Errant Casts and Other Inkblots: October 2012

Friday, October 26, 2012

More Myth than Bird

The morning air felt crisp and fine as the hunter followed the aging pointer through old, familiar coverts. The remaining aspen leaves twirled gently in the breeze as he listened to the tinkling of the bell. Suddenly the sound stopped. The hunter's pulse quickened. He walked in on the point, and the roar of one bird, and then another, found him with a shouldered gun. The double barrel spoke twice. After a brief search, the dog brought the birds to the hunter's feet. Later, as he cleaned his partridge by a woodland stream with gun broken over his knee, the hunter thought what a fine morning it had been.

Has this ever happened to you?

Me either.

Well, the sentiment has, but the reality? Never. It hasn't because Bonasa umbellus isn't actually a bird.

It's a myth.

A squirrel is just a squirrel, and no one waxes nostalgic about the cotton-tailed rabbit or snowshoe hare. The white-tailed deer used to be more romantic, but years of 1 million-plus herds, bonus permits and car kills have made the deer seem, well, more common. But say "grouse," and the classic New England images of stone fences, apple orchards, small-bore doubles and braces of liver-and-white Brittanies come to mind. Never before has a beady-eyed, dim-witted, 1-pound bird received such a massive onslaught of public relations.

I suspect I'm like most hunters in that I'm democratic-- I hunt what I can when I can. But I love grouse hunting, and get to do some of it each fall. My problem is that the classic images in my head never match my results afield.

I remember well my first grouse. I walked along a trail near the Wisconsin River south of Stevens Point. With my gun at port arms, I looked ahead to see a block of woods consisting mostly of oaks but with some declining aspens. It was fronted by a thick wall of berry bushes and looked birdy. I had a sixth sense about what was about to happen.

A grouse flushed and roared away with the sound of a bike with playing cards clothes-pinned to the spokes. I pointed the gun toward the bird and pulled the trigger. As the report faded, there was a dying flutter of wings on the forest floor.

I was elated.

While cleaning the bird, I discovered no pellets-- not even in the head or neck. It stood to reason. I killed the only couch-potato partridge in Wisconsin-- the bird had died of a heart attack. Shortly before I arrived, it had munched lazily on catkins while its mate nagged about the unused Stairmaster in a corner.

Nowadays, I have a side-by-side double-barrel-- just like those in the fancy magazines-- which I sometimes use for grouse hunting. But it is a .410, and it only looks expensive when the sun hits it right. In almost every how-to grouse piece I've read, the .410 has been deemed inadequate for grouse hunting or has been damned with faint praise as an expert's gun. I'm no expert, but I routinely dismiss their assertions that the .410's pattern is too sparse and likely to wound a bird. I don't worry about that. When I shoot at a grouse, it's in the next time zone when my shot arrives where it was. Inadequate or not, I enjoy carrying the gun, mostly in my own nod to sentiment. It was my grandfather's. When I hunt with it, I think of him carrying the gun behind beagles, and recall what he used to say to me during games of cribbage: "Miss 'em with one barrel, get 'em with the other."

I do him one better, and miss 'em with both.

My regular grouse gun, though, is the same gun I use for everything else: a nearly 9-pound 12-gauge pump. The wood is plain, and the checkering is pressed, not cut. At the end of a day with it, I feel like I've been lugging a small child. However, it does the job when I do my part, and I like to think it hearkens back to the days when guns were tools, not status symbols.

Occasionally, I encounter some waxed-cotton swell with a silver-plated, hand-embossed dog whistle and a gun that cost more than my car. I know there's a brand-new Range Rover or the like packed with the entire contents of two sporting-goods catalogs back at the logging road.

"Road-hunter. He's only in it for the meat," I can almost hear him think as he issues a condescending farewell after a last glance at my gun. I get some perverse satisfaction out of that, and I think it's because of the chance to thwart one of the main elements of the old, classic, "gentlemanly" idea of partridge hunting: snobbery.

Outdoorsmen are lucky because there seems to be less snobbery in our pursuits than in other sports, such as golf or tennis. But it is there, particularly in sporting clays, grouse hunting and grouse hunting's aesthetic twin, fly-fishing for trout. I think we've all encountered someone who acted as if the accumulation of accoutrements earned access to a fraternity. What these people don't understand is that we go to the woods to escape the social scale, not to climb it.

When trout fishing, I use spinning tackle --the horror!-- and favor spinners and chub tails as bait. My pet stream is a jungle laced with deadfalls, swamp muck and stinging nettles, and I like to get so far back that the only boot prints I see are mine from a month earlier. I despise coming back-- cut, stung and sweating, cooled only by the leaks in my waders-- to find some sneering chap belaboring the bridgeside pool for the few remaining hatchery trout because backcasts are easier to make there, and besides, those alder thickets upstream are just so nasty.

Enough of my vendetta. Back to grouse.

When I was in college, my friends and I hunted a small patch of woods near Polonia, which is near Stevens Point. We hunted a lot, and our grades reflected it. The land was beautiful-- a brook trout stream ran through it, and a peak gave way to reveal a golden cornfield framed on three sides by flaming maples and aspens. The spot looked classic, and every time I paused there I thought of a painting: Two birds roar away from a pointing dog as a gentleman shoulders his side-by-side.

But the birds didn't care about art. They were in the thick stuff; a nearly impenetrable jungle of black spruce. We got through by lumbering, sweating and falling, cursing as we became mired in muck and as branches slapped us in the face. The partridge were there, but we couldn't shoot what we couldn't see until one of us hunkered low to the ground and walked like a crab. We imitated him. Shots came awkwardly, but at least we could see. One memorable day, we killed three grouse that way; all on the wing, which was an important distinction in those days. We celebrated with beer and pickled eggs in a Rosholt tavern; bent low over the bar to minimize the pain in our backs.

A week later my grandmother commented on my poor posture.

Maybe I'm just being cranky, and I-- who received 12 years of Catholic education-- should be more sympathetic to the old idea of grouse hunting and its quirks. After all, what is grouse hunting to the people who live for it but a religion? And discounting snobs, maybe the fine guns and the hand-signed, limited-edition prints are just symbols of the religion, which gets its faithful through off-seasons and off-cycles when birds are scarce. Maybe my old pump-gun ethic is itself a form of snobbery, and I'm guilty of confusing poverty with morality.

I don't know.

I bought a glossy sporting magazine the other day; the kind where the writers have names like landed gentry and where you swear the publishers have infused the pages with the smell of English leather. In the magazine was an advertisement for a gun; a fine gun with two barrels, gold inlays and exotic wood to match an exotic name. I want that gun.

A turnaround?

Maybe.

But at night, when the moonlight streams through the blinds and glints off the barrel of the pump-gun leaning in the corner, I hide the magazine under the mattress, like a teen-ager with a copy of Playboy.

One year, we hunted up north, the entire Jump River crew. It was the third day, and we divided into groups, each with a dog, to explore new territory. Before we left the logging road, Kevin's golden put a bird up. It flew straight away-- an easy shot.

I missed three times.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to limit my magazine's capacity to one to conserve lead.

Hours later, we were exhausted and soaked, and I remembered why they call it Indian Summer: it was hot.

We missed everything we shot at, and the dog had long since departed for parts unknown. Below us was a vast expanse of bog that we had to cross to reach a birdy-looking stand of popple. There wasn't a New England-y stone fence or apple orchard in sight.

We started down the slope, calling for the dog. I thought of the words of another New England icon, Robert Frost. Other lines are more famous, but I remember these:

"And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep."

I did sleep later-- a nap before the campfire-- and I dreamt of grouse. They were as big as turkeys, and they were laughing at me.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

BB Guns, a Mortgage and the Flow of Mystical Energy

After years of living in apartments, my wife Lori and I just bought our first home, a bungalow just a couple of blocks from Lake Monona on Madison's east side. It's a nice little house, and we like it a lot. But while owning a home to me chiefly means that at long last I have a place to bury fish guts, it means much more to Lori. She's been painting like a fiend, using colors with names like "Seafoam" and-- I'm not kidding-- "Frosty Melon." With names like that, it's obvious that paint companies are catering to women. If they catered to sportsmen, my den would be "August Algae Bloom," and not "Pear Cactus."

Lori also bought new furniture, which she's been arranging according to the principles of feng shui. Since most outdoorsmen come from the "Case of Beer Doubles as an End Table" school of decorating thought, I'll explain: Like 99 percent of manufactured goods, feng shui is from China, and supposedly it alters the home environment by improving the flow of Ch'i, or universal energy. After trying dozens of furniture combinations, Lori discovered that the chief obstacle to the harmonious flow of energy in our home was, in fact, me. That's alright. I like it down here behind the water softener, with the litter boxes for our four cats and the scaps of wood left by the previous owner. My goose decoys are here, too, and while Lori's upstairs thinking color combinations I'm thinking of punching some Horicon Zone tags with my friend Bruce this fall.

I am allowed out of the basement on an every-other-Tuesday basis, and this was my week. I was lying in bed, wide awake, and I could tell that Lori was awake, too.

"You know, I've been thinking," she said. "I'd really like a winding cobblestone path."

Ironically enough, I had been thinking the exact same thing, though where the path would wind to I have no idea, since the toad which lives in our backyard can traverse the entire length of it in about 3.5 seconds.

Actually, I had not been thinking of a winding cobblestone path. I had been thinking of something far, far better, and no, it did not involve Keira Knightley, a hot day, and two hundred pounds of gelatin. I had been thinking of building an airgun range in the basement. Not only would it give me something to do during those bleak days between gun deer season and turkey hunting, but it would make our cats' trips to the litter box far more interesting. A home airgun range would also do something else: bring back a piece of my childhood.

Remember how much fun BB guns were? Do you remember the thrill of seeing a long box under the tree at Christmas, and the pleasant heft of a tube of BB's?

My brother Craig and I had twin Daisy air rifles when we were growing up in Menasha, and we spent hours in the basement with those guns, shooting at targets and pop cans and plastic soldiers suspended from a string. We were jealous of a neighbor who had a barrel-cocking European pellet gun which achieved velocities over 1,000 feet per second, but when it came to any kind of competition my brother and I always won. Since we spent countless hours behind the sights of our guns, we were far better shots.

Mostly, our BB guns were directed at inanimate objects. I hesitate to say this, but I say "mostly" because I did once plug my brother from hiding as he walked home from school. That we are close siblings now is something to wonder at, and I suspect that at some future Thanksgiving between the corn bread and the pumpokin pie he'll drill me with his Daisy and yell, "Twenty years! For twenty years I've been waiting to do that!" That's alright. He already got me back. In high school I had no luck with girls, to the point where I was considering buying a mail-order bride just so I could get a date. My buddies and I would be at my parents' kitchen table, trying to remember which card was trump, and Craig would waltz in with a dozen of the most beautiful girls to be found in the Fox Valley. Maybe it was his prowess with a BB gun.

Sometimes Craig and I trained our sights on my father's nemesis: starlings. Dad had a birdhouse which he had built erected on a pole in the backyard. It was intended for purple martins, but its chief tenants were starlings and English sparrows. We'd be at the dinner table, with Craig and I trying to sneak scraps to our collie Bonnie, and Dad would hiss "Starling!" One of us would slowly nose a barrel through the kitchen window, tighten a trigger finger, exhale and...

"Pa-tink!"

Of course I long ago graduated from cans and starlings to deer and geese and turkeys. My wife Lori was kind enough to let me buy a gun cabinet for my new den-- I guess it didn't interfere with the Ch'i too much-- and there are a couple of empty slots. One of them might just have to be occupied by a BB gun-- maybe even a Daisy like I had when I was a kid. Then, one day when winter is getting to me, I'll slip into the basement with a tube of BB's and while away the hours plinking at targets.

A man has to get away from Frosty Melon somehow.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Sunset

I'm a lady of few words - so let's just say the pictures speak for themselves. (Thanks for the suggestion Cousin Ick!) - Lori (the Art Director and Kurt's other half). Pictures taken Lake Monona, Madison, WI.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Wildlife Art, and Art on Wildlife

When I first started writing this column, I was concerned that I might eventually run out of material because I need calamitous events to happen so I have something to write about.

But then I had a happy thought: Why is it necessary that these events happen to me?

So look for a hilarious account of how my buddy broke his leg in an upcoming issue. Only thing is, he won't break his leg until the second day of this year's muzzleloader season. Guess I can't count on that.

I was also concerned that as news spread of my ineptness in the woods and on the water, I'd find myself short of hunting and fishing partners.

This indeed seems to be the case.

I stopped by my parents' house recently-- kind of a pop-in after a trip to Green Bay-- and asked my dad if he wanted to try a few casts off of the breakwall at High Cliff State Park on Lake Winnebago.

"No thanks, son," he stammered through the door as he barred the latch. "I have to help your mother pick out dried flower arrangements."

So now I'm having a difficult time finding someone to hunt squirrels with this fall. My friend, Hodag, would be game-- he was always up for anything-- but he's gone on to his just reward, and by that, I mean heaven, and not the return of 10-point bluebills.

Fact is, not many people hunt squirrels anymore, and if you mention that you're going, folks look askance at you and exclaim, "Tree rats! What do you want with them for?"

It wasn't always that way, of course. Kids used to get their start in hunting, as I did, by chasing squirrels. And bushytails were a hunting mainstay of a lot of sportsmen and women even in adulthood.

I admit that I haven't spent a whole lot of time hunting them in recent years, but I'm not joking when I say that I still dream about my favorite Calumet County squirrel woods, even though I haven't been there in 20 years. I can still feel the roughness of a shagbark hickory against my back, and in my mind's eye, I can see sunlight filtering through black walnut leaves as I sit listening for the patter of falling cuttings.

I used to have squirrels on the brain the way most hunters nowadays go bonkers over big bucks. I checked out books on them, and even kept them as pets-- I didn't see any contradiction in feeding city squirrels in the morning and going out to hunt their wild cousins in the afternoon. And I live-trapped squirrels in our backyard.

I trapped them for an advanced biology class I took when I was a senior in high school. That was the only advanced class, except for art, that I've ever taken. If you'll allow me to digress for a little bit, I'd like to talk about that art class before I return to advanced biology.

I had won promotion to Sister Carla's Salon of Artistes on the strength of a watercolor I painted of a smallmouth bass-- a painting which, against all odds, turned out so well that it won a few awards.

The advanced art class was full of studious artists. Nothing excited ever happened, except for when I got my tie stuck in a lathe in front of a girl I had a huge crush on. Thus freed of any further concern about scoring points with her, I was able to concentrate on my masterwork. I spent a whole trimester chipping a large plaster block into a small one, which I then painted brown and called a rock.

True genius is amost never recognized in its time. Being a giant smart-aleck, however, almost always is, and I richly deserved the "F" I received on that project. My classmates from back then probably all work in commercial graphics now, or are artists-in-residence at the Louvre. I, however, am back to having other people draw when I play "Hangman."

O.K. Thank you. Back to advanced biology.

A major part of the class consisted of a field project, followed by the dreaded presentation in front of the class. I had the idea of live-trapping squirrels, marking their tails in some manner, and then releasing the squirrels in a far-off neighborhood and observing to see if they returned to their home ranges. The only real hitch was in the marking, as far as I could tell, so the first day of my project found me kneeling next to a closed box trap in the backyard, with a can of yellow spray paint in hand, wondering what all wildlife biologists wonder:

A.) Should I use a primer?
B.) Why are the neighbors staring?
C.) How on earth am I gonna get steel wool anywhere near this critter?

In the end, a long plastic tube attached to the nozzle of the paint can worked fairly well. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I marked and released a dozen squirrels.

In case you are wondering, yellow-tailed squirrels do return to their home ranges, and when they come home, they're moving at a pretty good clip.

As an aside, I repeated this experiment in college for a class in wildlife biology, only this time with people. The results were much the same, only they didn't return to their homes, they returned to mine, and when they arrived, they were plenty peeved.

As you spend time afield this fall, I ask that you refrain from shooting yellow-tailed squirrels. Instead, please write the date, time and circumstances of your encounter on a 3x5 card and mail to: Kurt Helker, c/o Mrs. Stecker's Remedial Art Class, Toki Middle School, Madison, Wisconsin.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Gear

The other day I was sitting at home feeling downright disgusted with the state of the world we live in. New housing is being put in across our street, and the builders had filled in and paved over a tiny pond. The pond had always been populated with spring peepers which cheered our spring evenings, and I wasn't happy about seeing those frogs go. To make matters worse, my wife Lori and I had gone for a walk in the woods and found it strewn with trash-- every conceivable type of trash. There were beer cans, soda bottles, plastic bits of unknown origin, and what seemed like hundreds of Styrofoam fast-food containers.

I fumed when we got home.

"We live in a consumer culture run amok," I said. Well, I didn't say "amok," but you get the idea. "It always has to be more. More, more, more. Pave over that last piece of farmland, slap up those condos, buy the latest gee-gaw. Anything to increase the Gross National Product."

I looked around me and got a malevolent glint in my eye.

How many candles do you have?" I asked my wife. I didn't wait for an answer. "That one there's new, isn't it? The raspberry one?"

"It's mulberry, and it's not new," she said. "We've always had it." (Sure. I tried that with a new gun last fall-- "I've always had it"-- and it didn't work for me.)

You see, my wife collects candles. Well, she would say "collects," while I would choose a word more along the lines of "archives." Her collection is a living, breathing entity, like an amoeba; oozing and sprawling to fill every space in the house. I have to say here that I was kind of disappointed none of the Y2K calamities happened as predicted. I figured we'd make a killing selling candles on the black market. I pictured a survivalist hunkered in a candlelit bunker somewhere, awaiting the looting hordes, saying "Is that...is that a hint of soapberry I detect?"

"Why don't you go fishing for awhile?" Lori said. "I can tell you're going to be a crab today."

Ah, fishing. Relaxing fishing. "Perhaps she's right," I thought. "I have been meaning to get out for the early trout season."

I went out to the garage to collect my ultralight spinning outfit.

It wasn't there.

It wasn't in the boat. It wasn't in the back of the garage, by the belly boat and lanterns and duck and goose decoys. It wasn't in the front corner, either, by the nets, the four tackle boxes, the pair of waders, and the ice-fishing gear.

It wasn't under the raingear or stashed in the tangle of rods: the three spinning outfits, the two casting rigs, and the three fly combos.

It had been stolen! This was some kind of day I was having-- my favorite spinning outfit; stolen right out of my own garage. I decided to calm down by undertaking a long-overdue review of the contents of my tackle boxes-- surely there were some things I could get rid of.

There were, too. After much painful deliberation, I threw out a rusty three-way swivel, two old spoons lacking hooks and split-rings, and an old plug I had fashioned when I was a kid. Basically, it was just a whittled piece of bark wrapped in tinfoil. It had no discernible action, but still I had saved it for all those years against that tough-conditions day when I figured fish might just be looking for a piece of bark.

I didn't touch any of the plastic worms, though. I have a hundred or so-- not as many as a lot of folks, I know, but still probably more than most, and in every color of the rainbow.

"I don't want to throw any of these out, " I thought. "You can go through a hundred worms pretty quick."

As I placed the worms neatly in their slots, I remembered a trip I had taken with my wife.

We were out in a rowboat up North at my folks' place, and it was one of those magical still evenings when the water is dark and full of promise and the shouts of children playing carry all the way across the lake. We had caught a mess of bluegills for a late supper, and decided to try for bass for awhile. I opened my tackle box to the worm compartment.

"Why do you have so many?" Lori asked.

I thought it was a rhetorical question like "What's it all about?"-- the kind best answered with another question.

"Why, indeed?" I mused.

"Well, I'll take a brown one," Lori said.

"It's not brown, it's motor oil," I sighed.

"Whatever. A pink one, then."

I monkeyed with the fish basket and muttered under my breath. "Bubble gum. It's bubble gum."

But my wife is relatively new to fishing and can't be expected to absorb a lifetime of knowledge in the space of a few short trips.

To get back to my tale of the missing ultralight rig-- I have now largely concluded that it was not stolen, but instead left streamside by me after my final trip of the season last September. I would prefer if it had been stolen, because then I would get to feel righteously indignant instead of merely stupid. But the important thing is that after my anger had subsided, I was secretly pleased, and pleased because I got to buy more gear.

That got me to thinking about the nature of gear, and I have concluded that it is of only two kinds: gear you have, and gear you want. I almost said "need,"
but I think that is not the case more often than we'd like to admit. And those categories can be divided into stuff which is usually relatively easily attained, like lures, and big-ticket items such as boats and firearms which require real sacrifice.

Last year I thought I "needed" a salmon/steelhead spinning outfit. I enjoy casting for trout and salmon from Lake Michigan's beaches and piers, and get to do a little of it most years. I figured the extra casting distance offered by the long rod would pay off in terms of more fish. I took the rig to the mouth of the Pike River, near Kenosha, and found that I could cast, alright. The rod could launch a Krocodile spoon well over a hundred yards. I caught fish, too, a three-pound coho and a twenty-pound king, both of which had the nerve to hit the spoon only a dozen feet from shore. But that's the way with fish: you spend hard-earned money to outsmart them, and they prove themselves to be still just stupid old fish.

Guns are another matter, and for me, at least, they usually fall under the category of mercurial wants; wants which dry up like a seasonal wetland as soon as the rent payment or an unexpected car-repair bill arrives. I have to admit that I have enough guns-- a few "working" guns, and a few "luxury" firearms, like a dedicated clay-target shotgun and a cap-and-ball copy of the Colt 1860 Army revolver. There are a couple of perennial wants, though-- a Ruger Number One in .270 Winchester with a full-length Mannlicher-style stock and a 2-7x compact scope parked up top, and a lightweight 20-gauge for the popple patches and overgrown fencerows.

I've been trying to justify the 20-gauge to myself for years. Never mind that I already have a 20-gauge-- the bolt-action Mossberg which was my first gun. It's very light, and holds the distinction of being one of the few shotguns I shoot well. And having essentially one shot has never struck me as being a huge handicap in the hunting fields. Still, the old Mossberg isn't specialized; it lacks a label as a dedicated grouse gun. All of the famous New England partridge scribes wrote about old L.C. Smiths and Foxes and Parkers. You never read, "I stopped by a woodland stream to clean a brace of birds and light my pipe, and there I received quite a shock. I noticed that the baling wire securing the forearm of my full-choked single-shot to its rusty, pitted barrel was completely missing."

I'd like a large-bore centerfire revolver, too, for...well, for no good reason. I tried to convince myself that I could carry it in the deer woods. That line of reasoning didn't work-- my rifle and my slug gun and my muzzleloader all work just fine. So I thought that perhaps I would use it as part of a personal protection plan. That didn't work, either. I can't see any gun owned by me as a particular deterrent to crime-- after all, generations of wild game can attest to the fact that seeing me at the end of a gunstock is no bar to a long and happy life. Besides, in the town where my wife and I live, we are the criminal element. Just last year, for instance, at the beginning of what can only be called a "spree," we received a warning for having unauthorized patio furniture. Then, barely a few days later, I again succumbed to baser passions by leaving my car parked on the street on the last night of our town's snow ordinance.

But there comes a time in every outdoors-minded person's life when he or she has to admit that they have enough stuff. Luckily, that period doesn't last long, for new interests arise, and with those interests comes the desire for more specialized gear. Such is the case for me and turkey hunting...after all, there are always calls to buy, and I do need new camouflage, and perhaps a short-barreled 12-gauge with the latest screw-in chokes...but here I have to mention that buying clothing-- any clothing-- has always left me cold (literally, too, and why I probably should have paid more attention to it.) I'm largely immune to the catalogs' depictions of rugged-looking models attired in English waxed-cotton as they cast flies or split wood at some rural retreat. My looks could never be desribed as "rugged"-- utilitarian, maybe, but not rugged-- and I already own a waxed-cotton jacket. I received it for Christmas a few years back. It got accidentally thrown in with a week's worth of laundry, and now it looks less like a jacket and more like a waxed-cotton halter-top.

Writing all of this has depressed me. Like most sportsmen, I always thought of myself as a simple, straightforward type unimpressed with the trappings of the material world. But a look in my garage, and in my boat, and in my gunrack tells a different story. Thoreau said, "Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplify, simplify." Maybe he was right.

I remember reading that in class once. At the time I was living the bachelor life in an old farmhouse. It hosted truly Biblical plagues of flies, but it was a farmhouse, and I could hunt geese right out my back door. I sat in my living room one day, recalling Thoreau's words and feeling pretty darned good about myself. After all, like most bachelor pads, my place was pretty spartanly furnished. Call it the feng shui of not much caring. I had a stereo, a few dishes, a "Great Lakes Gamefish" poster, and a chair (even Thoreau needed a place to sit.) I felt so good, so simple and Zen-master-like, that I decided to reward myself by going after geese in the fields behind the house. When shooting hours had ended, I packed up my decoys and went into the barn to put them away. I had to climb a pile of gear to find a space for them, and I tumbled down and smacked my funny bone.

I remember that incident now, and I resolve myself: "Simplify, simplify." And I will, too.

Right after turkey season.