Right place, right time, right line

Hatred might be too strong, but it was pretty obvious that Wally didn’t like me, and yet he was to go on to teach me my most valuable lesson as a pigeon shooter. At the time I was 16, and he was something over 70. The summer before, we both worked ‘roguing’ — pulling weeds out of sugar beet — on the same farm.

In a clash of generations and backgrounds, it seemed he never had a good word for any of us youngsters in the roguing gang. This was the spring, though, before another hot summer spent bleeding from our soft hands as we pulled bolting beet out of ground baked solid. Unlike ours, Wally’s hands never split. It was one of the many differences between us.

“It seems somehow the purest form of the decoyer’s art”

Another was my habit of asking