One day last fall my wife, Joan, innocently suggested that since we weren’t using the old welded-wire dog crate in the garage—I think she referred to it as “that dog thing”—maybe we could put it out on the curb as a giveaway. We’d done that with the crate’s twin a couple of years ago and it was gone the same afternoon. It’s not as if people cruise our neighborhood night and day looking for stuff to pick up but if you put anything of potential value or utility next to the street it tends not to stay there long. It’s a little mysterious how it happens.

I’ve often wondered why grouse and woodcock hunting has such a rich literary tradition. The easy explanation, I suppose, is because it’s intrinsically more poetic than other “shooting sports,” bearing much the same relationship to them that fly-fishing for trout and salmon bears to other styles of angling. The literature of trout and salmon fishing, of course, absolutely dwarfs that of all other forms of the sport, and while the separation may not be quite as great between grouse and woodcock writing and all the rest the margin is still pretty substantial.