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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 4 8 T he pheasants live along the little creeks and in the ragged notches of rimrock above and below the benches where there are miles of wheat stubble during the hunting season. The land goes upward in erratic stairsteps to Montana's Crazy Mountains. And from a great distance there is little sign of the series of gullies, foothills, flats, and ranch homes between the main highways and the abrupt piles of the mountains themselves. From the Yellowstone Valley the scene is compressed as if with a telephoto lens. On a hazy day the various levels are vaguely separated. But on bright days the distance shrinks, and it is hard to believe that a man once wrote a book about his life between the highway and the peaks, a busy life in which he lived in several different homes, rode miles of range, and had neighbors he seldom saw. There is more than enough land against the Crazies for a small dog to hunt a lifetime and never meet the same pheasant twice. It really isn't good pheasant country anyway and old Kelly hunted sharptail grouse, Hungarian partridge, and blue grouse there as well. He hunted there every year of his life, although he lived far away in Florida, and he poked his orange- speckled nose into cover from Mexico to northern Alaska while I indulged in the probably childish project of shooting every major upland gamebird of North America over the same Brittany. Kelly must have wondered about that as he plunged off a cliff into an opaque Alaska fog to find a hard-hit ptarmigan, and when he was carried back into the truck in Arizona, helplessly fettered by unfamiliar cholla cactus. Kelly's furious drive kept me in constant introspection. After several days of hunting was it better to allow a limping, bloody-footed little warrior back Brett Smith is acclaimed for his paintings of hunters in period settings, such as those halcyon days when Charley Waterman and Kelly coursed the continent's gamefields. Above: Smith's Autumn Wings and on the preceding pages: Out in Fall.