This week’s rain and warmer tempretures wash away all the snow, and the myriad tracks that laced it.

On Jan. 20, my beloved German shorthaired pointer Josey Wales celebrated his 15th birthday. About a dozen of his two-legged friends attended, and each of them brought one, two or three dogs.

The snow wasn’t deep, but it was dense. The dogs ran in pairs, and we waited for the day to warm a bit before giving Josey a turn. Two birds were planted for him, and I got him out of the back seat of my suburban, where he had fogged the windows in anticipation.

A couple tendrils of dread had settled in my throat. Would this be too much for him? His hearing is completely gone, his eyes dim and blue, his hips arthritic and weak. But all morning he’d heard the shots as other dogs and owners found birds. When I lifted him to the ground, he immediately started off at a trot.

“Well,” said my friend Joe DeMarkis, Pottsville. When Josey was a pup, Joe had been the first person to help me with training, and also the first person to shoot a bird over Josey. “I hope that when I get old and decrepit, somebody takes me hunting.”

And then my bit of dread and worry was gone. Whatever happened, my old dog was thrilled. He chugged away through the snow and the whole gang of us followed him. In just a minute or two, he had found his first bird and pointed it.

There are some things that are so heartbreaking, they are beautiful. His back legs were splayed, his paws spread wide as he held himself upright. I flushed the bird, and it was shot. I sent Josey for the retrieve and he found it easily. He couldn’t pick it up though, so I walked up and put it in my vest.

Josey was already looking for another bird, which he soon found. I remember that as I walked up to him I reflected that where my old dog now pointed had been a choked wood of white birch, sumac and cherry trees. With the help of friends, over the past eight years, the old fields had been recovered and now sprawled wide in grounds groomed for training dogs.

Everything that had happened had started with this dog, Josey. It was because of him I had landed at this old farm, where one small piece of the earth had been fixed and made beautiful. I often joke that it’s a riches to rags story, buying this farm with him in mind. And it was because of him that I had met these types of people – like me, vehicles, homes, vacations, all these things planned around the hunting dog lifestyle.

I flushed the second bird. Again, Josey found it, I don’t know how. He couldn’t pick it up but enjoyed biting it repeatedly. My friends, who are also his friends, followed him with their cameras out like he was a star. In some ways he is – he had trained with every person and dog who were present.

We eventually trooped into my kitchen and shared some venison chili and snacks. I lit the candles on the Bow Wow Beef and Bacon cake and we sang to Josey. Later, with everyone gone, I took Josey’s grandson Homer out for a run, thinking we might find an escaped chukar. We did, I shot it, and Homer made a ridiculously long retrieve of it.

After completing the retrieve to me Homer launched into elated, celebratory jumps, just like his grandpop used to do. The snowy path back to the house had been packed flat by dozens of boot tracks and paw prints. All this has happened, I was thinking, because of one special dog. I felt humbled and lucky, to have had him to lead me on a path to this place. I know I won’t have him forever; I know he’ll be part of all our memories forever.