Skills
Get the best [rifle] that you can, of course; but do not worship it. Bear in mind that, whatever its trajectory and smashing quality, it is only a gun, and can kill nothing that you miss with it.
HORACE KEPHART
CAMPING AND WOODCRAFT (1917)
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The placing of the bullet is everything.
COL. TOWNSEND WHELEN
MR. RIFLEMAN (WITH BRADFORD ANGIER) (1965)
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In matters like hunting and fishing and falconry, mentors are priceless. They teach you nuance, and detail, and what is really important.
CHARLES FERGUS
THE UPLAND EQUATION (1995)
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No, I’m not a good shot, but I shoot often.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT (EARLY 1900s)
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Like most aspiring hunters, I was given, at an early age, a single-barreled shotgun and permission to hunt rabbits.
ALDO LEOPOLD
RED LEGS KICKING (1946)
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To the trapper-naturalist … the howl of the wolf … inspires [a] challenge to his own skill as a hunter and trapper.
H. McCRACKEN AND H. VAN CLEVE
TRAPPING: THE CRAFT AND SCIENCE OF CATCHING
FUR-BEARING ANIMALS (1947)
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If one really wishes to be a master of an art, technical knowledge is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that art becomes an “artless art” growing out of the unconscious. In the case of archery, the hitter and hit no longer are two opposing objects, but are one reality.
DAISETSU T. SUZUKI IN
ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY
BY EUGEN HERRIGEL (1953)
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The color of your clothes is not so important as many hunters appear to think, for the background of Alaskan hills in late autumn is a crazy-quilt of every violent color from blood red to flame yellow—and anyway, it is motion rather than form or color which catches sheep’s eyes.
RUSSELL ANNABEL
SPEAKING OF SHEEP HUNTING: TALES OF A BIG GAME GUIDE (1938)
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Woodcraft may be defined as the art of finding one’s way in the wilderness, and getting along well by utilizing Nature’s storehouse.
HORACE KEPHART
CAMPING AND WOODCRAFT (1917)
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The Johnny-come-latelies who followed us would not know the things we knew.
JOHN MYERS MYERS
THE WILD YAZOO (1947)
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Every field archer should make his own tackle. If he can not make and repair it, he will never shoot very long, because it is in constant need of repair.
DR. SAXTON POPE
HUNTING WITH THE BOW AND ARROW (1923)
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If a man’s weapon is not dependable, then he is not dependable.
COL. TOWNSEND WHELEN
MR. RIFLEMAN (WITH BRADFORD ANGIER) (1965)
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Every hunter has ultimately to learn the way himself … The truest hunter must go beyond rote lessons to a degree of knowledge that has become thoroughly ingrained, become an instinctual quality of his being, something beyond mere consciousness. He must, finally, be able to cross over from understanding to knowing. That is what ultimately cannot be taught.
THOMAS MCINTYRE
THE WAY OF THE HUNTER (1988)
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Learning to hunt is not the same as learning to shoot even though learning one certainly seems to help the other, and it is hard to think of a good hunter who is not also a pretty good shot.
RICHARD FORD
“HUNTING WITH MY WIFE” IN
SPORTS AFIELD (1996)
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Any kind of hunting is fine with me, but I especially love to go after whitetail deer with a bow. That’s why I originally started making bows years ago.
JIM HAMM
BOWS & ARROWS OF THE NATIVE AMERICANS (1989)
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The successful bird hunter must be knowledgeable about many things but in the end it comes down to this: He must know his birds, his dogs, and his guns.
GEOFFREY NORMAN
THE ORVIS BOOK OF UPLAND BIRD SHOOTING (1985)
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We all hunt in the fall—grouse, deer, elk, though we leave the moose and bear alone because they are not as common—but none of us is clever or stealthy enough
to bowhunt. With a bow, you have to get close to the animal.
RICK BASS
IN THE LOYAL MOUNTAINS (1995)
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I must have dozed, for my watch said eleven-thirty when I heard the first shot. It came with a pop, followed by an expanding wind, like a gale coming down a chimney
toward me, out overhead and away toward the Dream River. And then another, perhaps eight, ten miles away. And finally a third. All from the same rifle. In the fallaway echo of that crack, the hairs on the back of my neck stiffened. I was being watched. I was sure of it.
MARK SULLIVAN
THE PURIFICATION CEREMONY (1997)
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