When I first got married, I was thrust into the job of fathering a young stepson, Wesley.  One of the things that always seemed strange to me, then and now, is the reality of “play dates” for kids, wherein parents schedule times for kids to play.  I feel bad for kids now, they have all of their school activities regimented as well as after school activities (parents are obsessed with extracurricular activities as a way to make children stand out in a crowd of applicants for college) and then the poor kiddos even have their free time planned for them!  They will never know the joy of walking into the woods with no agenda just to see what might happen, and find themselves in a creek catching trout,  or making a tree fort, or doing anything without adult supervision.  Those times where adults were absent were key moments for understanding social dynamics—how to make a smart decision, how to deal with a bully, what to do when someone steals your baseball glove, figuring out what friendship means and then forming lifelong friendships.  Nope, it seems kids are under the watching eyes of adults until they go to college and then the sudden blast of freedom is almost too much for them—sometimes it is too overwhelming as they transition from 18 years of parental hovering to adulthood.  Well, anyway, that’s reality now, I guess.
            In recent years, I discovered, that my wife does the same thing for me.  She is always convinced that I need new friends, and she then sets up play dates.  Actually, they are typically suppers in restaurants where she and her friend are eating, and they both decide that the husbands should become friends too.  This almost never works out, as my wife works at the university, and most of the men in the area are not like minded with me—they don’t hunt, they don’t fish. They don’t even have dogs!  If they do have a dog it wears sweaters in the winter and the closest thing it does to hunting is digging through the garbage can!
            A few Christmases ago, Renee took the play dates to a new level, and that was in the form of these “white elephant gift exchange parties.”  Okay, so these are basically Christmas parties, but no one at the university would dare say the word “Christmas” because that might be offensive.  It turns out that everyone in my wife’s office hosts one of these.
            “When do you host one?” I asked my wife, Renee.
            “Well, I can’t,” she said.
            “Why not?”
            “Ever seen that Christmas Story movie?” She asked.
            “The BB Gun movie?  Yeah, I love that movie!”
            “You know how the neighbors are the Bumpuses and they have all those annoying hound dogs?” She held her arms out wide, palms raised.
            “Yeah,” I said.
            “Honey,” she pointed at a couch full of hunting beagles,” We are the Bumpuses!”
            “Nah,” I said, “Not at all.  I think those might have been bloodhounds in the movie.  We have beagles.”
            “Well, anyway, I hold ours at the church, so no one has to endure begging from beagles while they eat cookies and store bought eggnog.  I already had my party.  You haven’t made any of these office parties, because you have been hunting every time we have one.”
            “That makes sense,” I saId.
            “Well, everyone else brings their husbands!”
            “They probably don’t hunt,” I said, “Poor fellows.”
            “There is one white elephant gift party left, and please could you go?”
            “When is it?”
            “Tomorrow, at seven o’clock and it will be dark, and you will be home from the woods.”
            “Why is is called white elephant?” I asked.
            I will summarize her answer as I understand it.  They have a half dozen of these parties, and to save money on gift giving, each couple brings a used item, wrapping it.  The first person opens a gift and keeps it.  Then the next person does the same and can keep it or trade with the first gift.  The third person opens a gift and can keep it or trade with either the first or second person.  And so on.  At the end, the last person opens the final gift and can keep it or swap with anyone else.  Obviously, you want to be in the last person to open your gift, and then you get whatever you want.  The order in which gifts are open is determined by drawing numbers out of a hat.
            “Alright, I said, “I can make it, I guess.”
            I was hunting the next day, not long before dark, when my cellphone started buzzing in my pocket.  I ignored it.  It buzzed. And again.  A fourth time.
            “Hello?” I whispered into the phone.
            “I wont get to the house before this party, because I have to stay on campus to get a class session started.” Renee was frantic.
            “What party?” I whispered.
            “Are you kidding me!  The white elephant party.  We talked about this yesterday.”
            “Yes, that’s right,” I whispered.
            “Why are you whispering?”
            “The dogs are chasing a rabbit, and I do not want to give away my location to the rabbit.  I gotta go, they are getting close.”
            “Hey!” Renee yelled, “I need you to go home when you are done, wrap up a nice present that people will like and use, and then meet me at the party.  I will text you the address.”
            “No problem, your gal pals all have dogs right?”
            “Yes.  What are you goin—“
            “I gotta get ready to shoot.” I hung up.
            I cleaned rabbits, went home, fed dogs, and actually got to the party before Renee.  I walked in with my gift in a long box that originally held a floor lamp.  I couldn’t find wrapping paper, so I just duct taped it shut.
            “You must be Bob,” a gal opened the door, “I am Mary.”
            “Merry Christmas,” I said.
            “We say Happy Holidays, to be inclusive.”
            “Ah,” I said, “No Christians here?”
            “Um, actually, I think everyone here is a Christian.” She sipped her eggnog and scratched her head as she took a faith inventory of the room, “Yeah.  All Christians.”
            “Well then, Happy Holidays,” I held out the box.”
            “Just put it over there in the pile,” Mary said, “But we all know it is a lamp!”
            I chatted with a guy named Chad about some computer stuff he does and that I do not understand, and then with a nervous guy named Mike, whose wife yelled at him a lot, and then Renee finally showed up.
            “You didn’t wrap the present,” she asked me, trying not to move  her mouth as she talked.
            “I couldn’t find the wrapping paper,” I tried to be a ventriloquist too.
            “It was right inside the front door.”
            “Ah,” I said, “I used the basement door.”
            “The wrapping paper has been there for weeks!”
            “Oh yeah?” I said.
            When gift time came, My gift was opened early, “We could use a lamp, the husband of the couple said.”  They then pulled out a tie out stake.  The sort that we use to  put hounds on the ground at field trials or after hunts, to drink water and do their business and not wander off to—you know—be hounds.
            “What did you do?” Renee glared at me.
            “That one is hardly used,” I said, “And it is one of the big ones, almost three feet long, made for big dogs.  You know I switched over to the new ones, only eighteen inches, when they started making them.  Plenty deep into the ground to hold a beagle.”
            “Oh, a mystery!” Mike said as he held it up.
            “What is that thing?” His wife screamed and Mike flinched.
            “That is a—“ Renee covered my mouth.
            “You can’t tell us,” Mary said, “If someone doesn’t know what it is, then the people have to decide if it might be valuable or not. At the end you can tell them what it is,, if they still do not know.”
            “How often does it happen that you do not know what it is?” I asked.
            “Usually most people know what it is,” Mary said, but I do not recognize this thing.  Anyone else?”  It turns out that no one knew what a tie out stake is.  This was a good one too, with a sideways U at the top that sat on a swivel so that the dog could not wrap the attached chain around the stake and get choked.  Picture, if you will, a really long stake shaped like the letter “P” but the vertical line of the “P” is ten times longer—thirty inches to be precise.
            “You are in so much trouble,” Renee poked an elbow into my side.
            “You are a dog person,” Mike said, “I bet it is a dog leash that is also a walking cane. I think we should keep it.”
            “The next person took the stake too, “I bet this thing is for holding down your beach chair so the waves don’t move it!” the woman said as she swapped a wooden bowl for the stake.
            “I bet it is a thing for smoothing cement!” Chad traded for it, “And my brother-in-law could use this thing.”
            “I think it is for helping you get out of the snow if your car gets stuck, that looks like a snow chain,” another gentleman said, taking it.  The ideas just kept coming.  We opened up a little coaster that heats your coffee mug. “Coffee doesn’t last long enough to get cold,” Renee said, “We will take the wooden bowl, since it is against the rules to get your own gift back.”
            When it was all said and done, we showed them a picture of the tie out stake in action.
            “That’s close to what I thought it was!” The recipient of the stake said, “I figured it was a toddler retention system to keep them safe in the yard, it attaches to the belt loop!”
            “Oh,” I said, “I would be afraid of a kid  running and falling on the steel stake, even though it is rounded.  But if you are going to do that, I can get you another one for when you set up play dates.”
            “Oh, that is so kind,” the young mother said, “You really made this white elephant gift exchange party quite interesting.”
            “Merry Christmas!” I held my eggnog in the air.
            “Merry Christmas!” Everyone yelled, sipping their eggnog and eating cookies.
           

           “Hey,” my wife, Renee, said to me on the phone, “I went to that new pet store in town.”
            “Oh,” I said, while thinking to myself, “How much did this trip cost?”
            “Diamond really likes this bull pizzle!”
            “Do you know what pizzle is?” I asked.
            “No.”
            “Good,” I said, “I will be home soon.”
            Not only did my wife not know what pizzle is, my spellcheck on the word processor doesn’t know the word wither, underlining it in red every time it is typed.As you may already know, pizzle is penis.  If you are surprised to hear this, you should have seen the shock on Renee’s face, when I got home, and she was holding a handful of the sticks in her hand, “These things are not cheap, but the dogs love them, especially Diamond!
            “Great,” I said, I will never keep her out of any pasture with a bull or beef steers again.  She will be jumping as high as she can, and I will have to protect her from getting stomped.”
            “What?”
            “Bull pizzle is penis,” I said, imitating the vocal cadence of  Charlton Heston when he said “Soylent Green is people!” In the movie “Soylent Green.”  Apparently, she never saw the movie, and never saw a good impersonation of Heston before. “Damn you all to hell!”is my other Heston impersonation, from the end of “Planet of the Apes” when he realizes he has been on earth all along.  I don’t know if Renee has seen that movie.  Anyway, she stood there looking at Diamond gnawing away on her prize, and then looking at her hand, which held a half dozen pizzle sticks.
            “The people at the store said that they were good for cleaning the dogs’ teeth.  That doesn’t seem possible.”
            “Well, they are very dehydrated.”
            “I guess so,” Renee looked at Diamond, who was flattened out on her belly, holding the treat between her two front paws, and as happy as could be, “She has been working on this for almost an hour.”
            “Well,” I said, “How did you like the new pet store in town?” I was hoping to get an idea how expensive the prices might be, and maybe what the total bill was for the venture.”
            “I don’t care,” Renee shook her head, looking at Diamond, “I am still going to buy them…” she tossed the remaining treats down into the plastic shopping bag, hastily, as if she was playing a game of “Hot Potato” and the music was about to stop!  Note: Hot Potato was a game that kids played back in the 1900s before we had handheld video games, cell phones, gaming systems, or money.  You can google it.
            At any rate, we have been doing our best to clean the teeth on our mutts ever since paying a lot of money for some extractions.  As expensive as this pizzle might be, it an save money in the long run. It is pretty safe too—if made by a reputable manufacturer, because it is easily digested (unlike rawhide) and there are no splinters, like often happens with bones.  They are caloric, and that may mean cutting back on kibbles on a day when they are utilized.  If my dogs are running hard I don’t really worry about the calories, but in the summer I will monitor the food intake—I tend to run my hounds less in the summer months, not wanting to injure them in the higher temperatures.  There are other ways, and less expensive, to look after the  dental health of our hounds, and I use those snacks too.
            I do feed bones to my pooches, though I will be honest, some dogs are not as interested as others.  Many vets are apprehensive of bones, but I will use the knuckle bones as a way of removing tartar and keeping the gums healthy. I will get the store bought ones on occasion, but I also will get plain old soup bones from the grocery store too, which are cheaper.  There is a place near me that sells pork bones for fifty cents!  Trust me, that is cheaper than pizzle.  I watch them and take away the bone when it gets too small.  Whether is is pizzle or bones, I usually give them one per week, never more than two,  When they are running hard, I will give them a bone to gnaw one night and maybe pizzle or even a pig ear on another night of the week.
            Pig ears are also beneficial, but some of my dogs just go through them way too fast to get the cleaning benefit on the teeth,  During the hunting season, I have had dogs that get one pig ear per day, when the constant chasing allows for the extra calories with ease.
            “Want me to give your dog one too?” I asked a friend who was visiting my house with his lab, as I doled out the pig ears.”
            “No, she can’t eat those, she gains weight.  How often are you feeding those to your beagles?” He asked me.
            “The retirees do not get them too much, but some of the dogs that go with me every day get one per day.”
            “Really?” His eyes widened in disbelief, looking at a 25 pound beagle that was able to thrive on the extra calories because of the increased activity involved in being a rabbit dog that loves his job and gladly does it every day.
            “Yep,” I said, “And it keeps the chompers clean!”
            “Does that get expensive?”
            “Depends,   My wife is a good shopper, and can find great deals.  She gets a bunch when we have a good price somewhere.  She gets a lot of them online, often in bulk.  That’s why we store them in a plastic dog food container with a screw top lid.  Keeps them from going bad or getting broken into by a sneaky dog that gets to them.
            That dental health translates to more than cheaper vet bills, and not paying for tooth extractions.  Makes for a better nose too.  Bad teeth can effect the sense of smell.  Senses, and how they work, are a fascinating aspect in life.  Butterflies see more colors than we do—they see runways on flowers that guide them to the nectar in the center. Predators, including humans, have binocular vision (our eyes are together on the front of our head), which enables the ability to time attacks, determine distance, and maximize the benefits of depth perception. Prey species have their eyes  on the sides of their heads, and since we are all about the bunnies, it is not a surprise to any of us that a rabbit can see nearly 360 degrees around itself and also see above their heads too! Our binocular vision gets about 190 degree field of vision, and. Nothing above us.
            When I get a stuffy nose, I like to eat hot spices on pasta, mustard on cold cuts, and horseradish on roast beef.  Why?  Because when it drains my sinuses, I can taste better.  We have all had sinus congestion that makes food seem tasteless. Taste and smell are connected, and improved dental health keeps a dog’s sense of smell working optimally.  Tooth decay wafts up to the nose and it may be that a dog loses some scenting ability as it ages. 
            There are lots of things about scent that baffle me.  Moisture is good for scent, but some days a light rain that should increase the scent seems to hinder the pack (of course a deluge will often make scent worse but not always).  Under certain snow conditions, I swear the scent smells better when it is old, as if the rabbit leaves a track and it stirs up the granulated snow to melt—and the older tracks have melted more than the freshest ones, and that melting gives stronger scent.   People get all worked up about barometric pressure and what it may or may not do to the scent, and all of those things are fascinating and confusing to me at the same time.
            One thing I do know is that dental care helps.  Pizzle.  Bone.Pig ears.  I have bought those cow hooves stuffed with a rock hard cheese or peanut butter.  I avoid rawhide, due to concerns of big bits of the rawhide causing blockages. It ain’t as digestible as the pizzle.  Sometimes, when I need the dogs to be especially quiet while I am working, I will take them to my basement office and let them worry away a knuckle bone while I am on the phone.  In the winter I will sit by the wood pellet stove down there in our subterranean den,  and let the hunting house hounds enjoy the reward of a bone after a good hunt. I find myself listening to the muffled sounds of chewing and canine coos of contentment.  I then think about the chase and the mystery of scent as those teeth are being cleaned.  I am always happy to learn something new about scent.
           One of the things I recently discovered was that having two nostrils isn’t a coincidence.  When I learned this, it was suggested that I smell my coffee with one nostril only, pinching the other one shut.  Then smell the coffee again with the other nostril.  I will let you do that now.  Did you do it?  Ain’t that weird?!  Two different scents!  Wild, ain’t it?  I bet you got the same look on your face right now that my wife did when she learned what is used to make pizzle sticks.
 
 

 
           

 
            I live in central Pennsylvania, and that means I am surrounded by fantastic trout streams, spring fed, gurgling up from the ground.  You can travel to Spring, Creek, Spruce Creek, or the Little Juniata and see out of state plates from all over the country.  We are a bona fide  destination for angling.  I routinely show up at waters and see a Mercedes, or BMW, or even a Bentley parked there to fish.  A Cadillac Escalade is sometimes the poorest guy on the water, until I show up.  I like to make a big production, catch big trout when no one else is having success, and then leave in my old pickup truck.  I need to start by explaining a few things.
            First, I grew up fishing narrow cricks.  A crick is often mistaken for a creek.  To many, this is just an accent issue, with people in my neck of rural Pennsylvania mispronouncing the word.  While the part of me who appreciated linguistics agrees with that evaluation, the part of me that catches trout does not.  Here is how I differentiate a creek from a crick.  You can walk in a creek, and you can cast into it.  It’s a babbling brook, and you can take a fly rod and make majestic casts that kiss the water after a perfect presentation.  You stand there and hear Robert Redford narrating as you see Brad Pitt making things look easy.  Or Brad Pitt’s casting double.  A casting double is like a stunt double, but not as well compensated, I suspect.
            A crick is narrow, you can’t wade in it.  You ain’t casting into a crick.  The canopy of brush and trees is too thick.  In my childhood, you would hear rumors of massive trout that would be cleaned and the stomach contained whole frogs, or even a mouse.  This was way back in the 1900s, when my mother would send me out to catch fish to eat for supper.  We would cut wine corks into little buts that looked like a Tylenol capsule—the same shape as the food fed to trout in the hatchery before they were transported to the local waters as stocked trout for the beginning of trout season.  Some stocked fish lived and went wild, and found their way from stocked rivers into the cricks.  Native brook trout were in those cricks too.  A crick that was producing well offered a great opportunity for a kid to save some money by wading into thorns and thickets along the stream to claim lures that people lost by thinking they could cast into the tiny openings in the dense cover.  Jointed minnows, spinners, you name it, you could find it!  So, and this will be a surprise to many, us local anglers to those small cricks developed a better way to catch trout.  Brace yourself, if you are a purist.  No, really, sit down if you are reading this as a fly swishing purists.  We used live bait on a fly road.
            It was impossible to cast, so to avoid a tangled mess of 4 pound test in a spinning reel, we would use a fly road and just drift bait a short distance.  A couple drifts into each hole, working the crick slowly, so as to be quiet.  It was rare that we worried about casting a shadow, in those brush choked streams.  Rattlesnakes were a bigger worry. Fishing boots and snake boots are synonymous on a crick, and I wear a pair of snake boots made by Russell Moccasin when I fish cricks these days.  A live minnow jig worked great, but some guys used salted minnows, wax worms, or even red worms.  The line rarely was out of the reel, just tippet and leader!  Let it out, bring it in.  Repeat.  Next hole.  Sure, we had spinning reels on a cheap rod for catching stocked trout or bass, but for chasing crick trout it was all live bait on a fly rod.  Fast forward almost four decades, and you can see me on a famous Pennsylvania trout stream.  What do I do?  I go to the places that are catch and release only, but allow all tackle.  Yup, I go in there and begin with the biggest fly I can find, big as a damn moth if I can have one.  I once had a huge saltwater fly that I used.  I start slapping the water with that beast, while all the luxury car boys and girls are watching.  Then, I surreptitiously remove said fly, and go for my vest pocket where I have a few crayfish.  Sure, a live minnow might work better, but it takes longer string up the jig.  I let that crayfish tail drift and BAM!  I carefully produce a huge trout, making sure all my colleagues on the water see it.  Back in the water goes the trout, and the big fly goes back on.  I start beating the water again, like it owes me money, and then I change it out again.  I might have a red worm or two with me as well, or even a few kernels of corn.  I switch it up, because I sometimes catch the same trout twice!  It may be a stream that allows all tackle, but the guys looking to eat trout never go to those waters. It is just the purists, some that even refuse a plug or a streamer to enter their list of gear.
            Now, you may ask how long I do this?  How many do I catch?  I do it until everyone around me is slapping the water with the biggest fly in the arsenal, and then I go home.

 
           Well, you know how it goes, there are in-laws and there are outlaws and sometimes you are on the “outs” with your in-laws. One of the realities of Thanksgiving in my childhood home was a never ending barrage of relatives that would stop by to “shake and howdy” with everyone.  Okay, everyone had their own meal, but you never knew who might drop in before, or definitely after dinner.  It started early in the morning, when my maternal grandmother would show up to help my mother cook Thanksgiving dinner.   When I say help, I mean that she would flit around the kitchen making passive aggressive comments to get my mother in a bad mood.  “I think you are opening that oven too often, but you do what you want.”  “Oh, box stuffing?  Haven’t you been baking enough bread to have some crusty loaves to make your own?”  “Store bought pie crust?  That didn’t exist when I was raising children.”  And it would go on like that, until the tension in the air got as thick as pea soup—pea soup that was put in the freezer last year.
            The real traffic started after dinner, when the round of family visitors would randomly show up.  Early in the afternoon it was folks stopping for coffee and dessert.  Keep in mind, that deer season started the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the diaspora relatives would be trickling into town too.  My mother’s sister had a husband that came every year.  They lived out near Philadelphia somewhere. Uncle Lester was a nice enough guy, but wasn’t that familiar with the ways of wild critters or the places that they live.  One year, he shot a buck and proceeded to drag it out, probably a mile drag or so.  People saw him and congratulated him.  Several hours later, he was still not seen, and his vehicle (a sedan with tarps in the trunk to catch the blood) was still parked on the hardtop road.  Panic ensued about six o’clock, three hours after the deer was killed.  Dad and I had hunted in the morning before he had to go to work at 3 o’clock , but we had not seen Uncle Lester.  They called dad at work, which never happened.  You just didn’t call dad at work.  This, of course, was before cell phones, but even at that, it wasn’t like the factory had telephones on every hallway.  Someone had to go find him, and then it was a big production to have someone fill in at his post while he walked to the phone.  You only called if it was serious.  I once got in trouble at school and was fairly defiant about the matter, feeling I was in the right.  I got paddled.  Sat down.  Then the principal said he was going to call my father at work.  I felt the color leave my face and being right didn’t matter anymore.
            “We don’t know where Lester is!” mom yelled into the phone.  Followed by “Uh uh.  Hmm.  Okay.  You’re father wants to talk to you,” mom handed me the phone, which was attached to the wall of the kitchen.
            “Yeah?” I said.
            “Have your mother drive you out to Lester’s car.  Take the big flashlight, and all the bulbs for the light and all the D batteries we have. Take a couple small flashlights to change batteries in the big flashlight if you need to do that.”
            “Okay,” I said.
            “He must be on the main road, they say he shot it back towards the old coal mine. That is close to where we run hare.”
            “I know where you mean.”
            “Don’t leave that main dirt road.  When you get to the coal mine turnoff, you should see drag marks on the snow.  If you do not, just turn around and go back to the car with your mother.  If you find him take him out to his care.  Tell him I said buck the deer, I will get it get it in the morning. I will be home at 11 o’clock tonight.  Don’t call me back unless you don’t find him or he is dead or something.  If he is okay, I will get the details when I get home.”  Only, he didn’t say “buck the deer.”  Sure enough, I found the drag marks, going the wrong way down the main road.  There wasn’t much snow, but enough to see a bit of blood.  I found Uncle Lester a couple miles later, he saw my flashlight and came running to me.
            “I am right here!” He said, then “Bobby?”
            “Dad sent me, let’s get going.  You walked the wrong way.”
            “I gotta get my buck!”
            “Dad said buck the deer, he will help you get it in the morning,” only I didn’t say buck.  I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, but I had been given permission to use the biggest cuss word and it felt really rebellious.  Everything worked out, and the buck was fine the next day, a little frozen.
            Anyway, all these visiting hunters stopped by in the evening  of Thanksgiving to tell hunting stories, drink a beer, and then maybe watch the end of a football game.  The house would get claustrophobic with people watching TV in our small living room.
            Dad and I always hunted rabbits on Thanksgiving morning.  Just to escape the process of my mom and her mom getting into each other’s way in a small kitchen.
            “We ain’t in no hurry to shoot a rabbit,” dad would always say.  If we could get a good chase until ten o’clock, we would then shoot.  Well, he would let me shoot.  It can be tough to get a really long chase, and often the rabbit would hole up after an hour.
            “I could have shot that one,” my child-self would say, “It was going to hole anyway!”
            “Find me a rabbit!” Dad would yell to the dogs and they would leave the hole to beat the brush, “You can shoot later.”
            The year after “Wrong Way Lester” as the joke come to be called, Dad asked me on Thanksgiving Eve, “How’s your patience doing?”
            “What?”
            “I think tomorrow we will go to a spot that will have a lot more hare than cottontail.  You can’t shoot a hare until after Christmas.  You gonna be able to tell the difference and resist?”
            “I think so.”
            “You better know so.”
            “I will be careful,” I said.
            “I am only worried about the first circle if it is a hare, it might short circle and not run very big.  Otherwise it will be obvious by the size of the circles.”
            An overgrown clear cut adjacent to a huge stand of hemlocks in the Allegheny National Forest was our destination.  Tall grasses were feeding the cottontail and hare, the hare would run the hemlocks, the cottontails would stay closer to the sumac and cattails, running into the thick cover where the tree tops were left from the last logging operation.  The first rabbit ran into the hemlocks briefly and circled back.
            “Shoot it,” dad whispered in my ear as it hurtled across the dirt road towards the thickets.  I collected the cottontail before the dogs arrived to potentially tear it up.  After 20 minutes or so I saw a big hare burst out of the cattails and into the hemlocks, crossing the road 80 yards in front of me.  A few minutes later the dogs opened up and off they went. “That was a hare!” I said.
            “Good,” dad lit his pipe and walked towards the truck.  He unloaded his gun, and told me to do the same.  We sat on the tailgate, and just talked.  The kind of talk where there is long bits of silence.  We joked about mom and gram.  Then we would talk about school.  When the dogs would come back we would get up to look for the hare and watch the dogs cross.  This was before GPS, and the two beagles we owned would go way out of hearing and we had no idea where they were.  I am going to guess that they were running for about three hours or so when they started getting close for about the fifth time, and their frantic chase song was getting louder.  I am going to guess it was three hours or so, only because we got home right before meal time, which was one o’clock.  Mom had a rule that we needed to be back by then, but we sometimes were late.  The chase may have been longer than three hours.  Like I said, there was no GPS handheld with a clock on it then.  
            Dad tapped out his pipe and started sprinting for the hemlocks. He was 6’ 2’’ and long legged.  I am only 6’ and long waisted.  Years of smoking took away the 4 minute mile that he could rattle of in youth, but his ¼ mile sprint was still pretty strong, even at almost 60 years of age.  The dogs were a little pooped, and were not easy to catch, but were not too difficult once he was close enough to yell “Down!”  He grabbed Princess and leashed her.  She was the tougher to catch. I was there just a few seconds later and leashed Duke. We cleaned the rabbit, and headed for home, about a half hour away.  We pulled in the driveway, and I put the rabbit in water to soak in the basement refrigerator where we kept mostly fishing bait and dad’s Schmidt’s beer.  Then we put the dogs in the fenced yard.
            “You want me to put them in the kennel or let them run in the yard?” I asked, “I bet they are content enough not to try and dig out?”
            “Let’s kennel them,” he said, “Lord knows who might stop and make them bark, or who might accidentally open the gate.”
            The kennel was an above ground shed that dad build, with above ground runs with wire floors over a cement pad to catch the refuse.  He had electricity ran to the kennel, and even an electric heater he could run.  Each wire run extended into the insulated shed, where you had a box with a lid.
            “You like Turkey?” He asked.
            “Yeah, why?”
            He climbed the three steps to get into the shed.  I followed, and was confronted with odor.  Not dog odor (I had to clean that entire kennel every day), but the smell of  food.
            “What is this?” I asked.
            “I started a crockpot of rabbit stew early this morning before daylight.  You can eat all the turkey you want, but after we eat dinner, I think we will come out here.  We have all kinds of people stopping by to hunt this year.  Your mom’s brother is back in the area, and he has a few kids with him.  Lester will no doubt be around. There won’t be enough seats!”  He pointed at two lawn chairs he must have brought to the kennel from the lawn shed. “We can sit out here and eat supper.  They will leave faster if I am not there.  Plus, I only left 5 beers in the refrigerator, they won’t stay too long!”
            After dinner (I went light on the turkey)  we chatted and had dessert.  It got to be 3 o’clock or so, and dad said, “Hey, where is the other leash?”  Our leashes always hung on a peg just inside the back door/mud room.
            “I hung mine up,” I said.
            “I did too,” dad said.  We always had leather leashes, with French snaps.  I checked the floor.  Nothing.
            “Hey!” Dad yelled in the general direction of my mom, “We re going to run out and look for that leash we lost!”
            “Okay!” mom yelled.
            “Hurry back,” gram said, “Lots of company is coming.”
            “Do my best,” dad said and we drove out the driveway, headed in the wrong direction to get where we hunted.
            “What’s going on?” I asked.
            “Here,” dad threw the leash to me, which had been in the truck all along.
            “I don’t understand…” I held the leash.
            “If they see my truck, they will find me.  I am parking it behind the kennel.” He laughed.  We rushed around, parked, and closed the truck doors as quiet as possible.  In the bed of the truck he pulled out a cooler with 4 beers and 4 RC colas.  And a big piece of cardboard and tape.  
            “What’s the cardboard for?” I asked.
            “Blocking the window in the kennel so that they can’t see the light from the kitchen.”   I rooted into the cooler, and got a pop.  Dad let the dogs out of the sleeping boxes and into the shed part of the kennel.  The beagles were balls of energy, as they were not in that part of the kennel very often. 
            “I almost forgot!” He slinked out the kennel, closing the dogs in, and returned with a big smoked ham hock for each of them.  Their eyes bulged in ravenous zeal. We sat with the dogs, talked, and ate rabbit stew on paper plates.  We used an old radio to put some music in the room for the times between dialogue, when we just scratched a dog’s ear.  I put it to a station that played older country music, on AM radio, the music dad liked.  About 7 o’clock dad said, “Go get the the dogs their supper.  See who is still here, and tell them you are feeding dogs and that I am thinking about going out to look for that leash again.”
            “PHHEW!” I spit RC Cola out at the thought of being gone this long for a leash.
            “Hi mom,” I said.
            “That took forever!” Mom answered, “I was worried.”
            “No one here?”
            “My brother was here with his three boys,  and are gone. Your grandmother went to my sister’s house.  She took Uncle Lester’s family with her, except for Lester.  He wants to talk to your dad.”
            “Okay,” I grabbed the bowls of Purina covered in turkey gravy and went out to the kennel.
            “All clear?” dad asked?
            “Just Lester, everyone else left.”
            “Here,” he opened the doors of the run to put in the food and he added a second water bowl for each hound, “Those ham hocks will make them thirsty.”
            We walked in the house and Lester was there, “You went out all that time looking for a cheap leash?” Lester laughed his sort of hoarse cackle.
            “Shit,” dad said, “If I sent my little boy out into the night air to fetch your bucking ass last year, you know I wasn’t going to strand my favorite leash.” Only he didn’t say bucking.  
            

            “I’ll be back,” my wife said, as she set her phone on the table and wheeled around to go to the restaurant’s restroom.  The waitress flitted by and asked, “Need a refill?”
            “Sure,” I said, and get my wife a third glass of the carbonated water and lime.” Then, the table started buzzing.  This is pretty typical whenever my wife’s phone is on a table.  I looked, and saw that it was a phone call from Wesley, our son.  Well, he’s a stepson.  That was established early in our relationship, after I married his mom.
           “I told my dad that I call you dad too,” Wes said to me when he returned from a weekend visit.
            “Yeah?  How did that go?” I asked.
            “He doesn’t want me to do that.  He got mad.”
            “Well, just make life easy and call me something else.”
            “How about if I call you Bob?”
            “That works fine with me.  I’ve already been trained to answer to that name.”
            Two months later, Wes came home from his dad’s house and said, “Dad got mad again.”
            “What went wrong?”
            “He was calling me to the kitchen and I said, “I’ll be there in a minute, Bob!  He was mad I did not call him dad.”  He was 9 years old then.  He is 26 now.
            Anyway, the buzzing table went to voicemail, and my shirt pocket started buzzing.
            “Yeah,” I answered, seeing it was Wesley.
            “Hi Bob,” he said in his baritone monotone, “Do you know where mom is?”
            “She is in the bathroom,” I said, “What’s up?”  I could almost guess what was up—he was looking for some money.
            “I am playing a few gigs soon, and I need some money.”
            “Where is your paycheck?”
            “Well, Bob, if I still had that money, I wouldn’t be calling you.”
            “Alright bud, stop by the house.  I have a few jobs I could pay you to do.”
            “Can’t I just get what I need, and pay you back?”
            “Only if you give me your debit card, and I will get the money in cash when your direct deposit paycheck clears, before you spend it all on video games and pizza.”
            “Okay,” the monotone came through the phone, “I will come over tomorrow after work.”
           “Get there before it rains, scooping dog dirt in the yard is better before it liquifies,” I gave him a little encouragement.
            Renee heard that last part as she sat down, “Aren’t you worried that you will hurt his self-esteem making him clean poop?”  Much of modern life is concerned with self-esteem.  I have never understood this obsession, but my father was more concerned that a person would have too much self-esteem rather than not enough.  “Confidence doesn’t need affirmation, and it doesn’t need to brag,” he would say.
            “If he gets there too late,” I said to my wife, “I will already have it scooped, and there will be less work he can do.  And my self-esteem will be fine.  I have been picking up turds for, well, how many years?  Since 1985….
            Nostalgia hit me and I was back to 1985, with my first beagle.  Back then, sawdust was free.  Any store that sold lumber had free sawdust.  Dad got it in a giant burlap sack from the local building supply center.  We had an outdoor kennel with wire runs, and a cement slab underneath.  Every day, rain, shine, sleet, or snow, I was out there with an old metal coffee can that was filled with water, Pine-sol, and a toilet brush.  I would scrub the wire with the brush and knock the feces to the sawdust that covered the cement slab below. The sawdust collected urine too.  I then got a hoe and drug all the sawdust out, and I then shoveled the sawdust into a big metal can, lined with the extra heavy duty garbage bag.  Lastly, I scattered fresh sawdust under the wire runs of the kennels.  Every. Single. Day.  The garbage bag went to the end of the driveway each week on garbage night.  I scrubbed so much wire with Pine-sol that I cannot use it in my house.  Renee mopped with it when we first got married.  I took a whiff, and full of nausea said, “Can we please never use Pine-sol again?  I know it is a great product, but all I smell is dog shit when people use it!”
            Wood pellets, which are made from sawdust, cost over $4 per bag last winter.  I figure I shoveled enough sawdust as a kid to pay for a new truck at modern sawdust rates!  After cleaning kennels, I could walk over the hill from my house and jump hare or cottontail to run, and that was one of my favorite things to do as a kid.  Whenever anyone asked, “Where is Bob?” My mom would say, “If them dogs ain’t in the yard, then he is in the woods.”
            “In the woods” was the term used for everything from camping, to fishing, to making tree forts, or just walking.  We didn’t have hiking.  Hiking is what people do when they have to drive to the woods before they start walking.  When you live in the woods, or right next to them, then it is just called going for a walk. “The woods” had been timbered, mined for coal, and timbered again over the years.  My dad had a deer stand on a spot he called the clear cut.  The “clear cut” was covered with tall trees about 20 inches in diameter, so how long ago was it a clear cut?  At some point in my father’s life, it was definitely done, but he it wasn’t recent! I was 30 years old before I even considered the fact that my dad lived his entire life within a mile of the house where he was born, except for a couple years in the Philippines during the Second World War.  He spent 60 of his 64 years within 100 yards of those same woods that I roamed every day.
            Dad grew up in those same woods.  As a kid, he climbed a tree and beat the crows away to get a hatchling.  He fed it, and it was trained to roost in the yard, and flew down to his shoulder when he would go outside. It even said a few words from time to time.  In those same woods, as a kid, he carved his name on a. Flat rock with a hammer and chisel.
             “Where is that rock?” I asked.
          “Somewhere on the edge of Gordon’s pasture.  The Gordon farm also bordered the woods.  I can’t tell you how many times I looked for that rock, and I am sure that it got tilled over as the pasture and fields were moved and adjusted.  Being chased by the Gordon’s bull was almost a daily occurrence for me, if I had dogs out and they bounced a cottontail in the fallow field.  The bull would get aggravated at the dogs and I would rush in like a rodeo clown to give it a bigger target.  I see people with arm tattoos that look as if barbed wire is running around the circumference of the bicep.  I have had barbed wire around my arm, diving out of the cow pasture—I wished I had a barrel for an escape.  Speaking as a guy who has had actual barbed wire on me, I have no desire to get a tattoo of the stuff. I much preferred chasing the hare, they never went in the farm, but stayed in the woods.
            I was looking for that rock again not too many years ago, and decided that it was gone forever.  I sat next to a dead log, and carved my name into it.  That log will definitely decay into nothing, if it hasn’t already.
            In the 1950s dad had beagles, and he would open the kennel door and turn them loose in the woods next to the Gordon farm.  If he had to go to work at 3, he would leave, and the dogs would come home eventually.  One day, his beloved Prince dog never returned.
            “I saw the dog with your brother, Clarence,” a guy told my dad, “He was hunting the bottom fence row.”
            Dad found the dog, dead, shot.  He felt Clarence killed the dog out of jealousy, because it was a far better hound than any Clarence had.  I hate to think someone would be that cruel to anyone, let alone a sibling.  I think it was just as likely that Clarence shot at the rabbit when the rabbit was first jumped, and Prince was too close.  He left the dog lay, not wanting to tell dad.  That’s just my hunch.  At any rate, dad got out of beagles right after that, and never got another until 1985, when I begged for one.
            I was allergic to dogs my whole life.  A friend had a beagle, and we would take it out all the time, into the same woods.  I was hooked and wanted a dog.  I remember praying every night to no longer have allergies to dogs.  Then, we figured out that dogs no longer bothered me.  We were in my cousin’s house one day, a cookout got rained upon, and we went inside with the intent to eat and leave before my allergies flared up.  We stayed for hours with no problems!  My cat allergies never went away, I still have them to this day.  I still get stuffed up in a barn with horses or cattle.  A friend has goats—yep, they make me sneeze and snot too.  But Dad and I got beagles, and built the kennel.  I probably spent more time with those beagles, in the woods, than I did with anyone as a kid.  Guys will often pay someone to start a beagle puppy, or pay someone to condition dogs or take them to trials.  I never minded the solitary hours of being with dogs and listening to the chase.  It always allowed me to think, and relax. They were always enough company for me, and to this day I tend to hunt rabbits by myself.  I don’t need lots of conversation interfering with the hound music.  I was probably conditioned to be like that as a teenager when all my friends were more interested in sleeping in on summer mornings, and fixing cars in the afternoon.  I just went to the woods.  I couldn’t afford a car, so I ran dogs and then would beg dad for his truck.  Once in a while he would let me take it out on a date. 
            One day, dad and I watched our beagles—his Princess and my Duke running a rabbit, and he said, “Thanks for getting me back into beagles.”  He said it matter-of fact, looking at the dogs, not me.
            “I had to beg enough!” I said. Princess was named as an homage to his Prince dog, that he found dead decades earlier.  My dad was 45 years old when I was born, so it was like being raised by a grandfather.  I have half-siblings old enough to be my parents.  I have nephews and nieces older than me! The decades between Prince and Princess seemed to fade away and dad and I were always in the woods. We bred Princess and got a couple more pups.  I often wondered how different my life would have been if I would have remained allergic to dogs.  What if a person born to be a florist was allergic to flowers, or a guy born to be a carpenter was allergic to wood?
            Ten years ago, or so, I was tested for allergies, and my back was pricked with all those needles.  It itched right away.
            “I hope you don’t go outside,” the allergist said.
            “Why?” I asked.
            “You are allergic to every tree, bush, grass, or any plant pollen!  Your back must itch.”
            “Oh yeah,” I said, “And don’t forget cats.  My lungs get wheezy within minutes of being in a house with cats.”
            “Yes, and dogs too,” he said.
            “What?”
            “You are as allergic to dogs as you are cats!”
            “That must be a false positive,” I said.
            “No, you are definitely allergic to dogs.  But, the good news is you are no longer allergic to seafood of any kind, or eggs.  You outgrew those allergies.”  That was why I was getting tested.
            “I must have outgrown dog allergies too.”
            “Nope, I wouldn’t get a puppy if I were you.”  I didn’t bother to tell him I was living in a house with a half dozen rabbit running, brush busting beagles.
            I was thinking about that earlier, and remembering how much I prayed to get that first beagle.  I remember how the hound song changed my whole life. Especially the last summer dad was alive. I was a college freshman, and home for a few months before starting my sophomore year.  I was running Duke and Princess while he was in the living room, gooned out of his mind on narcotics as the cancer ravished his body.  I was while listening to those dogs and I decided to study things that were more philosophical and theological.  Science and math had always been my jam.  My high school even created an advanced physical sciences course, I was the only student.  I had exhausted every other science class available, there were none left for me to take.  I was left, unsupervised, in a lab to do experiments every day.  I was top heavy in math and science in my first year of college too, and loved it.  My work study job was in the chemistry laboratory
            “Dr. Clippard,” I said, “Our lab in class today is to determine the molarity of this sulfuric acid.”
            “Yes, I know.  I gave the assignment.”
            “Umm, I mixed this solution at work this morning.  I already know the answer.”
            “Oh, well then you shouldn’t be here long.”
            Duke and Princess brought that rabbit out of the pasture, down past the bottom fence row where dad had found Prince’s lifeless body, and went up to the top again, and I decided right then and there that I was no longer wanting to study the notions of how the world came into being, but the so what of creation.  We have this great world, how do we live in it?  Names carved in wood are ultimately as ephemeral as names chiseled in wood.  The lives that go with the names can have real impact—good or bad—on the people around them. The folks who are hikers, and see the woods as a place far away are ultimately as connected to those natural places as those of us who live in the middle of them.
            I would never pay someone to start a puppy, not that I am judging anyone else for doing it.  There is just something about that the first time a pup barks on rabbit scent.  It makes a bark that he has never bayed before.  It doesn’t sound like a playful bark with other pups, nor does it sound like an angry bay at an intruder or rival.  It is a dog’s rabbit voice, and it truly is like a switch going off in their little brains, and they are activated and will never be the same.  From that moment on, their primary focus is rabbits.  The pup has answered a calling.
            “We aren’t out of the woods yet,” is something people often say, as if the woods were a place to be avoided, or a bad place.  More and more, I find myself going into the woods, and not wanting to get out of them.
 
 
 
            “You know that, right?” my wife said, drawing me out of nostalgia at the restaurant, snapping me back to the present.
            “What?”
            “Wesley needs a guitar.”
            “I bought him two guitars over the years,” I said.
            “His electric guitar got stolen.”
            “Oh, I didn’t know that.”  I was stingy about buying him junk, but I always supported his musical talent, and he is very good.
            “Is he going to make enough money scooping poop to get a guitar?”
            “Tell him I will buy the guitar if he scoops the poop and also goes in the woods.”
            “What woods?”
            “The woods,” I said, “They are all fundamentally the same, on a primal level.  He needs to hear a rabbit voice, and learn what it means to answer a calling.”
            “You say some strange things when you come out of those trances.”
            “I will make him run dogs.  And listen to them. He won’t want to do that, but I will make him do it to pay off the debt.  He can catch dogs for me too if the pack splits and have dogs on two different rabbits.”  Wes used to like the woods, but as a teenager he turned into a suburbanite.
            “He will probably get lost!”
            “I will put a tracking collar on him too,” I said, “And you can pay for this supper!”
            
 
 

            
             
   
 
            

​ 
            I feel as if I have told so many stories, over the years, about how great my mom was to me, and how supportive she was in everything I did.  I suppose I have told the stories about her support of my beagling the most, at least in print.  But she was my biggest fan in all things.  I thought that this month I would tell about my low points as a son.  I guess I will start with applying to college.  Back then, Penn State was an affordable college for a working class kid (don’t look at the tuition today).  By the time I went to college I knew my life had gone to the dogs.  Penn State has a bunch of branch campuses, and the closest one to my hometown was Dubois.  The mom grapevine had sufficiently convinced my mother that Penn State Dubois was the party Mecca of the universe, and she decided that I should not go there.  Hell, I was willing to go as a commuter, and the money I would have saved in dormitory costs would have more than paid for a junky jalpoy  to get me there! Ah, but the stories of the parties in Dubois made mama worry.  So she had me apply to main campus, of all places!
            One visit had me terrified.  Not the parties, the size of the place was intimidating.  I think it was 40,000 students then!  So, after much begging, I convinced the university to let me go to my second choice, which was the Altoona campus.
            “You were accepted at main campus!” The officials wailed, “Why do you not want to come here?  Most kids would do anything to start here?”
            “I really wanted to go to Dubois,” I said.  This really boggled their minds, as Dubois was a very small campus, right next to the high school in town.  Altoona was pretty big for a branch campus, and that is where I went, to start.  University Park, the main campus, was so big that I felt intimidated by the number of students. The campus was bigger than my town  It was a dreadful thought, going to Altoona, being away from home, and not running dogs.  Dubois would have suited me fine, I could run dogs, take classes, and get along just fine with the students who also hailed from rural, north central Pennsylvania.
            On move in day, I remember being less than happy.  Granted, my best friend, Joe, was going to Altoona too, but I was probably one of the few kids that could have been happy commuting and not really having the “college experience” of moving out.  All the kids said, “I love you” to mom and dad and parents went home.  A few weeks later I was home for Labor Day, and dad said, “All those other kids told their moms that they loved them and you did not.”
            I did not grow up in a house where people said “I love you” that much.  Sure, we all knew it, and felt it, but it wasn’t vocalized. Not unless it was serious stuff—like surgery or a terrible accident and you were going into the emergency room!  I say it to my wife and stepson all the time now, but that was not the way things were in my house.  Looking back, I remember all those new college students with tears, saying goodbye with love.  What were my thoughts?  I was thinking, “Great, I am in Altoona, a city, and my dogs are hours away,”
            I got home a few weekends that first semester, and I hunted rabbits hard.  Dad was dying from cancer, though we didn’t know it,  He had beaten cancer years before, and it had returned, but the doctors were treating him for back problems, unaware that the disease had advanced with a vengeance.  Dad kept working, wincing with pain, and even rabbit hunted with me.  I kept thinking it would be so much easier if I was in Dubois.  Oh, by the way, comparing Dubois to Altoona, in terms of parties, is like comparing traditional brace dogs to SPO dogs.  And comparing Altoona to main campus is like comparing UBGF SPO to LPH!
            I only went two years to Altoona, and had to transfer to main campus to complete my degree. Dad had died, and mom was working a lot of hours, but would come to get me for a few hunting trips.  I was in an apartment with 5 other roommates and it was a college apartment!  Kegs.  Messes.  All that stuff.  Not a pleasant thing for moms to see. I would run dogs in the places where dad and I always did, almost hearing his voice.  Well, one dog. We had some good hunting dogs, and mom sold all but my old Duke dog.  She was making minimum wage at a convenience store after dad died.  I understand it now, especially since she got so much money for Princess, dad’s dog. Her pups sold well too.  I was out hunting hare over Christmas break, and old Duke was slowing down.  I stayed out until almost dark, waiting until I could shoot a hare in our limited Pennsylvania season.  I could have gone home sooner, but I was bitter about the young dogs being sold.  Hindsight being what it is is, I know it was for the best and those dogs had a much better life running rabbits all year than waiting for me to get home on sporadic weekends.
            None of this is to say I was angry, or mean.  I was just in flux—a full time student not knowing where I was headed.  I graduated college and went straight to seminary, which made everyone in the family….confused.  I guess I was always a bit rebellious, at times a hothead, and definitely not always gregarious or good at small talk.  But I was thinking about the big questions—life, death, eternity, the meaning of life, and all those things that are part and parcel of life in ministry.  What do I remember about graduation?  Not wanting to go.  It is a pretty impersonal affair at a school that big, and I was happy to let them mail my diplomas.  Mom and grandma wanted to attend.  I was sullen, and silent.  My mind was focused on the fact that I had earned a couple degrees that were not real good for the job market until I went to seminary and finished.  I regret not being happy.  I had some relatives that had gone to college, but I don’t know that any with the last name of Ford had done it.  Shoot, to be honest, a lot of the Fords in my family are smarter than me—mechanics, electricians, carpenters.  I was the nerdy kid with a good memory and not much skill.  
            “Good thing you’re strong,” dad would say, “You got two options—unskilled labor, which is not going to be around much longer—or those book smarts.  Skilled craftsmanship is not your thing!”  I have relatives that can restore cars, build houses, and build roads.  I once replaced a faucet handle without flooding the house, and I thought I was really being a handyman.  Mom was happy at graduation, and I should have been too.
            I was a student pastor in seminary and had a beagle.  The one old beagle I had back home had died, and I got a new one.  It stayed at a church member’s farm.  Rural place, outside of town.  By then, mom got a secretarial job in a construction company.  I still remember the last time I saw her.  I went to see her in Texas for Easter.  The church I was serving told me to go, and gave me the Sunday off!  No church does that, but they knew I wanted to see my mom, and I was a student.  Mom and I went to the sunrise service, not many there.  She died the following August.  Her body was shipped back to Pennsylvania. I ran my dog at the farm for three solid days before I went to the funeral.
           I wish I would have officiated the funeral.  I thought I would get too emotional.  The pastor put zero effort into the service.  Never learned a thing about my mom.  It was nothing but bare bones liturgy.  Prayers and scripture. He had to think hard to remember her name for the few times he had to mention her.  That night, I went to my childhood home and in the quiet darkness offered the service that I should have done.  No one was there, but me, in the stillness of my backyard.  I will never be too emotional to officiate a funeral again.  I learned a trick that night.  When I get too emotional to talk, I bite the inside of my cheek until it bleeds, driving away the tears.  I’ve used that same technique at funerals to bury childhood friends, fellow beaglers, beloved church members, and mentors.  It looks like a pregnant pause, an oratorical tool, but it is the internalization of grief to carry on—blood and saliva mixed.  Oh, and I have never done a shoddy funeral, not even for a stranger.  I learn a little something, as best as I can.  I personalize them all.
            Ah, I have written a lot of stories about my mom that show how wonderful she was, and how much I loved her.  And How much she loved me.  Why did I write this one?  Just to show that things in families can be bad at times, but love still reigns.  And when it seems like nothing good can ever happen, it does.  Like that Easter in Texas.  My mom asked me what my Easter sermon would have been.  I told her the gist of it, and explained that I would deliver it the next Sunday, when I returned to that little church in Ohio, next to that seminary.
            “Where did you get those thoughts?” She asked.
            “Running this beagle I have there, and thinking,” I answered.
            “Are you mad I had to sell all but the one beagle?” She asked.
            “Of course not,” I said, “I love you.”
            “Keep listening to those beagles,” she said.

​They say any element heavier than Hydrogen was made in a star.  Hydrogen fuses into Helium.  And that fuses to form heavier elements.  The heavier stuff will be found towards the center of a star, like metals.  Gold, Silver, platinum and the less precious stuff, are forged in the cosmic furnaces.  When a star dies, the elements are scattered.  Our planet is made with the remains of dead stars.  People are fond of pointing out that we are made of stardust.  I was thinking about that this week.  I have been avoiding the beagle club with Covid-19, and letting the old timers have the club running grounds.  I am constantly officiating funerals with lots of people being exposed to me, the last thing I want to do is give a virus to an older club member.  So, I have been running in the wild.  Everyone who has hunted with Andy Purnell will tell you that they know his secret spots, but I actually do.  I have been in those spots a lot, the ones that are safe—some are prone to rattlesnakes before winter.
            Andy and I would run dogs and chat.  Some spots we would just train dogs, no hunting, just to make sure that no one else found them by following us in hunting season.  Sometimes, we would run a place so much that we would know particular rabbits, the same as when you get a bunny in a beagle club that tends to run the same pattern every time you find it.
            “That rabbit is familiar,” I said, listening to the dogs one day in November.
            “The third circle will cross the fork of the dirt road, running over that flat rock,” Andy said.
            “Yep.”
            “We shouldn’t shoot it until the third circle,” Andy said.
            “You want to get it?” I asked.
            “Why?” he shrugged.
            “I know you like staying on the paths.”
            “For a guy that gets in the brush as much as you,” Andy puffed on his pipe, “You should be a judge.”
            “I aint a fast enough runner,” I said.
            “Fast enough,” he smiled.
            “I don’t know enough about dogs to evaluate them,” I protested.
            “I won’t disagree with you there,” he laughed.
            “Go stand at the Y in the road,” I said, walking away.
            “Where you going?” he yelled.
            “Don’t you worry,” I said, and headed for a patch of greenbrier.  I heard Andy laughing.  He knew I was headed to a spot the rabbit would go on the fourth circle.
            BOOM! I heard Andy’s .410 pistol bark.  “Son of a b---” Andy yelled. The rabbit ran right to me.  I dropped it, with one shot from my double barrel.
            “Well,” Andy yelled, “You only shot once, so you must have got it.”
            “I always get it,” I said, “I get at the edge of the brush.  They are moving slower.”
            “They are only slower in front of your dogs!” he yelled back, “Mine are here too!  You must have gotten lucky!”
            We ran another rabbit, guns unloaded, sitting on a log until it was time for him to go to work at Lion Country Supply, and for me to do hospital visits.  That was a few months before Andy died, from cardiac failure.  I was at that Y in the road recently, running a rabbit that runs remarkably similar to the one I shot that day, years ago.  I won’t shoot him this fall, if he makes it that far. I was thinking about stardust as the rabbit passed me. Why?
            When Andy died, the town where the funeral was held was jammed full of pickup trucks with dog boxes in the bed.  They lined the streets, like a parade was going to start.  The funeral was standing room only as I walked in, an hour before the service started.
            “Can I get his wedding ring?” Andy’s widow, Lisa, asked me.  Andy had been cremated.
            “I will get it,” I said and walked to the funeral director and asked him.
            “What ring?” the funeral director asked.
            “His wedding band,” I said.  He looked nervous.  The funeral director that worked for him walked towards the back, closing the door behind her. I walked back to the urn with the ashes, where Lisa was greeting people. “They are getting it,” I said.  A few minutes later the guy approached.
            “They didn’t give us the ring,” He said, “The State Police probably have it.”  That sounded odd to me.  I pushed the idea aside, getting ready to officiate the service.  It was going to be tough to do without getting emotional.  When I am at a funeral for someone close to me, I keep a memory of a time when the deceased made me angry ready to think about if I get too sad to keep speaking.  I pause, and the memory pops into my head to help me settle.  If that doesn’t work, I bite the inside of my cheek.  I bit my cheek pretty hard to get through that funeral.
            The next day, I called a state trooper I know and asked why the police would have the wedding band.  He told me that would not happen.  I told Lisa to call the coroner.  She got a copy of the coroner’s report, and it said that the ring was taped to Andy’s hand, and the clothes he was wearing were there too, with the body.  I thought it was possible that the guy stole the ring, an odd thing.
            Lisa called my cell phone, “Hello,” I answered.
            “I scheduled a meeting with that funeral director,” she said.
            “Good idea,” I said.
            “Will you take me?”
            “Yeah,” I said, “Sure.”
            “Good,” she said, “I am afraid that I will get mad. You need to keep me calm.”
            “No problem,” I said.
            I know a lot of pastors and funeral directors.  I did some calling.  I am told that the guy was previously in legal trouble that got him in enough trouble that he can own a funeral home but he has another worker doing the work.  I was also told that he once beat his wife on main street.  I can’t prove that these things are true, and I didn’t try to confirm them.  But his peers and my colleagues said it was the case.
            It was cold and snowy when we met him.  Tiny, powdery snowflakes, that he was shoveling as we arrived.  A broom would work better.  Into the office we went, he sat behind his desk, Lisa and I sat on the opposite side.
            “Did you find the ring?” Lisa asked.
“It never arrived here,” he leaned back in his chair like we were discussing a ball game or pizza.
            “It had to,” I said.
            He dialed a number, his desk phone on speaker mode.  One ring, and an answer “Hello?”
            “Yes,” the guy put a foot on his desk, “I am here with the Purnell family.”  He didn’t recognize me as the officiating pastor a week earlier.  He thought I was a relative.
            “Oh yeah,” the guy on the other end said.
            “Yes,” he slouched in his office chair, “You told me that there was no ring on the body when you did the cremation, right?”
            “That is correct,” the voice asserted.
            “Okay,” he put both feet back on the desk, “Goodbye.”
            “What does that prove?” Lisa asked.
            “The ring never made it here,” he said.
            “We contacted the coroner,” I said, “You’re a liar.”  I was wondering what pawn shops I had to seek to get the ring back.
            “You can’t talk to me like that!” he stood and was shouting.  Lisa began to cry,
            I stood.  And in a very calm voice I said, “You better calm down.  Because if you plan on going in this direction, I will give you a hell of a lot more trouble on main street than your wife did.” I shoved his desk towards him. He sat down and rolled his chair backwards. His eyes were like silver dollars. Yeah, I can’t believe I said that either.  The woman that works for him pulled us aside.
            She handed me the ring, and told Lisa that she should not pay a bill if she received one.  She apologized, and said she went back and found the ring.  It went through the cremation process.  It only survived the heat because it was made of titanium.  All the precious gold had boiled out of it, and the once shiny titanium was now charred and blackened.  That was the second time I held that wedding band.  The first time was at their wedding, when I held them both high with the wedding liturgy that says, “These rings are the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace…”  Now, I held the ring again.  We walked outside.  No one checked for the ring. They burned it. I was shocked.
            “That was some gangster shit, Ford,” Lisa said.
            “What?” I asked.
            “You just threatened to kick a guy’s ass on main street.”
            “Sorry about that,” I saw her watery eyes.  I am not touchy-feely, but I reached down and held her hand, making sure that the wedding band was between our palms.”
            “I didn’t expect that from a pastor,” she said.
            “I hear that from time to time,” I said, pressing the ring into her hand so she grasped it as we neared my truck.
            “You were supposed to keep me from getting mad!” she said.
Months later, Mike Leaman, Cody Mathis, and I held a small ceremony in one of Andy’s favorite hunting spots.  We put his ashes, as requested by Lisa, where we had just hunted and shot some hare.  It just occurred to me recently, that the gold, forged in the blast furnace of a star, and boiled out of the wedding band by a crematorium, must have been mixed into those ashes, in tiny flakes.  “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” as the liturgy says.  Stardust.

​One of the recent changes in my hunting season over the last few years has been the addition of Christmas Eve to the days when I can hunt.  When I was a kid, way back in the 1900s, rabbit season ended after Thanksgiving, and did not return until after Christmas.  We now can hunt after Turkey Day but before Christmas, from the end of the rifle deer season through Christmas Eve, and then hare season starts the day after Christmas.  Christmas Eve hunting, you have to understand, was never a holiday tradition in my family. It was Illegal back then.  I have to say, it has become one for me.
If you don’t know me, I can tell you that I am prone to being absent minded.  I have walked around the office looking for keys that were in my hand.  I never know where a coffee cup might turn up—I am notorious for putting them on high, flat surfaces to keep the dogs from stealing a lick or two. As a pastor, I am always losing my vehicle in hospital parking garages and parking lots.  I once rushed from a hunt directly to a hospital to see a church member who had been in a car accident.  I was wearing bibs and wool.When I finished the visit, I wandered the hospital parking garage looking for my truck, going from one floor of the garage to the next.  A hospital employee found me trudging In my boots along the sloped floors of the parking decks.
“Can I help you?” He asked.
“I can’t find my truck,” I scratched my head, “I forget where I parked.”
“Oh,” he said, “Okay.  We thought you were a homeless guy casing out the place to rob an unlocked car.”
“What?”
“You looked like a homeless guy,” he pointed at me to make It clear.
“Oh, what does a homeless guy look like?” I asked.
“You here as a patient?” He asked.
“Nah, I was visiting a church member who was rushed here and I didn’t find out about the wreck until recently.”  I gave him the card that enables clergy to get free parking.
“You have a good day, Sir.”
Anyway, the point is that I lost my truck, and I have done it before then and since.  If you have ever been to Geisinger Hospital in Danville, Pennsylvania, then you have seen the largest parking lot I have ever seen.  They have a shuttle that loops around the expansive lot and then to the hospital entrance.  I rode that thing for a half hour to find my car one time.  My current Beagle Mobile has a rooftop tent, awning, and a massive rear bumper with storage cabinets.  I obviously have all those things to travel with dogs and be comfortable when I go to field trials to hunting trips.
“Why do you have all that stuff on your truck?” I was asked at a field trial.
“So I can find it in parking lots,” I answered.  I am forgetful.  I miss things in the news, and I can be out of touch with pop culture.
My first Christmas Eve hunt was with Andy Purnell, not many years before he died.  I had no idea that we were even allowed to hunt that day.
“You got church on Christmas Eve?” Andy asked me on the phone.
“Well,” I was sarcastic, “It Is Christmas Eve, what do you think?”
“But that stuff is all at night, right?”  He knew the answer to that question.  Many don’t know this, but Andy was an acolyte in The Episcopal Church as a kid.
“I am free till 7 o’clock,” I said, “What’s up?”
“Let’s rabbit hunt In the morning!” He said.
“We ain’t allowed,” I said.
“It has been rabbit hunting season since deer season ended!” I heard him laugh.
“Shut up!” I said.
“I’m telling you the truth,” Andy said, “But I can hear you typing to double check me.”
Sure enough, rabbit season had been expanded. “Well I’ll be,” I said.
“How do you not know this?” He said.
“Meh, I miss things.  My wife gets mad all the time when I do not notice haircuts that she gets.”
“I will meet you at 8 o’clock,” he said, “Let’s get breakfast at your place.”  That meant the restaurant close to my house, which has the best home fries in the entire world.  They also serve homemade pepper relish, which varies by batch but ranges anywhere from extraordinarily hot to a flavor just cooler than magma.  Yum.
“Alright,” I said.  This meeting place meant that we would hunt close to me, and use one of my spots.  Andy had lots of spots, and if I am honest he showed me more hunting holes than I ever showed him.  He carried his .410 pistol, and we walked into some pines.  A brush up  against the snow filled boughs had him emerge from a group of pines with his beard covered in snow, and he was puffing frantically to keep his pipe lit.  To be honest, he looked a bit like Santa Claus, If Santa  started jumping around and complaining about snow falling down his back while wearing an orange vest.
“That is cold!” Andy said.  The dogs started a rabbit and headed towards the bottom as we laughed at the snow fiasco and listened.  The chase was going great and we could not stop laughing at the sight of Andy trying to keep his pipe lit through the plop of snow,
“What were you doing off the road?” I laughed.  Everyone knew Andy wasn’t big for getting into the cover.
“I was turning my back to the wind and didn’t know I was that close to the trees,” he said, as as soon as he uttered the words he knew how he left himself wide open to an insult about his proclivity to shoot from dirt roads and starting laughing, “Ha ha ha!” he said.
I barely composed myself to talk through the laughing, “You accidentally left the path!” I wheezed, “And then your laugh was almost a Ho Ho Ho! That would have matched your white beard.” We walked over to watch the chase.
“That rabbit is gonna cross the spoil pile,” I said.
“You still got that sight hound in there to follow footprints In the snow, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“We will be fine,”
It then occurred to me that I had Christmas cookies in my pocket.  Good ones.  Church Lady cookies.  The kind that are made with club crackers and layers of butter and chocolate and other stuff.
“Say,” I cleared my throat, “Do you want some Christmas cookies?” I said to Andy as we stood on a steep bank, watching my dog take the front through the shale and dirt that was  covered with a coat of fresh  snow, using his eyes to see rabbit tracks.
“Hold this,” I handed Andy my shotgun as I rooted into my inner vest pocket to track down the zip top bag of snacks. “I gotta get Santa his cookies while he watches my dog work and lead his mutts through this coal mine.”  I snickered
He laughed as he grabbed my back with a big paw of a hand and kicked my legs out.  He eased my weight to the ground and pushed me down the steep bank towards the bottom where the dogs were chasing, “Don’t get my cookies wet!” He yelled as I slid about 30 yards down the hill.  “HO HO HO!”  Andy mocked me with a laugh as I rolled over to my stomach and looked uphill at him as I slid away.
It was Christmas Even and we were acting like little kids.  Did we shoot rabbits?  A couple.  We shot a couple.
“You bring the coffee?” He asked as we loaded dogs back into the truck.
“You know I did,” I said, grabbing my thermos, “Those cookies make you thirsty?”
“Yup.”
“I filled his travel mug 2/3 with coffee.  Andy always added about a half cup of that powdered coffee creamer.  French vanilla or hazelnut.  Maybe more than a half cup, as it obliterated the coffee taste entirely.  He carried a container of it in his glovebox! I have hunted Christmas Eve since then.  Some years we have snow, some years we do not. But I always think about my first Christmas Eve hunt with Andy, and then I go home and get ready for candlelight services at church.
My father and I made a ritual of hunting snowshoe hare on the day after Christmas, every year.  That was opening day for hare here in Pennsylvania, and not many guys knew where to find them back then.  I lived in the northern part of the state and could walk to a stand of hemlocks that was full of the white ghosts.  We frequently chased them, but the short season meant that we were only able to get a few each year.  By the time we could hunt them, I all but had them ready for the hunt, running them for months.  When you run the same hare all the time they get playful and almost don’t fear the dogs.  Like a beagle club bunny.  I was always so enthusiastic on the first day, and dad could see the excitement on my face.
“Relax, we will be there soon enough!” He said one year.
“Yeah, but there is this one hare that Is massive, you won’t believe it, and I know right where we have to stand to get him!”
And we did just that, and the hare was the biggest I have ever killed even to this day. And if we managed to get our daily limit of hare (2 per person per day, at that time) then we would relocate to a brushy bottom near a farm and try to get some cottontails too.  It was just what we did on the day after Christmas.  We hunted all day with our beagles.  It was my favorite day of the year, dad and I hunting on the 26th of December.  And while he never ate candy, for some reason dad brought peanut brittle to the woods for the start of every hare season.  We would eat rock hard peanut brittle while listening to the hare loop.  My life has pretty much gone to the dogs ever since then.
Last year I was hunting Christmas Eve on a piece of land a friend of mine owns.  I was putting the finishing touches on my sermon for that night, and thinking about Christmas.  How Christmas can make us sad, when loved ones have gone before us. I thought about those hunts with dad on the day after Christmas and the hunts with Andy on the day before Christmas, and the way that Christmas is a non hunting day sandwiched between my new tradition of hunting cottontails on the 24th and my older tradition of chasing hare on the 26th.  As the dogs chased that Christmas Eve cottontail last year, I grabbed a hatchet from my truck and cut down a small spruce tree to put in my house.  It was small enough to fit in a bucket, covered with a small tree skirt.  My wife has been a fan of artificial trees, especially since they invented those pre-lit ones. We had not had a real tree for a few years.  I decided that I would put this small spruce on a table in my office.
On that Christmas morning a year ago, I drank my coffee with the odors of that spruce filling the room.  It was in the pines where Andy pitched me down the spoil pile on my first Christmas Eve hunt.  It was in the hemlocks where dad and I spent our December 26th hunts.  That  little spruce seemed to do the trick to conjure both traditions, and both evergreen species, to the forefront of my memory.  While the rest of my family was seeping, I sat in my office with that tiny tree and had breakfast.  Oh, did I tell you that I stopped at the grocery store after cutting that tree down and bought some nasty French vanilla flavored powdered creamer and a small box of peanut brittle?  I poured the flavored powder into my coffee and grabbed a rock hard piece of brittle.  As daylight began to overtake the morning, I forced my nostalgia to stay in the dark, as my family began to stir and we prepared to commence with celebrating the light of the Christ child. Holidays can be tough, but we owe it to our beloved dead to continue with our lives.  We must make sure others have cherished memories and traditions, and that is somewhat dependent upon us.  Merry Christmas everyone, and keep ‘em running!

Sometimes, I fear I am becoming my father.  Now, I know what you think that means—that I do stuff like yell about the lights being on, get upset if people are wasting leftovers, or fill my gas tank when it gets down to half empty (It is not half full).  Oh, I do all those things.  Hey, I even tell my family that they do not have to turn the water off so abruptly, causing water hammer in the plumbing system, just like my dad would complain.  No, I am talking about a much different way that I am becoming like dad.  I just realized it recently.  Well, in the last couple months.
            I realized that social distancing has not been a hardship on me, at least in terms of my personal life.  When I was a kid, I used to say that my father didn’t seem to have friends, at least not ones that he “hung out” with on a regular basis.  “He is either at work, or he is with his family,” I said.
            “Everyone has a best friend,” my buddy said.
            “I don’t think he does.  And the friends he has are just guys from the beagle club.”
            “No one pops by the house?”
            “Yeah,” I said, “But only if they need something.  Other than relatives.  Now that I think about it, the relatives often only stop when they need something too.”
            “Okay, well he must get phone calls.  Whoever calls him the most often is his best friend,”
            “You are probably right,” I chuckled.
            “What is so funny?”
            “Overtime.  His most frequent call is overtime from the factory.”
            All these years later, I think that I am in the same boat.  I do not miss restaurants.  Even before all this coronavirus stuff, I usually packed a lunch.  I never know what my day will bring in terms of hospital visits.  I save money, and eat in my truck.  A thermos of soup in cold weather, or a sandwich in a cooler during the warmer months is my standard choice.  I never really went to stores that much anyway, that has always been my wife’s forte.  My dad never signed his paycheck or deposited it once, my mom always did that.  I may deposit my own checks, but I do that with my phone now.  Sometimes, I will give my debit card to my wife, Renee, when she goes to the store, but she makes more dough at the university than I make!  She does have trouble not being around people.  Renee is working from home, and I hear some of it.
            “I am tired about hearing you talk about Zoom and all the other web pages you can go to for online meetings,” I said to her as she closed her laptop, ending a meeting.”
            “They are platforms, not pages,” she looked over her glasses, in that bossy sort of way.
            “Whatever,” I said, “But every conversation you have with every co-worker is the same.”
            “They are colleagues.”
            “Okay.”
            “Do you even know what I do at the university?” she pushed her glasses up and looked through the lenses, trying to bait me into an answer.
            “Not really,” I said.  And I don’t, other than it is all online, and that is true even when she is in the office and her “colleagues” are all meeting in the same physical place.
            My work has been altered—I can not do hospital or nursing home visits.  Heck, I can’t do any visits.  I have substituted phone calls in place of driving to hospitals.  It goes pretty well, though, as you can imagine, it is tough on people who are older and suffering from hearing loss.  Hah, my hearing isn’t the best anymore either, so some pastoral care calls are just me and an older guy yelling at each other on the phone.  But a couple weeks into this whole mess, and I realized that I have to be at church on Sunday mornings, for our livestream church service, but otherwise, I could be anywhere during the week, so long as I could make cell phone calls to patients and tend to work stuff from afar.  Also, I could wear anything!  I ain’t talking about pajamas, I mean bibs and brush pants.
            Social distancing?  How could I possibly avoid people any more than if I went into the woods, and just stayed there?  I can just run some dogs, have some cookouts, and give my wife a break from the barking house dogs while she is having her online meetings. I will go afield for a couple days at a time, and as long as I can get a cell phone signal at the top of a hill, I am able to stay there.  I take the dogs and might run them as a pack one day, and take turns soloing them the next.  It makes for good time alone to think, and work on a weekly homily and provides a great place to work on any writing that I have to complete.  Over the years, I have been staying in the field with hounds more and more, but in recent weeks I have really been training hounds.  I thought I would share some things that make staying afield with dogs enjoyable, rather than uncomfortable.
            Rooftop tents are pretty commonly found with an internet search.  They vary in style and price.  I like a fiberglass top, which is why I have a Maggiolina.  You can mount it to the rooftop of a car or SUV.  With my pickup, which has a dog box in the bed, I use a ladder rack.  I like the fiberglass top because I have never gotten wet, no matter how hard it has rained upon me.  The tent bolts on the ladder rack, and I can drive anywhere with it—80 mph on the interstate, or an off-road crawl (it is only 130 pounds) into hunting spots.  In one minute, the tent can be raised, a ladder extended, and I can climb in and sleep on the mattress that is built into the tent itself.  The tent has paid for itself in the money it has saved me by not sleeping in hotels while on long road trips.  In fact, I sleep in this tent so much that it feels like home, and I now get to field trials the night before rather than waking up in the middle of the night to drive.
            Comfort goes beyond the tent.  In all those cowboy movies, the guys sleep on the ground, using a saddle for a pillow, and just a blanket.  Then, they wake up and move cattle all day.  Even when I am training dogs for a few days, I seldom let them run rabbits the entire day, but rather a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening is more typical.  What about the rest of the day?  It is good to have a comfy chair, some shade, and a place to sit and work in the rain.  They sell all kind of awnings for your 4x4.  I have a Foxwing that provides lots of shade for sitting under and also a place for the dogs to cool down.  It takes a few more minutes to deploy than the tent, but not much more.  It can be attached to a roof rack, or any other customized options, as I did for mine.  It can handle highway speeds when not deployed.
            My tent is comfortable, don’t get me wrong.  However, my best sleep of the day comes after I put some miles on the dogs at dawn, eat a late breakfast, and then take a nap before afternoon work, phone calls, and writing.  I own a camping hammock.  You can’t find a more comfortable “chair” if you try.  When I do camp remotely, I no longer carry a tent.  I use my hammock and use a tarp.  No need to worry about roots or rocks. Just find two trees, and set it up.  Shoot, If I am camping from the truck I can often get by with one tree, and attach the other side to my truck’s ladder rack.
            I kept my eye on a product, waiting for a good deal, because it isn’t typically cheap.  It is a tent that zips right onto the awning, called an Oztent.  Why did I want it?  It is perfect for two things—a screenhouse on those evenings when the mosquitoes (big enough to outdo any murder hornet in an aerial dogfight) are biting, and a dry place in a driving, windy, rain that would typically be catastrophic on my awning.  The tent anchors the awning fast to the ground in higher winds.  I like to run dogs until dark, and return to camp.  I can either rest in my hammock, or sit in a folding chair in the ground tent.  Weather is usually the determining factor.
            Storage is vital.  I have a bumper with swingout storage boxes that lets me pack a lot of gear.  I can fit a lot of clothing and a pillow in compression sacks.  I also use the storage boxes for tie out stakes, water bowls, and flashlights—I hate searching for all these necessities.  Hammer, tin shears, and a hatchet are there too. I use those boxes for anything that I know I will need and do not want to find in the perpetual pile of “stuff” in the back-seat row of my truck.  The bumper and boxes are light weight aluminum.  Aluminess is the company that makes them, and you can locate them online.
            My cargo hauler, inserted into the truck’s receiving hitch, is a beast.  It is made by Let’s Go Aero.  I can haul an array of comforts there—coolers, cooking gear, you name it.  Best thing?  It slides out.  Yep, I can slide the cargo basket back, allowing me to drop the tailgate no matter how full the hauler is.  This is key when you need to get to your dogs on a long trip to give them water, and alos let them water the local shrubbery.  I can then close the tailgate, push the cargo basket back into place, lock it down, and drive away.  It really is a game changer for long trips.  I also have a roof rack, and they all work well when used properly.
            Lastly, is power. Goal Zero makes lots of battery and solar panel options.  I have a Yeti 400, that I charge at home before I leave the house.  It makes small work of charging GPS tracking collars for the dogs.  Heck, in the interest of saving power, I have installed Microsoft Word on my cell phone, and use a battery powered keyboard that synchs up to my phone via Bluetooth.  That previous sentence just strained the limits of my tech language, but I can do a lot of writing on the power carried by that Yeti 400 when I am only charging a cell phone rather than a laptop.
            Just last week, I was out in the field and got a phone call from my wife. “Hello?” I answered.
            “Where have you been?”
            “Running dogs,” I said in a matter of fact fashion.
            “Your phone went right to voicemail,” Renee said, “I just got done on a Zoom meeting, but you wouldn’t know about Zoom.
            “I know plenty about Zoom,” I said.
            “What do you know?”
            “I just got great video of my 10 ½” tall beagle soloing a cottontail in really poor scent.  And she was zooming!”
            “Well,” Renee said, “Your phone was turned off, I have been trying to call you.”
            “My phone was on, I was using it.”
            “No, you were not talking.  It went straight to voicemail.  You could not have silenced it that fast,” Renee sighed.
            “I was recording video of the zooming,” I said, “I had the phone on airplane mode so no one could interrupt me.”
            “You figured out airplane mode?” she asked,
            “I was born for social distancing.  I am already at work, so overtime ain’t gonna call me,” I said.
            “What are you talking about?  You coming home soon?  You have been gone for days.”
            “Yeah, but only because it is not hunting season.  Or I might just stay out here….”
Zoom video at https://youtu.be/GfQ_b9g1ZG4
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