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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 129 gone the next, poetry dipped in twilight as they prepared for the journey south. Singles, tens, a hundred if there were 50, bird after bird darted past, evening acrobats twisting and spinning until more twittered above in helter-skelter, awkward grace. I watched in awe until the dance vanished at dark, come and gone quick as a hummingbird. Like Dickinson, I understood evanescence. The game vest of my mind loaded with a limit of memories, I followed the moonlit path back to the farm, grateful for my grandfather's gifts. Forest and fields, water and woods. I am a rich man because of him. Respect indeed. n Editor's Note: A longtime contributor to Sporting Classics, Ted Jennings passed away on August 8, 2016. He penned this story in August 2015. home for Grandma's birthday and to hunt the last afternoon of pheasant season. Sneaking along the side of a pond, I flushed a rooster from the cattails and dropped him on the third cackle. Hunting done and resting by beaver water gurgling over stones and sunken logs, I tuned into "Bird Radio," as Grandpa called it, and remembered each of us taking turns identifying birds by their songs and sounds until we knew them by heart. Even the peent of the mating woodcock. On a hunch and a hope, I hustled through dusk to the "ballroom," the old orchard now choked with grass, brush, and a few stunted apple trees standing like sentinels guarding the past. At one end, the sun promised more Indian summer, a fading red balloon floating above the horizon. At the other, a Hunter's Moon glowed golden orange in the evening sky. I was in luck. Woodcock gathered everywhere and nowhere, bowing and rising one second and head and splattered blood on the base of a birch. Like Proust, I remember things past: heat, sweat, and held breaths; sun gleaming on gunmetal and the whip-crack snap of the rifle; thrashing, silence, and the aftermath of death. My grandfather studied me while I wrestled with what I had done. Satisfied, he said it's the way you're supposed to feel when you take a life and told me never to lose that feeling. Then he handed me a new pocketknife, a Boy Scout model I still own, to mark the rite of passage. Picking up the dead squirrel and placing it in my palm, he guided me through the gutting and skinning while blood stained my hands and the new blade for the first time. It was humbling. Like Blake, I heard the songs of innocence and experience. trEasurE: Rich is relative. There was a time in late October after my grandfather's passing that stays with me still. I'd come