Adventure out west

A dearth of jobs in his home territory forces Pat Cringle to try his luck across the pond, but an odd summer leaves him homesick for England

The wildfowling season was coming to an end, and the pinkfeet were on the move to their northern nesting T grounds. I had nothing to do during the next two months except help my father kill rabbits and attend vermin traps on his 1,500-acre partridge beat. The only chance I had of earning money during the summer was to act as warden on the ternery. In that job I would receive 14s for a seven-day week, but it would finish about the first week in July, leaving three empty months before the geese returned.

I was feeling unsettled because of an offer I had received from my elder brother, who had settled in the United States of America. The offer was to pay my passage and other expenses to his home and stay with him as long as I liked, but if I decided to return home to the wildfowling the following winter, I would have to pay my own expenses. "Fair enough," I thought, "if the kind of money he talks about can be earned, I haven't much to worry about." My brother was at New York to meet me, and after visiting other relatives, we eventually arrived at his home at the foot of the Adirondack Mountains. I had heard quite a bit about the hunting in the area and was looking forward to having some fun with a rifle-but, as I was a foreigner, a licence to carry firearms was not easy to come by.

However, after helping an old farmer for a few days, he promised to take me for a day's hunting. That cheered me up a bit. Sadly, when the day arrived we followed his two dogs without seeing an animal or bird to shoot at. I told myself that I would have had more fun roughing up rabbits at home.

Nothing turned out as I expected. I was thinking of the pinkfeet nesting in Iceland and Spitsbergen and picturing them returning to the marshes on the North Norfolk coast.