Afield
The hunter, like the savage whose place he filled, seemed to select among the blind signs of their wild route with a species of instinct, seldom abating his speed, and never pausing to deliberate.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1826)
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You need to be familiar with the field, the woods, the marsh, the forest, or the mountains where you hunt. If you work hard and long at this aspect of hunting, you can become a part of the place you hunt. You will sense when you start to belong to the country.
JIM POSEWITZ
BEYOND FAIR CHASE (1994)
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I finally managed to reach the end of the woods, but there was no road of any sort there: some kind of untouched low bushes spread far and wide before me, while beyond them, ever so far, one could glimpse a desertlike field. I stopped again. “What is all this! Come,
where am I?”
IVAN TURGENEV
THE HUNTING SKETCHES (1852)
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The dog was disappointed and yearned back towards the fire. This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below the freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge. And it knew that it was not good to walk abroad in such fearful cold.
JACK LONDON
“TO BUILD A FIRE” (CIRCA 1900)
IN THE UNABRIDGED JACK LONDON (1981)
• • •
Some people can do better with one rifle and some with another, and in the long run it is “the man behind the gun” that counts most.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“HUNTING IN THE CATTLE COUNTRY” IN
HUNTING IN MANY LANDS
EDITED BY ROOSEVELT AND GRINNELL (1895)
• • •
He is not an educated man, but … is never lost … he adds the singularly retentive memory of peculiarities and of every incident in his own history and that of his companions … Everything Bridger has seen, he recollects with entire precision, and in his wild life … he has traversed the whole country in many directions.
J. CECIL ALTER
JIM BRIDGER (1979)
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Come face to face with a brownie at close range, near enough to hear the low rumbling in his chest, and no other wild animal noise will ever scare you again.
BEN EAST
OUTDOOR LIFE (1945)
• • •
That night around my fire I heard howling far to the west of me, perhaps several miles away. Sure as God a wolf.
JIM HARRISON
WOLF: A FALSE MEMOIR (1989)
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I like to hope that somehow he survived, to live out his days in some distant range, and I almost wish that I had never seen him alive at all. It’s a fearful thing to know that the wild held something so splendid, and that you spoiled it.
JOHN S. MARTIN
OUTDOORS LIMITED (1947)
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“Well,” I thought, “here is the situation which you have visualized for more than ten years. You know what to do. Don’t wait any longer. If it is necessary to spend a night in the woods, spend it as comfortably as possible. Make camp-and make it now.”
LAWRENCE R. KOLLER
SHOTS AT WHITETAILS (1948)
• • •
When I heard the full-throated bawling howl, I should have had chills racing up and down my spine. Instead, I was thrilled to know that the big grays might have picked up my trail and were following me down the glistening frozen highway of the river.
SIGURD OLSON
THE SINGING WILDERNESS (1956)
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God doesn’t count the hours you spend afield with friends.
GENE HILL
“THE PRIMROSE PATH” IN
A HUNTER’S FIRESIDE BOOK (1972)
• • •
The first track is the end of the string. At the far end, a being is moving; a mystery, dropping a hint about itself every so many feet, telling you more about itself until you can almost see it, even before you come to it.
TOM BROWN
THE TRACKER (1978)
• • •
“Pshaw!” muttered Abiram; “the boy, has killed a buck, or, perhaps a buffaloe, and he is sleeping by the carcass to keep off the wolves ’till day; we shall soon see him, or hear him, bawling for help to bring in his load.”
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1826)
• • •
My first sight was a kitchen match held to the bow with a rubber band.
FRED BEAR
FRED BEAR’S WORLD OF ARCHERY (1979)
• • •
I admit that the game of deer-hunting is sometimes tedious and the shooting of the occasional variety; yet my experience has been that the great chance does come to the faithful, and that to make good on it is to drink one of Life’s rarest juleps, the memory of whose flavor is a delight for years.
ARCHIBALD RUTLEDGE
“PLANTATION GAME TRAILS” IN
THE DEER BOOK BY LAMAR UNDERWOOD (1980)
• • •
The heart of [this] hunter looks for a piece of Eden. It feels right to hunt in a place where the land is healthy.
GEORGE N. WALLACE
HIGH COUNTRY NEWS (1983)
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Probably few of my readers have had occasion to drop in at village taverns—but as to us hunters, where won’t we go!
IVAN TURGENEV
A SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES (1852)
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The Iroquois Confederation called the Adirondacks “the dark and bloody land,” too wild to civilize and suitable only for warfare, hunting, and little else. Since that time, twentieth-century technology and population booms have made few inroads.
A. J. McCLANE
GREAT FISHING AND HUNTING LODGES OF NORTH AMERICA (1984)
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For hunting, .22s are mainly useful on squirrels. You cannot kill either a turkey or a woodchuck consistently with a .22 …
STEPHEN BODIO
GOOD GUNS (1986)
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I had my rifle turned around and ready by the time it was gone. I had figured elk, because that’s all I had seen. The word moose was just working its way forward in my mind when I saw it sidehilling along the opposite bluff …
PETE FROMM
INDIAN CREEK CHRONICLES (1993)
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It is regrettable that of the hundreds of thousands of deer hunters spread throughout our whitetail deer country only a few spend sufficient time in the woods for absorbing some knowledge of deer habits.
LAWRENCE R. KOLLER
SHOTS AT WHITETAILS (1948)
• • •
If once I could blame a failed duck hunt on boyish restlessness or bungling, now I can generally blame the simple absence of game. I’ve become a better retriever
trainer, a better duck caller and a better shot over the years—years that locally reduce these skills to near irrelevance. Too soon old, too late smart, as they say.
SYDNEY LEA
HUNTING THE WHOLE WAY HOME (1994)
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You have to wonder what goes through a dog’s mind. There are those who say, Not much, but I’m not one of them.
DAN O’BRIEN
EQUINOX: LIFE, LOVE, AND BIRDS OF PREY (1997)
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