Volume 20, Number 4,
April 1974:
With These Two Hands

Text-only version

ISSUE HOME PAGE

ABOUT THIS ISSUE
- about KSN

IN THIS ISSUE
- section 1
- section 2
- section 3
- section 4
- section 5
- section 6
- section 7
- section 8
- section 9
- section 10
- conclusion

With These Two Hands
by Robert J.Boles

I used to have a sandpiper in my traveling exhibit, but many times, after a program, especially if I had been speaking to a Lion’s Club or the Rotary Club, an old gray-haired man would come up to me and ask, " Do you have a snipe in your exhibit?" Just by looking into his face I could tell he had, when as a young man in college, lost faith not only in the manner of hunting the snipe, but also in the bird itself. More correctly worded the question should have been, " Now tell me truthfully, is there a bird called the snipe?" For the benefit of such men I took my sandpiper out of the exhibit and added a common snipe, often called a jack-snipe by hunters.

You would be surprised at the beautiful snipe stories I heard when they saw this bird. A professor at the University of Kansas said that when he was enrolled as a freshman at the University, senior boys befriended him and invited him to accompany them on a snipe hunt. And since he thought he knew how to hunt those birds he accepted the invitation. The fellows took him to a sandbar island in the Kaw River on a foggy evening, gave him a lantern and a burlap sack, and told him they would go to the other end of the sandbar to startle the birds to get them flying in his direction. He should stand there and catch the snipes as they would be blinded by the light. Very slowly he lowered the lantern to the ground so that the fellows could not see he was setting it down, then he ran for the boat. He said he just made it and got off the beach before the other fellows arrived. He rowed to the bank, beached the boat and ran to the dormitory room. The fellows who had taken him on that hunt were pretty mad that they had to swim ashore.