Pheasants on the Fringe

Wild cacklers at the edge of the world

In a good year it's a thin place, and sometimes, usually in brown late January, you wonder why you stay. Why you try. But then spring comes and the wheat comes alive in a green too green to be real, and there's a smattering of good rain and the plow turns up a chunk of bone one morning that proves to be the top half of a bison skull. One year the plow hit something metal and very, very old. That fall you showed it to a friend from the university when he came out to shoot birds. He turned it over and over in his hands and his words carried your thoughts away like wind on shallow soil: "I think it's a 17th Century Spanish rapier.

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