One of my favorite memories of my youth involved a Hungarian partridge as a supporting actor.
I think I was about 12 years old and Wisconsin's pheasant season opened at Noon the third Saturday in October. My Dad had to work until Noon and I already had taken Hunter Safety but was not allowed to hunt alone until I turned 14. We owned a measly 10 acre parcel, and except for the acre where the 103 year old farm house sat, Dad had painstakingly planted it with Northrup King 75 day maturing corn with a two row McCormick corn planter pulled by a 1947 FarmAll Model A he bought at an auction from Seymour Canning for 150 bucks.
That little corn field had a good fence line as did all fields in the 60's as the huge machinery we know today simply did not exist. The field and fence row held a few ringnecks, a couple of rabbits, maybe a Hun or two, but most importantly, it was ours!
As I kept looking out the window hoping to see Dad's 1955 buckskin and white Ford Fairlane, instead I see a pea soup green station wagon pull up on the shoulder of County Hwy. P, adjacent to our corn field. Two men and a boy get out and start uncasing guns. What the heck? They had parked next to a power pole that Dad had nailed a yellow and black NO TRESPASSING sign on, no more than the width of the road ditch from the passenger side of the big Plymouth wagon.
I yelled to Mom that I was going out to confront the trespassers and grabbed my trusty Climax 20 gauge single shot from the corner where it resided next to the screen door. I had recently graduated to the 20 gauge so I could hunt ducks with Dad as my Savage .410 single was illegal for waterfowl.
I hustled my young ass down the corn rows until I intercepted the interlopers. I explained to them that my Dad was due home any minute and we were going to hunt this very field. The driver of the Plymouth, a big florid faced fellow wearing a stiff looking canvas hunting coat said, "Well we saw a big rooster pheasant run across the road into this corn." I told him he parked right next to a NO TRESPASSING sign and he said, "Well we never saw it." That right there was great preparation for my future career as an LEO as I could see the lying sack of, oh never mind.
With some bluster but no apology the trio turned to leave the field and in doing so jumped a Hungarian partridge which whirred past me on my right away from the road and all of us. I thumbed the hammer, mounted the old single barrel, and smoked that Hun with a low brass Federal 6 about 25 yards out. As the feathers drifted off down wind one of the adults behind me said, "Boy did you see that kid shoot?" I still think fondly of that poor old Hun giving its life for that memory.