My dog is curled behind the chair as I write, chin on paws, breathing regularly. Then he begins to twitch and his breath comes quicker and his nose flares. He is dreaming and since he is a bird dog, I know he is dreaming about hunting birds.

In fact, I even know what hunt he is dreaming about because I was there and we both will dream about it until our dreams themselves become a dream.

In his dream, he again is curled into an awkward point on the afternoon covey. The impossible covey. The covey stranger than fiction. The covey that should not have been there.

No matter how many days afield a hunter makes, no more than a handful will stick in memory, unalterably etched and endlessly rehashed. The rest fade and become one, a running together of experience like the melting of a graceful ice sculpture into a puddle of water.

The little dog is dreaming about one of those days. I lay my hand on his shoulder and he twitches awake, confused, his mind still filled with the image of that Knox County ridge with the air full of quail and the sharp bark of a shotgun behind him.

It was the day of the afternoon covey.

North Missouri, mid-November, a farm gone to the Conservation Reserve Program, with foxtail and lespedeza. Quail are everywhere.

I AM SHOOTING A 28-GAUGE side-by double, a sweet little straight- stocked gun that seduced me the first time I saw her. I have bragged about her grace, her ability to reach out and touch something.

My hunting buddy, Spence Turner, wants to try it and we swap guns. I hand her to him and there is a twinge of regret, like turning the girl of your dreams over to some lout who has cut in on the dance floor.

I take Spence's 20-gauge Winchester 101 and smoke three birds in a row while he misses at least that many with my baby. Spence blames it on the gun. Like me, he is a flawless wingshooter who is only undone by faulty equipment, weather conditions, the phase of the moon, or black magic.

"Give me back my gun!" he snarls, thrusting my 28-gauge at me, the way the inspecting officer used to slap an M-1 rifle back at me in the Army, half hoping I'd drop it so he could chew on me a while.

Spence continues to miss with his own gun and this does not improve his mood which now resembles that of a badger with an impacted tooth. I hear him in a gully shouting threats at birds that don't stop to listen. He is invoking great powers, but they apparently are on vacation, for there is another flush, another shot, another hoarse imprecation.

It is not Spence's day.

On the other hand, it is Dave Mackey's day. Dave is the third member of the party. Most days are his. If Dave spends enough time, he will go home with a limit and with most of his shells unfired. He is not victim to the evil spells that plague the rest of us great wingshots because he doesn't believe in devils and black magic.

HE BELIEVES THAT IF HE POINTS his gun at a quail and pulls the trigger, the quail will drop amid a spray of feathers and so it happens. Simple faith is a wondrous thing.

He pockets bird after bird and by noon he has eight and is finished. "I'll just walk around with you fellows this afternoon," he says, and I have the uncharitable suspicion that he is seeking cheap entertainment, that he is following to hear me rant at the dogs and Spence curse the gods of gunnery. Dave once saw me empty my gun at a quail, throw the gun on the ground and stomp on it.

He has been interested in watching me quail hunt ever since. "It's better than those funny home videos," he says.

But he tires of walking gunless late in the day and says he will get the truck and meet us. There is a birdhunting axiom: the car always is uphill when you come back to it at the end of the day.

And so it was. I saw Dave's truck across a steep hollow and up a long slope, parked in the foxtail, and I sighed, for the sun was low and the shadows long and I was leaden with fatigue.

I had six birds in the bag, at least a dozen good reasons why I didn't have the other two to fill a limit. Spence, with several less, was fuming through the grabbushes, swearing and calling down evil spells on the quail he missed.

A LONG DAY QUAIL HUNTING that had begun on a chilly morning, was finishing as the first cold breath of evening dried the sweat on my face.

The truck was a distant goal, like Emigrant Rock, glimpsed a hundred miles off by dead-weary pioneers.

I took off my cap and let the breeze cool my wet head, wiped a film of sweat off the inside of the cap. Chubbs, the Brittany, loped down the hill and patrolled the ditch edge, hunter to the end, but I was so tired I had quit.

Six birds is more than enough and more than I usually collect in a day's hunt. A limit is a once or twice a season event and when it happens it is because I am offered a heaping handful of shots that anyone can make.

Six birds would insure a warm welcome when I reached home, the hunter from the hill. My wife sends me off in the chill morning, not really understanding, because if you really want meat, Schulte's IGA is one mile and you're home in 10 minutes, not 120 miles and 10 hours away.

I drive 300 miles, come home with maybe a pound of meat. I eat in cafes that serve garbage-dump meals, charge Waldorf prices, shoot $5 worth of shells...and bring home the equivalent of a buck's worth of frying chickens.

THE TRUCK SHIMMERS on the horizon, a mirage, a chimera. Of course I have to jump a ditch and it is the elephantine leap of a caribou failing to clear a suckhole in the tundra. I grunt and clamber out of the hole into the edge of the foxtail field. The truck is a hundred yards off, Mars to an astronaut.

One who does not hunt birds cannot know the deep fatigue that saps the knees, depletes the hips, makes the feet scream and throb. My neck won't work right, the feather of a gun feels as if I am lugging a 105-mm howitzer. I don't give a good goddamn if the dogs point or not.

I stumble up the hill, break the gun open, remove the shells and stuff them in my pocket.

I am thirsty like a dying man in the desert and I am tired to the marrow. The truck now is closer and I am stumbling toward it as if it were an oasis on the Sahara and I were a sun-blackened survivor.

"Water!" I croak and Dave, his face filled with concern, reaches for the water jug and opens the passenger door.

AND THEN I NOTICE SOMETHING PECULIAR. Chubbs, the little Brittany, is coiled into a point about five feet from the bumper of the truck. This is incongruous. It's like seeing Michelle Pfeiffer smoking a cigar at a stag party. It's like seeing Rocky Balboa serving cookies in Mrs. Mitchell's tea room.

"You have to be kidding," I exclaim through cracked lips. The dog does not move, his eyes try to meet mine, but his head-down point won't release him and his eyes roll crazily. He is frozen. This a point. This is a Point. This is a "POINT."

"My dog is pointing," I croak to Dave, who has gotten out of the truck and is looking at the dog as if it suddenly had sprouted wings and started singing selected passages from "The Messiah." After all, he's been sitting here for 15 minutes.

I grub in my pocket, find a couple of shells, stuff them in the little double, and close it. "Got to be a rabbit," I mutter, moving forward.

I KICK UNDER THE DOG'S NOSE and a glory of quail explodes into the late evening. They rise in a thunderburst that stops the setting sun and halts the planets in their orbit, and I find the gun on my shoulder and pick a nice fat quail, blurred wings, sharp body, and shoot and it clenches and falls, and I swing smoothly to a second bird and all of its own accord, my finger slides to the back trigger and I fire and that bird, too, tumbles into the leaning foxtail.

Silence returns to the north Missouri afternoon. I look at Dave. "You did see that?" I ask, because I really don't believe it myself. He nods, unable to speak. Chubbs brings me the first bird and I motion him back and he finds the second and brings it to me also and I look at two birds in the hand, eight in the bag, a miracle has just happened.

"You did see that?" I ask again.

Spence toils up the hill and leans against the hood of Dave's truck, breathing hard, his teeth clenched. His dogs slink along behind him.

"You're not going to believe this," I say...