“Teddie, Boy-o,” Gramps would drawl through his dentures, “you gotta be careful round them critters — gnome-folk, I mean — bite and scratch you if you don’t get a drop on them.” And then he’d tell me how he saw his first gnome out on the farm when he was eight, learned to shoot when he was nine, got his first gun for his tenth birthday, and felled his first gnome two weeks later on a Boy Scout trip up in Missouri. Scouts were different in those days, I think.