Perspiration was pouring off my face by then and my feet were sweat-soaked inside their boots. But for some reason known only to unlucky hunters, I could not leave this place without firing a shot. It worked beautifully now, mounted on the rinkydink spare tire that my father and his wife had left in our garage before their last trip to Alaska, and I shot my way through a box of shells, hitting something less than 50 percent, so much less, in fact, that when I broke just one of the last round of three, I decided to give up and declare victory. My Lab just whined. We hadn't seen birds in as fine a piece of grouse habitat as there could possibly exist, but at least I had warmed up the barrel.

When I reached Beaver Creek again, another hunter was already working the line of cottonwoods I'd picked out for myself. So I sat on the tailgate munching on elk sausage until a squall blew down the canyon, bringing rain.

We hunted up Hogback the next morning, surrounded by clouds. I wanted to gain enough elevation to find blue grouse--the big noisy birds that I had often seen while elk hunting but never with a shotgun in hand. For the first dim hours after dawn, with an importunate and tangible mist limiting visibility to ten paces, I was not exactly hunting. But I was hiking, and carrying the gun, and it was no small pleasure to experience that dizzy and unanchored feeling of walking in clouds.

By mid-morning, when the dog and I turned back for the truck, the clouds had burned off, and we could see where we'd been and the limitless miles of country around us. The clouds had left droplets of moisture on every pebble and pine needle, glimmering in the light like newly faceted jewels. As we walked along the sharp edge of the ridge, the dog found a blue grouse hiding in a juniper and charged. We both watched it explode from the ground and sail off into a thousand clean feet of air, wings spread like a bird of prey, gliding over the canyon until it was no more than a dim speck of gray feathers. Neither of us offered to follow.

Although I hadn't so much as lifted the gun to my shoulder, the sight of the grouse was like a balm to my heart. Not that I had felt sick exactly--in my third day of fruitless hunting--but still there was comfort in the mere presence of grouse, a signal of renewed hope, like the swoop of a frigate bird over blue water, or the smooth curve of a fresh elk track.

An hour later, near the base of the ridge, another blue offered me three shots. The first, low and quartering away, missed behind; the second, as the bird was rising, disturbed enough air to encourage him to wheel back above me; the third, awkwardly overhead, was a futile prayer.

The dog gave me the long-suffering look that he'd practiced during last December's waterfowl hunting, and perfected on the final morning of that season, when the ducks flew like there was no tomorrow and I responded like a five-year-old with a fly-swatter, flailing wildly at the whistle of wings. On that day the skies had settled by noon and we spent the hours until dusk in a frantic search for redemption.

I took some consolation in actually seeing a grouse that could be shot at, but what I remember of course is the bird overhead, tail feathers fanned outward like the night's best poker hand, wings spread like a net to catch the blue sky.

At lunch time, I sat in the sun on the front porch of the cabin, eating cold potato soup, and sipping bourbon from a Mason jar. The afternoon brought wind and rain again, and then only rain. Nonetheless, I picked up the gun and walked out to blunder among the grouse. Shuffling along below the crest of the ridge, I tried to pretend that it was duck season again, that I had forgotten my raincoat instead of merely overlooking it, and that I could hardly allow such a trifle to douse my enthusiasm.

The gray light threw what color remained into stark relief. Red-orange of Indian paintbrush, purple asters, the pearl white of yarrow, blue of harebells, and the occasional yellow of a brown-eyed susan. The grouse were feeding warily, very near the timber line, in a scrubby patchwork of juniper and bearberry. I flushed four birds, or perhaps two birds twice each. I took one shot as a big blue flew low through into the timber, but dropped only a fir branch. Walking back to the truck, head down against the wind and soaked to the skin, I spotted a fossilized seashell imbedded in a fist-sized chunk of wet black shale--a remnant of the ocean floor 7000 feet above sea level, a reminder that even the lowliest of the low may someday rise.

The next day's grouse came, of course, when I least expected it. I'd been watching a long-legged hare, still in his summer coat, trace a series of zigs and zags up a rocky terrace, loping along in a graceful and considered fashion, as if he were entirely aware of the yellow dog 50 yards behind him, and even more entirely aware that said dog would not think to look up and apprehend him while said dog's nose was glued to the twisting trail of scent.

Small accommodations, but a spectacular view under Grouse Ridge.

I shifted my weight to the uphill foot, in preparation for taking a step toward the hare, when the big blue rocketed out of a juniper 20 yards off and flew at an angle that brought him within fifteen yards, moving left to right, his big wings pumping like a wild turkey's.

I brought the gun up and touched the trigger before the muzzle had cleared even his tail feathers. The grouse turned his wings under the wind and veered off downhill. Humbled and despairing, I wasted another shot at his back. The dog looked up momentarily from the rabbit trail to see what all the noise was about, heard me swear softly, watched me stoop to collect the spent shells, then went back to his work.

The grouse hung in my mind like a pinata at a child's birthday party, in which I was the blindfolded guest who swung and missed and swung again and missed again.

As I worked back up the slope, I thought of the theory of success I'd developed as both a guide and a commercial fisherman--go far enough, work hard enough, and it will come. The "it" being that moment when fish and fisherman find themselves wired together, jolted by the same not entirely unexpected current, almost as if each had predicted the other's capture. This theory seemed to apply with equal relevance to mountain streams and the gulfstream, to palm-sized trout and man-sized tarpon. I desperately wanted it to apply to upland birds as well. Melded to the old urge to chase was the more enduring urge to provide, at least in some symbolic fashion, if not in the real terms of meat and bone. I did not want to explain to my children how I could hunt every day for a week and not taste even one sinewy drumstick.

I watched a family of ravens playing in the updrafts created when the wind slammed into the side of the mountain, their black wings spiraling high into the blue, doing loops and barrel rolls, cawing to each other as if to ask, "Can you top this?" Then I turned my back to them and ran to catch up with the dog.

Although each life we take for our own sustenance is a gift, this bird was more like a king's ransom. I had given up for the evening, hiking head down again for the truck, when I saw the grouse running ahead of the dog in a little alley of open ground. It lifted off from the uphill side of the opening, turned and followed the steep contour of the mountain, bringing it back below me. My first shot went high, as did the second. I watched as pellets scattered bits of bark from the trees downhill and behind the bird. This blessed grouse could have easily escaped into the thick timber, but instead it kept on as straight as a homing pigeon. By some miracle the third shot found feathers, and the bird dropped like a wicker basket. It hit the rocky slope about 50 feet downhill, then rolled another 20. The dog scrambled down and picked it up in his mouth. When its wings flapped uselessly, he let it fall. I asked him to bring the bird a half-dozen times to no avail, then finally started down after him. Seeing this, he picked it up again and carried it to me.

I can't explain this behavior from a dog who has swum with a wounded goose across an ice-choked river, receiving a staccato beating about the head and ears all the while, then delivered the exhausted bird perfectly to hand, except perhaps as an expression of a dog's disgust at my shooting in the past week, his way of saying, "You don't deserve this beautiful grouse and I am withholding it for your own good."

Back at the cabin, I admired again the plump heft of the bird, so much weightier than the ruffed grouse that frequent the woods near our home. I dressed and plucked it while it was still warm, saving the black tail quills for my son. I stowed the cleaned carcass in the cooler for dinner the next day, with my returning family, then sauteed the heart and liver in garlic and butter, served it with a plateful of egg noodles alfredo and a handful of steamed green beans, picked from our garden on the morning we left home, and still so crisp that they squeaked between my teeth.

The heart was tasty but the liver was like a healing tonic, smooth and succulent, with the almost medicinal tang of juniper that you find in straight gin.