In the last two issues, we’ve examined gastric bloat and torsion, hypoglycemia, hypothermia, and heat stroke. In the last part of this special series, we’ll look at poisoning.

At 14 months, German shorthair Geena was amazing—not only for her excellent hunting skills, but also because she could sit on the front seat of a car with an unwrapped chocolate éclair on the dashboard and not wolf it down. Her owner, Andy Baker, says he could set down a juicy T-bone steak, leave the room, and Geena would not go near it. Who would have guessed that a capped bottle of antifreeze would prove irresistible to such a dog?

While helping a friend work on his truck, Andy made a quick trip to the store for a gallon of antifreeze, which he set on the backseat of the car. Geena always rode along with Andy and liked to hang out in his car. Shortly after returning to his friend’s garage, Andy discovered the bottle had its cap chewed off and the seal broken. “Geena has a nasty habit of taking caps off bottles quicker than spit,” Andy says. “I made the stupid mistake of not putting the bottle in the trunk. Knowing what antifreeze does to animals, I just about panicked.”

Each year, a certain autumn day breaks and slips over the Connecticut River, covering the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with morning light. It is the beginning of a reunion for me. It happens on a weekend in October, when the leaves are radiant and still on the trees, and the sun spreads westward through all that color, coating the land like spilt maple syrup. Each year I return to see it, driving east to make a homecoming. I leave my in-laws’ house in the crackling cold and stop in Eden, Vermont, for coffee and a cinnamon doughnut, at a store where bear hunters buy tins of chew and dairymen scrape their boots on the mudroom sill.

Over Eden Mountain, the road turns down and the coffee is weak but hot; it scalds my fingers when the washboard dirt road shoves my rear tires toward the ditch. On the east side of the Lowell Mountain ridge, the stars shine brightest, and I know I’ll be meeting that advancing day in the scrub edges of the sleepy countryside ahead. There will be dog bells and scratched hands and sweat-stained shirt collars, and everything I’ve waited for since the last bird season closed, a long nine months ago.

In the first blush of a fine spring morning, Linda Baker, director of the Upper Green River Alliance, and I disembarked from her truck in Wyoming’s 7-million-acre Upper Green River Valley. “Hey, grouse droppings,” she said.
“Neat,” I said, not sarcastically. They looked like the scat of my Yankee ruffed grouse, only white instead of gray-brown.
“Wait,” she said. “There aren’t enough; this can’t be the lek.” The lek was farther west—toward the snow-streaked, moonlightwashed Wyoming Range. To our north rose the Hobacks and Gros Ventres, darker in their coats of lodgepole pine and subalpine fir. We’d gotten lost in the maze of dirt roads recently cut through this rolling, sagebrush steppe to accommodate the gas industry. The year was 2004.
Lights on gas drilling rigs imparted a New York City ambience to what had recently been de facto wilderness. Ulcerating the surrounding flatlands were 8-acre rectangular well pads next to plastic-lined ponds that held scum-encrusted, hydrocarbon-fouled fracking water. It was oozing onto this parched landscape, killing wildlife forage and damaging the habitat of some the last pure strains of Colorado River cutthroat trout.