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Right over there is where I picked him up the first time I ever turned him loose," Gary Christensen tells me, gesturing toward a patch of gently waving prairie. "I can even tell you the day: July 15, 1991-the day before his first birthday.

"We'd started 21/2 miles east of here," he said, directing my gaze to a vaguely defined coordinate across this sea of grass. "Mind you, now, he wasn't runnin' off. He was just lookin' over the country. I was singin' to him the whole way-although I finally had to ride him down to get a rope on him."

We're standing along a section line, the September sun high at our backs, the table-flat prairies near Towner, North Dakota, stretching to horizons beyond which you can imagine the world simply falling away. Scattered thickets of popple and wild plum rise bristling from this tawny expanse, shimmering mirage-like at the limits of vision, seeming to float above the earth. Seeking shade, the sharptails go to these places in the heat of the day. The dogs learn to look for them there, as the dogs brought to the prairies for training have been doing since the days of baggage cars, buckboards and telegrams.

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