Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/554642
rock rolling, dry-land wheat farmer would break down and weep if he heard "The Hills of Home" in the Old Tongue. So I reckoned I did her a favor when I drove her to Savannah and put her on that northbound plane, though she did not think so at the time. I stood in the jet-way and watched her go, from eyebrows to toes most perfect. But from the eyebrows to the red hair . . . alas. She bought the ticket on her card, a thousand bucks at the last minute. She did not look back, and she walked out of my life just like that, like the snap of the closing of a very fine gun. But not quite. My boy was still up there and he buddied up with the bait shop man's grandson and took up with the redhead's niece, for a while, anyway. He called me the evening of the close of deer season, my birthday that year. "Happy birthday, Pa." "Thanks, Sonny. How you been?" "Pretty good. I killed a real nice buck today." It wasn't his first buck and we always passed a joke back and forth. "Where'd you get him?" But this time, instead of saying "Between an oak and a birch," he said, "Busted him out of the cattails on Little Windy, right where you used to stash the boat. I figured you'd appreciate that." I did. And so another generation came to Little Windy. Note: On page 33, Duck Blind Heaven by Robert Childress, portrays the artist's duck blind in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Childress was a friend of Norman Rockwell, and the Norman Rockwell Museum has a permanent collection of his works. A giclée print of Duck Blind Heaven (18 x 24 inches and printed on archival paper) costs $300 plus shipping. To order, contact Nancy Childress via email at nchildress57@gmail.com. worked wonders. The storm blew on through about midnight, the wind dropped off to nothing, the skies cleared, and the shimmering bright starry array told me it had turned damned cold. Mid-morning we went to fetch home the skiff and decoys and found Little Windy frozen. Not just frozen, mind you, but it had frozen literally in our wake and we never even knew. The scant bow wave, the water rippling astern, every oar-stroke swirl was captured in opaque ice and would remain that way even if buried in snow, until thaw, a testament to a fine duck shoot in a day long gone. It was already thick enough to support a red fox, paw prints crossing and crisscrossing, worrying the cattail edge, nosing for cripples and our one lost bird. T hough I lived in a log cabin, cooked on a wood range, threw in with the Lutherans, ate a buffalo I shot out of the Black Hills herd, and even slept beneath its robe, I would never be more than a southern freak to those Norwegians, and among the Swedes, I was even more suspect. So when my blood kin called me back to Carolina, I went, washing ashore on a lovely little island, remote and sparsely settled. I brought the redhead but it did not work as I had hoped. Norwegians are a perpetually homesick tribe. Starved out of their native land, they took to the sea and took up homesteads on foreign soil, a one-way trip and they knew it, so poor they would never see the fjords again. They ate potato flatbread and lye-cured cod every Christmas for the next hundred years, long after their cousins in the Old Country gave up on both for ample reasons. They prayed in Norwegian in their clapboard country churches, and though they understood little, they hoped the Good Lord would hear it all. The hardest-bitten, shoot-it-in-the-head- and-cut their-throats hog killing, S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 3 7