Word: wildly
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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MacKenzie Thorpe has been stalking through the Lincolnshire marshes for most of his 62 years. Hunter, guide, marsh warden, bird advisory officer, conservationist, naturalist and lecturer, he is a legendary figure in British wildlife circles. He is called Kenzie the Wild-Goose Man. He is also the Owl Man, the Weasel Man, the Finch Man−a caller of the wild who can lure a hare from its hole or a baby seal onto the beach. Thorpe can mimic 88 different bird calls, ranging from the swallow's high titter to the low cluck of the red-legged partridge...
...sternest test comes each winter when the great pinkfeet migrate from Iceland to roost in the wheat and potato fields of Lincolnshire. Considered Britain's ranking expert on wild geese, Thorpe has banded the pinkfoot for conservation, painted it on canvas, filmed it, shot 3,800 himself and instructed countless other guns−from the Queen Mother's private secretary to Actor Richard Todd−on the wily ways of "the loveliest bird that flies." The call of the pinkfoot, says Thorpe, is the most difficult to imitate. By recording the geese's ringing...
Seven for Eight. The Wild-Goose Man knows all about cover. Until a few years ago he held another unofficial title: prince of the poachers. Son of a gypsy father who migrated south from Yorkshire, Thorpe was raised in Sutton Bridge, a marsh village of flight netters and punt gunners who thrived on wild-fowling. His grandmother, a formidable woman named Leviathan, was famed for her skill at pouncing on nesting pheasants and sweeping up both birds and eggs in her petticoats. After graduating from slingshot to birdshot, Thorpe began poaching in earnest...
Jack Crabb is 121 years old. His eyes are agate chips; senility seeps through the cracks in his voice. But Crabb is not your average superannuated former Indian fighter, former Indian, intimate of Wild Bill Hickok and General George Armstrong Custer, ex-gunslinger, scalawag and drunkard. No sir. He is Little Big Man, sole survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. He may tell a stretcher or two, but when he reminisces, graduate students listen. A budding anthropologist starts a tape recorder, Crabb opens his toothless yawp and the saga unfurls...
...more than they did about Zanzibar." As a result, when they wanted to find black leaders to receive OEO grants in 1968, "they sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth, looking like a bunch of wild men." If the bureaucrats got so shook up that "their eyes froze into iceballs . . . they knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs...