The pheasant was shot two autumns ago in Idaho; its fame has less to do with the bird, itself, and much more to do with our dog - a mere puppy then – which made a miraculous pursuit over so much ground that the hunters feared they had lost the dog. For two years, I have been hearing about the incredible retrieval. Rarely have I heard about the bird. But what’s the bird like? I asked my husband, Peter. Nothing special, he said, not large, not impressive in any way. Our conversation always ended right there.

At the time the ring-necked pheasant was shot, we were living in Los Angeles, some distance from any pheasant-habitat. Peter and his brother, Matthew, drove to Idaho to hunt and visit our good friend, Bob. Together, the three hunted in Wieser, Idaho, in a field that was set beneath another field. On a Thursday morning, a pheasant busted up from the ground and Peter fired at it. The bird continued to fly. Matthew turned and had a shot; the wing was hit. The bird careened down, landed, and began running, spreading golden weeds as it raced.

The puppy, about a year old and not yet trained in the field, thrust his head into the air. He faced the wind driving north into Wieser, and he bolted in that direction. Peter and Matthew were sure the bird had taken a different course. They watched the dog cross the first field, the second, and shrink out of sight. Peter cursed, then, because he imagined the pointer was chasing the same mule deer that, all morning, he had harassed out of boredom or to irritate the bird-hunters.

The men rested, waited, and asked each other where the dog had gone. His head finally crested the upper field as he crossed back through the exact path that pheasant had made. At Peter’s feet, he dropped the bird. Good dog, they said. The dog knew – as dogs always do – the tone of those two words, but the men must have meant more. Good dog, you chased down the wounded bird. Good dog, you didn’t let that bird die out there in the field after we’d shot it in the wing and back. Good dog, you are who you are supposed to be.

Indeed, the pheasant had been shot twice. A sturdy bird, it took the hit in the back and kept flying. After the second shot forced it downward from the sky, it – stubborn – took off running, which it could do just as well as fly. Peter said he would have the bird mounted to mark the dog’s amazing retrieval. Really, you would have to look at it that way because it was no grand hunting story: not a one-shot event and not expected or hoped for. The remainder of the trip was about quail and chuckar, but no other pheasants. Among all those smallish birds, the focus of the trip became the dog: a miracle-performing, ground-covering, untrained pointer with possibilities no one suspected.

Back in Boise, Peter brought the pheasant to a local taxidermist, a woman and half of a husband-and-wife-team just getting their business started. The wife worked solely with birds and the husband worked with elk, whose heads were piled in snow. She apologized that it would take some time; she was backed up and her freezer was full. But Peter was in no hurry; he was on his way home and asked her to call when she’d finished.

It was autumn 2001, the season that travel had considerably declined across the country, the season that some hunters refused to go into the fields and cancelled long-planned trips. Peter was, I recall, undeterred by travel-warnings and cautions. He was driving out west where it was supposed to be dangerous, anyway, and his dogs needed to run.

The taxidermist takes her time - two seasons – until she calls our house in June, earlier this year. I pick up the odd message on the voicemail; it is some unknown woman’s voice that declares your bird is ready.

Ready for what? It’s ready to be seen and to appear before us so that a story can be recounted about its flight and fall, the dog that revealed his innate ability in his first young season. It’s ready for the story around it to be told. In June, we had barely moved into a new house and Peter was nowhere near Boise, Idaho. Bob picked up the mount and agreed to keep it until August when Peter would return to Boise.

A ground-dwelling bird, the pheasant is in the family Phasianidae along with partridges, guinea fowl, chuckar, and grouse. What makes this family of birds intriguing, perhaps, is their silence and the fact that they often walk and run. What makes them impressive is the crash with which they abandon dirt and hedges for flight. Like many other birds, pheasants are imported and not native to North America. Originally from Eurasia, wide variations of the pheasant exist here because the birds are continually introduced and bred. As a result, American pheasants always resemble European and Asian pheasants.

The pheasant is said to have come from the land of the river, Phasis, near Colchis, Jason’s destination for the Golden Fleece. The bird isn’t mythologically famous like the goose or swan or peacock. But it did become a star, in the age of Queen Victoria, when pheasant-hunting rose in prominence. And in another tradition, here, the bird continues to be well-hunted today in North America.

The pheasant-hen is a dirty brown and white, blending her feathers into earth. But the male is sought-after and beautiful. Wherever the pheasant is regarded, the bird of renown is always male. Even among other cocks, however, the pheasant is paid little notice as an extraordinary bird. The colors of the ring-necked male, however, are remarkable. Each deep hue meets the body and its tail, though not as spectacular as the peacock, is elegant, possesses distinct grey lines that extend across the orange feathers to the end.

While the ring-necked pheasant was being fleshed and dried, we moved from Los Angeles closer to where I work, into a place with plenty of white walls for the European mount elk head Peter likes to keep over the fireplace and for the anticipated pheasant.

We reside in a circa 1971 condo in an association where the colors of one’s house are fairly regimented and the grass is kept short and green. So, it’s slightly bizarre - unless you know us - to find an elk head above the fireplace and the new addition, a ring-necked pheasant in-flight mount, on the far living room wall. There, if you lounge in our chairs and tilt your head back, you can see pheasant’s underside and the very short stick that connects it to the wood.

I have been living with the elk-head in my house for almost three years. Sharing space with it, I have grown accustomed to its oddity. In fact, I think I am more attached to it than I am to my furniture. The elk is at least more like me: bone.

But the pheasant is altogether different. He is exactly as he used to look in flight but I’m not sure how much of his bones are left. On the surface, he is preserved. Dead and still, his wings are extended as he is caught in his pre-death, pre-shot lift. He has glass for eyes, but I could swear he is looking at my drapes and considering that they need to be replaced.

In my first year of high school, I opted out of physical education and enrolled in dance. The quarter-long class – just one example of an unfocused high school career – was a turning point. I was set aloft by a teacher whose assignment was to create a dance and to perform it on the last day of class. I was no dancer, but - as I was also beginning to understand - I was no student and definitely no athlete. I had shied from every team sport my parents encouraged me to try and each day I was failing algebra.

In my mother’s house, I rolled the rug up to reveal her hardwood floor and I worked each afternoon to choreograph a dance with a few techniques the teacher had given us and with what little else I had: my hands and the extension of my body that, as time wore on, I discovered. For hours, I ignored my homework and understood how to make something from the inside first.

When I performed the two-minute routine, my classmates seemed surprised. My teacher leaned over to her assistant and said I didn’t know she had it in her. The performance was inconsequential, but I nevertheless marked the experience. In fact, I never danced again. The lesson and pleasure were, for me, in the making, the creation that took place within and which could not be kept or explained. Later, I walked the school-halls and listened as best I could. But I knew, then, that it was better to have a few hours lost to something like a new song and a hardwood floor.

I am not alone in observing the pheasant. The wonder-puppy’s litter mate, a bitch, seems unnerved, too. Late at night when I cannot sleep and I wander into the living room, I have found her, more than once, sitting on the couch or standing on her two back legs so that she can lean against wall near the mount. The dog is not unintelligent; she never sniffs the air. She knows that pheasant is nothing she will ever shock off the ground. I walk over to her and say, good dog, it’s okay.

In this case, I know she understands the good dog part, and she even understands the okay part, too. But it’s not okay. In the dark, we both study the pheasant, which appears colorless in the night-light. We don’t think about that day of hunting, the number of birds shot or the weather that Thursday. We don’t recall the distance from which the ailing bird was retrieved and we never call it a miracle.

Instead, I imagine the belly incision that split the pheasant open and the taxidermist’s worry over how to remedy the bird’s back, and make its wounds disappear. I consider how well she knows pheasant-colors; enough that she could make it seem it had never lost blood. I imagine the taxidermist’s stiff neck from her labor and her pride in the perfected realism. I understand how her work allowed her – I’m guessing – to think of a million other things while she went about the task of removing the brains of the bird, fleshing it, and ensuring that the stench of its death and life was absent.

In my world – far from the dog’s – the pheasant is both the surface of things and an attention underneath. Unlike the elk across the room whose appearance I have come to embrace as some reminder for what our days have been about and the direction each one of us is going, the pheasant is both who he is and who he never was. In this darkness, he’s an uncanny reminder - both of emptiness and fulfillment – of what our days might be.

True, he is adornment. But earlier he flew through the sky after having spent most of his days hiding quietly in dirt and hedgerows. That bird avoided being found and flushed and, for a moment, figured centrally in a scene he could eye from above. Under his grays, reds, turquoise and the defining white ring around his neck, he is a pheasant-skull, plastic, and mostly some woman’s dream; he is the taxidermist’s work, her time spent hoping he would be as beautiful made as he was breathing.