Colter was "the runt of the litter, the one nobody else wanted" (p. viii). Bass describes himself as a slow learner and a bad shot, who in his sleep dreams of birds, "the hardest ones to hit" (p. 166). The German shorthair pointer teaches him "to feel the world again, to taste it, to see it, drinking it in, like gulps of air" (p. 53). "A dog creates, transcribes, a new landscape for you," Bass writes. "A dog like Colter sharpens your joy of all the seasons, and for a while, sometimes a long while, such a dog seems capable, by himself alone, of holding time in place--of pinning it, and holding it taut. And when he is gone, it is as if the world is taken away" (p. 169).
I fell hard into this book's amazing grace. Bass may be a really bad shot, but he is a really fine writer. His writing is so vivid in this book that you can smell the gunpowder after each shotgun blast, and the sweaty fur of his panting dog, making COLTER, well, the best dog book I ever read.
G. Merritt
