Ten minutes out the back of the house, through longleaf pines, there is a bend in the creek where a four-inch ledge gives the water its voice. He has carried prayers down there, and fears too heavy to carry back up the hill. This June morning, the drought had taken the song. The ledge sat dry. The bed lay open to its bones, stones he never knew were down there, roots crossing the banks like old veins, and one small dark pool holding what was left of the water and most of the life in those woods. He sat on the fallen holly that refuses to die and stayed anyway. On what remains when a thing you trust goes quiet, and the difference between waiting and being forgotten.

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

It begins in a checkout line, with a green dinosaur, a Highland cow, and a rainbow trout in the cart, each selected for a specific dog who requested none of them. What follows is the full audit: a three-foot stuffed peanut that has inexplicably survived twelve years and one interstate move, a setter who guards a small alligator for hours before eating him without explanation, a wirehair whose true love is house slippers, a puppy who prefers yard debris, and roughly sixteen hundred dollars of investment portfolio scattered under the furniture. A lighter one, about the consumer survey the dogs have been conducting for years, and why we keep refusing to read the results.

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

The full essay can be found here: The Toys They Never Asked For

The first time he packed for a hunting trip to North Dakota, he packed like he was deploying to Afghanistan. What followed: nine days, three resupply runs into town, a borrowed knife, a young dog whose paws were ruined by day three, and a dunce cap the camp made him wear because he had earned it. He drove home, sat down at his desk, and started a list. The current list is version thirty-three, with tabs, sub-lists, and a dog medical kit that could nearly support surgery. On the night that kit repaid every year of refinement, and a theory about what most of what we call wisdom actually is.

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

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”