[Old and Reliable]

Of all his great stories, I like best "The Stranger" and "Pepper". Gene wrote so often and so well about dogs and men and shotguns and whiskey and grouse coverts and Chesapeake duck blinds- I have 4 of his books all personally signed to me by Gene when he and the now late Mike McIntosh visited our area in Oct 1990 on an Orvis tour.

How did I know the large Bald eagle, our national bird and also symbol of the storied 101st Airborne Div. (aka- "The Bloody Battered B%$#@*&S of Bastogne) is a male? Good question. Had some Canada Geese been in view, you would have to be a game biologist with X-ray vision to tell the sex of any given bird whilst airborne-

So I went to Hemingway's post-humously published novel: "True At First Light" and the part where he had shot his aging horse "Kite" and left him to bait the Eagles in the area-- and I quote pages 208-209: "I lay there watching them eat the body of my friend and partner that I had killed and thought that they were lovlier in the air.------I wished that I had a shotgun, but I hadn't. So I took the .22 Winchester finally and shot one carefully in the head, and another twice in the body. He started to fly but could not make it and came down wings spread and I had to chase him up the high slope"

Note that Hemingway referred to the dying bird as He-him- male. How did he know? Here's where all the years of heavy drinking and womanizing and burning through 4 wives and their inheritances really affected this man-he writes: "-- nor why I had killed these two, the last one by smacking his head against a tree down in the timber, nor what their skins had brought at Lame Deer on the reservation.

So, how did I know it was a male- a solo event, our magnificent National Symbol, and thank God old skirt-liftin' Benny Franklin didn't get the turkey instead= no comparison. Same way that Hemingway did I suppose- literary license. But to admit in print of killing two highly protected National birds, and then the utter BS of picking up a wounded Eagle by the legs and where the talons are, and smacking his head against a tree until the bird succumbed to death. I lost all respect for Hemingway after I read that. How he escaped prosecution by the Feds is beyond me- just as how our former lawyer shooting Vice-Prez. Dickie Cheney didn't get a fine for NOT having a valid Texas non-resident hunting license--

About 15-18 years ago a wealthy Bloomfield Hills Dr. (with apologies for the inherent redundancy therein) shot a Bald Eagle up in Northern Mi in the Kirkland Warbler preserve- drove his Jeep into a two track, uncased his new .270 Weatherby magnum scoped rifle, and shot dead the bird that was sitting on a nest. He left the dead bird, the tracks in the sandy soil (that's the general AuSable River area- and that means "Of Sand" in French)and the fired empty case- and departed- but some mushroomers heard what happened, called the DNR- they kept the deceased bird, the empty case and made casts of the bootprints and tire marks- end result- The Dr. paid a $25,000 fine, lost the Jeep and rifle, and had a 15 year ban on legally obtaining a hunting license in MI- I think he got off cheap--