Birds Of A Feather

I first met Paul de Nemeskeri-Kiss in the foyer of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York City, between acts of Verdi's Don Carlo. He was there as the guest of his daughter Ursula, I as the guest of Ursula's boss, the producer of the Met's satellite telecasts, my friend Klaus Hallig.

It was a Saturday matinee, yet it was the season premiere of this production, and thus many were there in evening clothes. The lighted chandeliers turned day into night. Chagall's giant murals looked down upon us. A more unlikely setting could hardly have been found for a conversation about woodcock hunting. But in the taxi en route from our hotel to Lincoln Center, Ursula, who had come to pick us up, told me that her father was to be there—this was her parents' wedding anniversary—and that, like me, he was an enthusiastic outdoor sportsman. In fact, said she, he was a fanatic.

I had nothing, not a word, to say about woodcock hunting, because I had never in my life done it. Though I have spent much time outdoors, not since I was a small boy in Texas many, many years ago had I seen a woodcock, and even then I had seen but few—the ones my father brought home from a day afield when quail were what he was really after. Those few were more than most people ever see; indeed, most people go through life unaware of the bird's very existence, Ursula's father said.

Hunting was in his blood, as it was in mine, I learned during the few minutes of that intermission. Paul's father had been game warden to Admiral Miklós Horthy. Horthy had been the Regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944, and that made Paul's father the overseer of thousands upon thousands of acres of forests and fields. With his father Paul had hunted and killed roebuck, chamois, boar, wolves and Hungarian partridge, the legendary grouselike Auerhahn, which men spend their whole lives hoping to get a shot at. After World War II, Paul came to America, did postgraduate studies in engineering at Columbia University and went to work for the telephone company.

From this job he would be retiring in a year. Then all his time would be his to fish and hunt. Of the first he liked best to fly-fish for trout, and of the second, well, it was hard to choose, but perhaps best of all he liked woodcock hunting.

The woodcock season for the year was just over, as of the week of our first meeting. For him it had been a good one. Eighty-five birds. Where did he do his hunting? In several places as the season progressed, beginning in upstate New York's Helderberg Mountains, then working southward to the Catskills and down along the Hudson River, then in New Jersey, following the bird on its annual migration southward. Except for New Jersey, those were places not far from where I lived and where I, too, fished and hunted; yet I had never seen a woodcock anywhere in them. Was I a wingshot, he asked. Well, I did a bit of duck shooting on the Hudson; otherwise I got little chance to practice on anything except clay pigeons in these game-poor times.

Before the bell rang to summon us back to our seats for the next act of the opera, he invited me to go woodcock hunting with him the next year. I accepted with an easy mind, knowing I need not worry about being put to shame shooting with a man who could kill 85 birds in a season. You learn to take lightly such long-range and indefinite invitations made at such times and under such circumstances. You will never hear from that person again. You won't even mind that you don't. In the course of a year he will have forgotten all about it, and so will you.

"Paul what?" I asked my wife.

"I don't know," she said. "I've asked him to repeat it twice, and I still don't understand. I can't ask him to tell me a fourth time."

If she had asked twice then I could not ask once, so it was not until the word woodcock was mentioned, and not for another moment even then, that I was able to connect the voice coming through the phone with the man I had met at the opera. It had been 10 months since that meeting. I felt somewhat ashamed of my initial doubtfulness.