Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
nightmare, but it gradually worked its way up my left leg and down my right. It was so painful it hurt for anyone to touch me, but it was the first thing I had felt since they put me on the backboard at the pool." The pain was followed by three months of rehabilitation, trying to get his body back, relearning things the rest of us never even think about. "I had to be able to pick up a paperclip and put it in a Dixie cup. Such a little thing and it took so long for me to be able to do it. But after three months I was able to walk, and the first thing I did, while I still had the halo brace on, I went smallmouth fishing on the Susquehanna. I'm a lucky guy. I take nothing for granted." In keeping with the positive attitude, he added: "And just so you know, the majority of all those medical bills were covered by UPS. I was just a temporary employee, and I wasn't injured on the job, but they paid for it." He moved to California so he could spend as much time as possible outside, and kept driving his body forward. "The first thing you want is to be independent. I set goals for myself. My hands still didn't work too well, my right hand especially, so I got a job with a construction company, as glazier and laying floors, so that I had to use my hands. I decided I was going to run the LA Marathon, and I did it." There are those of us who would argue this was sign he had injured his brain at least as much as his spinal cord. Gradually, Andy started back into the outdoor life, first with Turner's Outdoors as a booking agent, then as marketing and special products manager, and finally testing new products ("I shot my first California deer in Malibu, behind Pepperdine University.") before moving to Legacy Sports. He was working the National Wild Turkey Federation show for Legacy, walking past the exhibits, when he S P O R T I N G C 148 L A S S I saw a display of painting on feathers and a light bulb went on. "The artist wasn't there, but turkey hunting had always been such a big part of my life, so when I saw that I got inspired, and as soon as I got home I started doing research on the mechanics of painting on feathers. Then I went out and bought a bunch of art supplies and turned my dining table into an art easel and plunged in." T he history of painting runs from the cave walls of Lascaux to the cement walls of urban shelter and has encompassed almost every conceivable medium, from stone to canvas, parchment, wood, metal, bone, ivory, glass, sand, the human body, feathers . . . The list is almost infinite and reached its absurd zenith with the anti-art movements known as Dada, and Dada's offshoot, Conceptualism, where the physical thing itself becomes a work of art: a urinal hanging on the wall, an un-made bed, a human skull studded with rhinestones. Wildlife art, mercifully, hasn't gone that far, but some artists have embraced Marshall McLuhan's concept of the medium as intrinsic to the message – Kobus Möller of South Africa sometimes paints on animal hide, for example – while other artists have turned the concept upside down. California artist Lance Marshall Boen creates his enormous painted fish sculptures out of leather, and Andy McCormick has chosen to paint fish on feathers, specifically, turkey feathers. It would be nice to explore the subtleties of artistic irony in this combination of medium and subject, but this is a case where truth is much simpler than fiction. The man just happens to be a rabid fisherman and a rabid turkey hunter. He routinely catches golden trout that make the largest one I ever caught look like a guppy. And while I was convalescing from shoulder surgery and missing an entire turkey season, the miserable C S