English cocker spaniels hold a special place in my heart. Watching these handsome dogs hunt a field, quartering in their distinctive figure-eight pattern, is almost hypnotic. Like when you gaze into a log fire and do not want to look away. Though the diminutive cocker is not the only spaniel breed I have owned and trained, it is the breed I favor above all others, due to its immeasurable love for both people and the challenge and excitement of the hunt.

To me, “remote” was an abstraction, a vague idea of distance and expanse and low probability. Until I found it on a map. Remote, Oregon, doesn’t pass for much of a town—but in my mind it has come to stand for a place of wild country and a chance for adventure.

To be honest, I didn’t think my oldest daughter would want to hunt for awhile after she got married. But here we were, with her new husband in tow, a rifle and a shotgun in the rack.

East of Remote, the road turned to gravel and climbed up and around the back of Bone Mountain, past the snowline. We locked the hubs in and shifted into four-wheel drive. Daylight pushed back the dark. We looked into bowls of fresh powder and hoped to strike a track.

Our chances of seeing elk were, well, remote; but I had a plan that involved the shotgun and a few roads I had found that would take us below the snowline.

Twenty years ago this was a worn-out, overworked, eroded piece of monoculture agriculture ground, full of beef cattle and corn, but largely bereft of quail, songbirds, or anything else resembling native prairie. The land was epilogue, the final chapter in a story stretching back for generations of changing land-use practices, changing conservation values, and disappearing wildness.

Jimmy Bryan read that book—in fact, he lived it—during a farming and ranching career that spanned half a century. But when Bryan looked out upon the land, he realized he didn’t like the ending. It bothered him. He couldn’t reconcile the epilogue the land had become with the chapters he recalled from his youth. So Jimmy Bryan decided to rewrite the book, not on paper, but upon the land itself—the rich, loamy pages of the once-famed but now largely gone Mississippi black-belt prairie region.

Thus was born Prairie Wildlife, a gorgeous, sprawling, 6,000-acre open book—one still being written—chronicling one man’s efforts to bring back the land and bring back wild quail, all while striking a delicate yet achievable balance between conservation, restoration, agriculture, and recreation.