August 2021 - 47
and pine pulls him and his rifle or shotgun
and now a different dog, a setter, into herds
of elk and coveys of blue grouse and more
sage chickens and now chukar and Huns.
His fly rod waves over brown and rainbow
trout, and he laughs with new friends who
share this blood. It is a sporting life, drawn
from those ponderosas of long ago, laid open
beneath a Western sky, tolerated but always
encouraged by those kind parents. Elk and
mule deer and whitetails, and even bighorn
sheep and moose and caribou. Cutthroat and
grayling and Dolly Varden and salmon. Still
collecting, is he. Far away and over the phone,
father and mother share in those stories and
they go places too, like Alaska, Scotland and
Hawaii, but they come home to the pines and
as the years bring them the brittle reality of
the human body creeping toward a century
of life, they listen to the pines. Outlasting
but fading. Fading.
One day years later, his brother calls and
says it is time to come home. Time to sit at
the bedside of his dying father, hold his hand
and tell him how wonderful this life of love
and pines has been. He does this night after
night and then as the breath whispers from
the old man's lungs, he says goodbye. He goes
back north for a short time, to his family, to
his little boy who made the old man twinkle
with laughter for too few years. He calls his
mother often now for she has only the voices
of the ponderosas on the west wind.
Months later, he returns to remember and
help spread the bone and powder that is the
dust of a life while his old mother cries. The
ashes are scattered into the meadow where the
bison roam, up against a stump of an old ponderosa
where once the boy of 3 found an Easter
egg and his parents laughed and wondered
what kind of a man their boy would become.
That night the man, still a boy, rolls out
a bedroll beneath the pines and his mother,
now well into her 80s, laughs at him sleeping
outside with the ponderosas when there is a
perfectly good bed just steps away. But he is
saying goodbye and this is where he belongs.
Beneath the pines. Always.
- Tom Reed lives near the mountains of Yellowstone
with his family, bird dogs, horses, chickens and other
assorted friends on a thriving organic farm. In the
spring he plants ponderosa pines there. His books are
available in the Game and Fish Store.
- Lori Eslick is an illustrator, artist, presenter, children's
picture book illustrator, author and workshop leader.
She regularly creates illustrations for Wyoming Wildlife
magazine's Wild Country Dispatch column. More of her
work can be seen at eslickart.com.
Wyoming Wildlife | 47
http://www.eslickart.com
August 2021
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of August 2021
August 2021 - 1
August 2021 - 2
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