any fossils, but the scenery was terrific. Transformative. We drank in the evening, making the most of Montana's midnight sun, when it stays light until almost 11 pm in June.

A mule deer doe came walking carefully up a draw, her attention ahead of her.

Her huge ears swiveled side to side as if she were apprehensive of ambush.

Oh, the light was so beautiful. I could see myself painting the scene with her just so, touching light across the grasstops and casting the foreground in deep violet shadow. Oh, to have world enough and time...for now and for the foreseeable future I'm painting birds, but someday...deer.

Suddenly she vaulted into space.


She pronked high, looking for danger.

Her springy tendons and slender, resilient legs carried her high up into the air, over and over.




She wasn't so different from my daughter, whose lightness I envy as I grow closer to the earth.


The grace in these children comes alive when they are allowed to gaze out over miles of wilderness. It turns into something electric, something beautiful, infused with the spirit of the landscape.


I couldn't stop trying to keep some of it for the coming winter. And now I'm glad I did.

There is a thought scrabbling around in my head that's hard to catch and contain, so it's going to come out in pieces. It's about happiness, that most elusive of human emotions. If emotions were birds, happiness might be a rail, skulking through the dark reeds of dissatisfaction.

You can take trips with your family, and think back on them, and think, "Yeah, that was a great trip. I was really happy out there in Montana."

And what I'm thinking is: Why does that feeling have to be remembered as just part of a great trip, isolated in occasional memories, floating out there on its own? Why not look at that trip as part of a continuum of good things, an integral part of your great life, and think of it when you step back to take stock, as we so often do?

Because this is your life, this moment in Montana. And these are the people you love most.


And you set up a camera on a tripod to record this moment, this evidence that you were happy for a while.


Believe it. You are.

These are the gifts that wilderness can give to us. Small wonder we turn to it again and again.