It begins with a speckled paw arriving on a wrist around the second sip of weekend coffee. Henry places his paw on people. On forearms, on knees, on the hand brushing a different dog, like a formal objection entered into the record. Then the discovery that the setter paw is a real thing, with an older grammar than this household. But underneath the humor is a dog who arrived as Mickey, with kennel-stained feet and eyes waiting for the world to prove itself unkind again, who learned to ask, and who has spent the years since teaching every dog that follows him what belonging feels like. The paw says, I am here. The older brother says, you can be here too.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

Google Maps and the author are currently in a disagreement. The computer has a perfectly reasonable route from central North Carolina to north-central North Dakota, and he is not taking it. His map has thirty-seven pins in a folder called Rest Areas for Dogs: a little lake near Rio Grande, Ohio, a wildlife area outside Farmer City, a piece of South Dakota ground a thunderstorm found by accident and pheasants renamed Plan A From Now On. A two in the morning departure, a French press on a tailgate, a six-foot-three man sleeping diagonally in a five-foot-eight truck bed, and autumn unfolding backward through the windshield. On why the fastest way there was never the point.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The canvas is not yet light, only that deep muted purple that belongs to the Northern Plains. The stove has given up in the night, and three dogs have migrated under the blankets to negotiate for warmth. Then two logs, a clump of dryer lint, two clicks of a lighter, and a percolator set on the stove. Paw balm before anything else. Bacon in a skillet. The dogs know what comes after the collar bag. This is the part of a hunt most people never see, and the argument that it was never outside the hunt at all.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Hour Before First Light”

It arrived as an email from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks in the middle of a late July workday, and within minutes there was a calendar on one screen, regulations on the other, and October dates running down a notebook page. The season had started. Not the legal one. The other one, the one that lives in color-coded spreadsheets, a Browning Sweet Sixteen given its August oil, and a specific unremarkable piece of North Dakota ground where the first walk always begins. Sixty-three days out, and counting on purpose. On being forty-four and still carrying a number in your head that works the way Christmas used to.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “October Begins in August”

A collar weighs about 132 grams. You can set it on a kitchen scale and read the number yourself. But no scale can weigh a puppy’s first collar waiting on the counter, or a field collar being retired, or the one that has returned to emptiness after the dog who wore it is gone. Three collars, held at once. The essay to close the first ten on.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “The Weight of an Empty Collar”

Fifteen miles of north-central Montana, not far from the Canadian border, and not one bird came up. Two good dogs hunting like it was still first light. Three sheds in the grass, a jackrabbit the size of a small car, and a small voice by midday insisting the day was wasted. Then a tailgate at sundown, where the frustration did not vanish so much as lose its authority. On the days that give everything except the thing you came for.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author's own voice.

The original essay can be found here: https://chasingthequietpull.substack.com/p/when-the-hunt-is-enough

Every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, in an Indiana parking lot full of Labs and Shorthairs, someone asks why these particular breeds. The joke in the title has answered for years, because the joke is faster than the truth. This time the truth gets its turn. It runs through an eight-hour drive to Iowa, a bearded wirehair who looked like Father Time at three, a piece of mail that found the author in Afghanistan, and one sentence at a Virginia kennel that decided everything after it.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “Life is Too Short to Hunt With an Ugly Dog”

The sun catches him near Beckley, West Virginia, twenty-six hours from North Dakota, a dog in the passenger seat where he sometimes imagines his father. And a memory from a Kansas lakeshore: a young man in blaze orange, four days into hunting, walking in front of another man’s gun because no one had ever stood close enough to tell him not to. On what the passenger seat used to teach, and who is supposed to fill it now.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The original essay can be found here: “No One in the Passenger Seat”