RETROSPECTIVE
Time makes incredible changes in one's outlook, I find. Not long ago I came upon a fragment of a note I made about standing waist-deep in water waiting for duck to flight across a bog in mid-November. This could not, of course, be an account of my own doings. Some iron man had subjected himself to such awful suffering, aided, or inspired, by a sort of mystical faith, and yet I remembered the sky of beaten pewter, the barking of a dog and the sound of the wings of duck. I suppose I was somewhere about, my eighteenth birthday at the time. A similar sort of thing happened only last week when I went to add another ill-kept diary to those cluttering my desk. In the year 1952 I seem to have been a hardy fellow. I caught a pike, of seven pounds one day when the rings of my rod froze and I had to cast over marginal ice in order to fish at all. My boots filled with snow as I clumped back to the car three miles from the water. It didn't happen to the man I know now. He sits by the fire—except when there is a pigeon shoot—and warms himself not only in the heat from the embers, but in the thought that he isn't out there in the wilderness waiting for duck!
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