Wild Berries and other Wild Things

(from For the Love of Quail)

Snow was falling thick and fast, covering the previous layers with a fresh blanket of white. It had been falling off and on for days and was now several inches deep.

Dad had purchased a calling bird the previous summer, keeping it in a cage on the side of the chicken house, so his covey of quail would stay close by. As long as the little birds could hear the call of the male partridge, they stayed on the property, nesting here and there in the meadows or in the wooded areas. Even though the calling bird does not call in winter, the little covey huddled together in their favorite spot on top of the only hill on the property, snowed-in beneath a little wooden shack, which served as a deer blind.

Dad faithfully trudged up the hill two or three times a week to feed them, but as the snow deepened, it became harder for him to make the trip.

Even though he loved the snow, he loved the quail more. As he watched it drifting silently to the earth, he was torn between the beauty of the glistening flakes and the thought of those little birds starving to death. It was more than he could stand. He thought about the year before when a whole covey had been wiped out, except for one he had named Patty, and she was on that hill.

Turning a deaf ear to my mother's protests, he yanked on his four-buckle, arctic boots, grabbed his jacket, and jammed a hat down over his ears, pulling on a pair of gloves as he stomped out the door.

When you are seventy-six, just walking on bare ground is enough of a challenge, but imagine trying to walk half a mile through deep snow at that age.

He made it though, there and back, but he paid the price. That evening, he suffered a heart attack and never fully recovered. The quail finished the food and I'm sure that was the end of them. By January, Dad had slipped into a coma and it wasn't long before he was gone, too.

* * * * *

Dad was a 'wild thing' in his younger days. Instead of walking the four miles to and from school, he ran both ways. He attended basketball games at other schools even though he sometimes had to travel twenty-one miles (one way) in order to do so. An ardent admirer of Shakespeare, he quoted passages and lines from his plays to fit every occasion in his life.

During his senior class trip to Charleston, West Virginia, he had an attack of severe chest pains. Refusing medical help, he toughed it out and promptly forgot about it. Many years later, a doctor asked him how old he had been when he had a heart attack. Dad was dumbfounded to be asked such a question and wanted to know the doctor's reason for such a diagnosis.

'Well, Mr. Nelson, the tests show scar tissue, which means that at some point in your life, you had a heart attack.' Dad went home and thought about the doctor's statement, trying in vain to remember when he could possibly have had a heart attack. He worried about it so much that he almost gave himself another one, before he remembered the senior trip incident!

(293 pages)