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PrintPursuing Perfection
An unnatural history of feathers
ILLUSTRATION BY KATHLEEN HANSON AND MEGHAN HANSON POWERS
(page 1 of 2)
It would be tempting to wax lyrical, speculating that the feather had come full circle, had achieved its destiny. But it would be a dubious claim at best. The truth is that from the underside of a grouse in the foothills of the Tetons to the jaw of a cutthroat on the Snake River, the feather had followed a bizarre and entirely unnatural course. It was a trajectory in no small part shaped by the violent taking of a life, then by the feather becoming part of a contrivance with the motive of sub-surface seduction; in short, a fate entirely other than what it had evolved for. To pretend otherwise would be delusional.
It might also be easy to pursue a tangent regarding some romantic notion of native localism, of the feather and the fish being products of a certain region, originating a mere few miles from each other. There is undoubtedly some superficial appeal to this line of thinking; eventually, however, inconvenient but integral facts would have to be dealt with—the involvement of a shotgun manufactured an ocean away, hooks devised of composite metals originating God-knows-where, a carbon fiber fly rod. Well, you can see how quickly this interpretation would fall apart under scrutiny, if consistency were a criteria.
I’m whittling away at these sentiments not for the all-too-easy exercise of merely stripping essence from existence, but instead because, as Antoine de St. Exupery once put it, “a thing is perfect not when nothing more can be added to it, but when nothing more can be taken away.” While I’ve always been dubious of perfection being an attainable state (much less a desirable one), the process of peeling away to expose the heartwood is what holds the real appeal for me. Having therefore negotiated at least some of the obvious poetic potholes, am I left with anything worth considering beyond this feather I’m attaching to a hook?
The bird drops hard, landing out of sight with the distinctive thump that only dead bodies make. I break the action and pocket the spent shell, noting the pungent tang of gunpowder dissipating into the decay of leaves and frost, a singular scent that characterizes fall like nothing else for me. I am hunting alone and without benefit of a dog, and so I work my way into the thicket—crouching, crawling; trying to locate an extremely well-camouflaged animal. Only a slight post-mortem spasm amongst the season’s detritus gives away what would otherwise be indistinguishable to the eye. I hold the warmth of a recently live creature, and on a cold October day, I’m not ashamed to say it is used to put feeling back into my own hands....(continued)
