Up on top, in the saddle between the buttes, a 500-foot climb from the rocky two-track below, sits a rock. Plunked there by a volcano, created first in a cauldron of fire, it’s a chunk of stone pockmarked by eons of fire and ice.

A boulder about the size of a subcompact car, it has a cleft in its center, like a Yugo on which a tree has fallen. The dust of centuries has piled around it and it makes for a pretty good seat on a nice day. But nice days are hard to come by late in chukar season.

Curt Butler, of Gastonia, North Carolina, talks about his art, “I have spent most of my life around woods. One of the many fascinating things about trees and woods is the shapes and variety of spaces as you wander through them; they are truly a world you can get lost in.”

Picture this: You’re working the edge of a hay field turned brown, cut months before in late summer. A lanky young German shorthaired pointer plunges in and out of the thick brush bordering the field, working the cross wind. Without a moment’s pause, he dives again and again into the tangled mass of thorny raspberries, dried goldenrod, and buckthorn, quartering briefly out into the field for a gulp of chaff-free air between plunges. An older shorthair works the brush farther in from the edge, tracking bird scent along the single moist strip of ground bordering a rise of ledge.