Jim Spencer “Out There”

When we bought our place in the Ozark National Forest nine years ago, the house had stood vacant for nearly two years. It had been in fairly poor repair even before it was vacant, with large cracks and gaps everywhere — under the eaves, in the stonework foundation, around the plumbing where it entered the house from the crawl space, around several of the windows.

When Grandpa was a kid, there were lots of quail. Subsistence farming was the way things were done, and there was a family on every 40.
Each had a cornfield, a garden, a few small row-crop fields, a pond, a cow pasture, a weed-grown junkpile and probably a woodlot.
Fields were small and odd-shaped, turnrows and field borders were uneven and weedy, and in general everything was close together and a little shaggy. And almost every 40-acre farm had four or five coveys of “birds.”