"The Dawn Flighting" is a seemingly simple story that gets more complicated the more you look at it. The story concerns an unnamed man who goes off with his Labrador retriever in the pre-dawn hours across marsh and sea walls into the edge of a pond, where he shoots at ducks, killing several. At the story's end, he places the ducks in a bag and heads back towards the sea wall, pausing for a moment when three swans fly overhead.

There were several things I noticed about this story. The first is the almost total submersion of character into the here and now of the hunt. The central character is seemingly not developed at all, without a name, or a past, or a future, existing in the eternal present, the exigencies of the moment. Those of you who read "The Perfect Storm" may recall John Spillane, who bails out of his helicopter into the raging Atlantic Ocean: "His memory goes from falling to swimming, with nothing in between. When he understands that he is swimming, that is all he understands -- he doesn't know who he is, why he is there, or how he got there. He has no history and future; he is just a conciousness at night in the middle of the sea." (Sebastian Junger, "The Perfect Storm", pp. 240-241).

But living solely in the present cannot go on forever, and just as the real-life Spillane regains his memory, so too do bits and pieces of the past and character of PO'B's unnamed man come through: thus we learn that "he was a choleric man" who had often "spoil[ed] his whole morning with rage" (p.31). He has a certain private morality: he doesn't believe in killing shovellers (p.32) or in letting wounded birds suffer (p.32). There are hints of poverty: he counts his meager catch against "the big pile of empty cartridges" (p.33), suggesting he is not hunting for mere sport, but can ill afford the cost of bullets without meat to show for it. There's an interesting bit of interior monologue: "a fine drake it was" (p.32), rather than the more conventional "it was a fine drake"; the syntax used hints at an Irish background of some sort.

There's a tremendous specificity to the wildlife, illustrating once more PO'B's concern for natural history: not ducks alone inhabit these pages, but mallards, and drakes, and shovellers, and teal, and widgeon. I don't know one from the other myself, but PO'B certainly seems to.

Killing, and the main character's attitude towards it, is, as in the earlier stories, once more an important theme. And there's a deadly progression at play here: in the first two stories, the main character was killing fish; now he's killing birds; soon enough the characters will be killing people. The man keeps his emotions in check towards the birds he kills for the most part, excluding the wounded bird he kills for mercy (p.32), except for a widgeon he kills, which he stares at "with an unconcious grin of pleasure" (p.32), almost exactly like JSB, the central character from "The Return", who is "[g]rinning like a boy" (p. 11) when he kills his fish.

There are, in fact, many interesting points of comparison between this story and "The Return". Although the evidence is scanty, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the man in "Dawn Flighting" is JSB himself. Is there a clue in the fact that the man's dog is a retriever (i.e., a returner)?

The story in "Dawn Flighting", however, is "The Return" stood on its head. Both stories concern men going into wild places, hunting animals, and leaving. "Return", however, begins in the day, and ends elegiacly, at night, "in the dying light" (p.15). "Dawn Flighting" begins when "the night was old, black, and full of driving cold rain" (p.27), and ends with the dawn breaking, on a redemptive note, as the man sees and hears "three wild swans" (p.33), flying away in the cold air, "and a leaping exultation took the man's heart as he gazed up at them, up away in the thin air" (p.34).

This is an interesting technique PO'B uses on occassion: ending a story with threes: thus "The Hundred Days" ends with the mysterious woman "waving, waving, waving" (p.281); and "Treason's Harbour" ends with triple letters, as Jack resolves to write to the Admiralty, and Laura Fielding resolves to write to her husband, and Stephen resolves to write to Wray; and Stephen's final sentence is in three parts as well: "[1] Not more than eight or perhaps nine men knew the contents of Jack's orders;[2] and if that does not enable Wray to lay his hands upon the prime chief Judas, [3] then there is the very Devil in it." (pp. 333-334); and now "Dawn Flighting" ends with the three swans.

A page before (p. 32), the man has shot at three ducks, killing one; now three swans rise up lyrically and majestically, suggesting death and redemption, recalling as well the fairy tale of the ugly duckling who grows into the beautiful swan. And in spite of all his hinted at troubles, the man is glad, if just for the moment, at the sight and the sound. "The Dawn Flighting" stands as PO'B's most optimistic short story so far.

John Finneran