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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 35 T here are myriad sounds in this world we inhabit. Many are so utterly ordinary that we scarcely pay them heed. Some are welcome, and some we might prefer never to have heard. But then there are those cherished sounds that belong to each of us individually and very personally—sounds we savor and treasure, and pray we never forget. Life so far has taken me to many places and many spheres, and has produced many rich memories. Yet for all I have experienced, all I have seen or smelled or tasted or felt, it is the sounds that most permanently endure, and I find myself thinking more and more about them as my time on earth glides to a standstill. The midnight voices of the steam-driven coal trains still linger in my childhood memories as they hauled their loads through Four Way and up the western divide into West Virginia, vanishing into the night while I lay warm between darkness and dream. The raspy songs of the redwing blackbirds are still etched into my mind, when, still a youth, I explored the tiny creek that vanished upstream into a cool morass of wet meadow grass. The squeaky hinges of Granny's kitchen door still beckon me to her table, along with the clinking of dishes and the clatter of pots and pans, and that loving voice of hers that always heralded the good things to eat she constantly made sure were waiting for me. The boom of the wild Atlantic surf breaking on the beaten sands north of Cape Hatteras possesses a resonance that, once heard, is never to be forgotten; nor is the full-throated bugle of a big bull elk high in the southern Rockies or the raking roar of a stately red stag deep in Patagonia, and especially the plaintive death song of that big black bear in northwest Ontario as it fell before me at five yards that evening back in the mid-'80s. Still, I find no particular need, feel no particular compulsion, to rank these sounds in any specified order of impact as the years grow longer and time grows shorter. But then there's the Skydance of the Woodcock—in whose presence all other sounds pale. At least they do for me. I first heard the Song of the Skydance as a young man one cool February sunset. I had read about woodcock and studied paintings and pictures of woodcock, and Ramblings by michael altizeR NothiNg iN Nature quite equals the skydaNce of the Woodcock. once, in the autumn of my 13th year, I had actually seen a woodcock for myself as I hunted up along the densely wooded edge of the creek at the base of Bays Mountain during that first autumn after we'd moved from Virginia to Tennessee. I was frozen in my tracks as the bird erupted, nearly from beneath my feet, its erratic corkscrew flush and twittering wings startling me into a state of momentary confusion. At first I thought it to be a grouse. But it was too small for a grouse, and its rise was more an amplified twitter than the thunder of wings, its profile more streamlined than that of a grouse with its thick ruff and broad tail fan. The bird's long beak was set at a right angle to its body, unlike anything I'd ever seen, and it disappeared vertically into the tangled latticework of overlapping limbs and branches before I could bring my little single-shot 20 gauge to bear. When I returned home an hour after dark that evening, I told Dad what I had seen, and he smiled gleefully and told me the bird must surely have been a woodcock. It was the first woodcock I had ever seen, and I would neither see nor hear another Off the Ridge - WOOdcOck by DaviD maass – couRtesy wilD wings inc.