The Little Red Book of Hunter’s Wisdom is a compilation of thought-provoking quotes about hunting—some old, some recent, some by well-known people, some by everyday folks. Our intention is that, if you take them as a whole, they will give you an overview of what this great sport of hunting is all about.
Peter and I assembled these quotes—all 363 of them—from a myriad of sources: my personal library, Peter’s library, public libraries, websites, books lent to us by friends, the list goes on and on. When all is said and done, doing the research for this book was as much fun as actually assembling it. While the majority of the quotes are from books that Peter and I have read and remembered, many were taken from books that we researched—books that we knew about, but never had the chance to read. I knew, for example, that the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev had written about hunting in the nineteenth century; yet I had never read his Sportsman’s Sketches before. What a fine piece of literature, what remarkable powers of observation. I returned that book to my local library, in South Salem, New York, and made a mental note to borrow it again.
There are other books I plan to revisit, some that I read more than 25 years ago, some I’ve never read. What a pleasure it was to once again read “The Leatherstocking Tales,” by James Fenimore Cooper, which I hadn’t looked at since high school. What joy I felt to open Hemingway’s “Green Hills of Arica,” another book I hadn’t read in years.
Others I have read recently. Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Books” have always been among my favorites: My father read them to me when I was a boy, and I did the same with my children. I continue to pick up the two volumes and read them from time to time. It’s always inspiring to read about the boy Mowgli, growing up with wolves; and the mongoose, Rikki-tikki-tavi, living with a human family and protecting them from Nag and Nagaina, the sinister cobras that inhabit the garden.
Some of the quotes in this book are from my mental library—passages I have read and remembered over the years, from stories I have enjoyed and related to. “Lost,” by Burton Spiller, always struck a chord with me. What hunter hasn’t considered the consequences of getting lost deep in the woods, with daylight fading? The story took on special meaning to me when I became seriously turned around while deer hunting in Maine’s Allagash region in the late 1980s: The temperature was near zero, the sun had dropped behind Mount Katahdin, and I was lost. Like Spiller, I made mistakes—in my case, I didn’t trust my compass, and I set off in momentary panic, when I should have simply stopped and taken some time to calm down and think things through. Ultimately I did stop, and was able to figure out how to get back to camp.
Thomas McGuane’s “Heart of the Game” has always meant something special to me, echoing my own feelings of the hunt. So has John Miller’s “Deer Camp,” which reminds me of my own hunting club in New York’s Catskill Mountains, where 10 of us convene every November to live in a tar-paper shack and hunt whitetails along the Neversink River.
Everything written by Theodore Roosevelt and José Ortega y Gasset commands my attention. Their insights have lasted through the years, and for good reason. James R. Pierce’s piece on old hunting buddies always stirs me, especially because I hunted with him for many years, and through his last season. And many may not know it, but Lee Wulff, world famous as a fisherman, was also a dedicated deer and bird hunter. I had the chance to hunt with Lee a number of times, and his observations on the natural world, both spoken and written, were unparalleled.
We have included other friends and acquaintances in this volume, not simply beause we know them, but because the people whom we often find ourselves around have as deep a feeling for the outdoors as we do. Tom McIntyre, Mark Sullivan, T. Edward Nickens, Lamar Underwood, and Ted Nugent have many differing opinions, yet each has the same respect for the animals we hunt.
The literature of hunting has always been a part of our heritage; it has helped form the foundation of this nation, our national psyche, and it keeps a great many of us going, staying anchored in a world that’s becoming increasingly complex.
So as you make your way through these pages, take your time, study the words: They are there for a reason. Our hope is that they may hit home with you, that they may send you searching for books in your library as well.
—Jay Cassell,
Katonah, New York.
June 2011.