In Saskatchewan in the fall, it is the Snow Geese and Canada Geese in the wheat stubble, taking off as one with extended necks and incessant honking.  They fly like city drivers, making haste, coursing like blood through a vein, running red lights, peppering the grey doom of the Arctic fronts, harbingers of minus forty degrees.

When we settled into Alaska, it was the ptarmigan on the ridge above the glacier where we saw the grizzly bear while we were picking blueberries — flecked and strutting, beady eyed as chickens and taking to flight only after lingering too long.  Easy fodder.  Feet furry with feathers.  There, in that untamed state, it was also the spruce grouse bursting forth as we walked along the Klutina River, drumming into the distance with rust in his eyes, our hearts beating faster from surprise.

When we came to Arizona, it was the Gambel’s Quail at roost in the red rock wash behind the fish hatchery, on the Colorado River.  In the saturated violet of dusk I felt the covey rise up from the willow branches, brushing my cheeks with their flight feathers, cheeping and chittering as they went and I found I was in the arms of a great seraphim — all wing and flame — and I cried out, “Holy holy holy.”

On the Snake River, it is the California Quail covey busting into the breeze while Tater Tot and I hunt into the wind and setting sun, along the rapids, beside the sage.  It is the starling, moving as they will in great acrobatic swells against the snow and gale force, invasive and voracious, thinking as one, flying as one.  It is the whistle of primary feathers as the hawk zooms on the updrafts at the edge of basalt cliffs, swooping with talons open to clutch a chukar in flight as I swing my shotgun through the air and then pull up at the last moment to watch the fit as they battle for survival.  It is the short eared owls, rising from the sage as a parliament of thirteen on a crystalline winter afternoon; I wonder if I have gone deaf as they lift up, so silent are their feathers against the frozen air.

I’ve always thrilled at the sound of rushing wings.  A bird overhead.  A raven by surprise.  The thing with the beating heart to stud the sky and stall my senses.