Book Review

Here are reports on two readable collections of short, mainly humorous pieces; a new edition of a popular English book and a sumptuous coffee-table work on a top Italian engraver.

A Peach Tree in an Apple Orchard
By Paul Fersen (Lyons Press, 800-962-0973, www.lyonspress.com; 2007) 195 pp. $16.95.

Vermont is full of intriguing folks—so I’ve found in the five years I’ve lived here. Vermonters range from umpteenth-generation locals who use fascinating words like “rowan” (it’s old English and means the second cutting of hay) and “doouh-yaahd” (dooryard, or the plot of ground right next to your house) to transplants from all over who have located here for the matchless natural beauty and outdoor opportunities in the Green Mountain State. Consider Paul Fersen among the latter. He came up from Georgia 28 years ago, spent a few years as a ski bum, owned and worked a dairy farm and now is on staff at Orvis, in Manchester. Fersen also has written a column for Stratton, a regional magazine in southwestern Vermont, and these essays and ruminations are drawn from that publication.
Who would suppose that an ex-football lineman (University of Georgia, New Orleans Saints) would write this well? Maybe it’s Fersen’s college journalism degree, but I think it’s more likely that the guy just reads and writes a lot—and is a wicked good observer of people and nature. The book is full of humor, mainly of the wry sort. He inserts his XXXL self into a fundraising soiree for the Southern Vermont Arts Center, where “It’s not easy to ma-neuver 6-foot-5 and 280 pounds through a tight and polite crowd of well-dressed and coifed partygoers in a small room strewn with expensive antique furniture. Particularly when your entire life has been spent running into people at high speed or grabbing large pissed-off cows around the neck and holding on long enough to shove your arm down their throat to administer medication.”
Fersen calls Vermont “the land of ruffed grouse, pot roast and potatoes,” and he’s more comfortable in places like Sherman’s Store in West Rupert, drinking coffee with the farmers while jawing about taxes, heifers and deer hunting. He writes about hunting ducks with friends (limited opportunities in the Mettowee Valley but plenty of fun anyway), urban sprawl down South (“a cacophony of neon and Cracker Barrel hell”) and his ancient Grandma Moon, who never made him wash his hands, saying “Dirt’s good for a child. That’s all we are anyways.” Then there’s his Labrador retriever, Yoo Hoo, who likes driving pickup trucks. (You gotta read the whole essay to really get it.) The book is all over the place: curmudgeonly observations on cell phones and computers, fishing, mud season, fatherhood, food, the joys of spreading manure in winter.
Good writing is where you find it: in the pages of a regional magazine that may not have the cachet of The New Yorker or Harper’s or in a paperback brought out by a publisher who’s willing to take a chance on a bunch of essays on country living. I can’t recommend Fersen’s book enough. It had me in stitches most of the time. And the chapter “A Farm-er’s Christmas” is a lovely thing indeed.

If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?
By Bill Heavey (Atlantic Monthly Press, 212-614-7850, www.groveatlantic.com; 2007) 285 pp. $23.

It’s been years since I read Field & Stream (or any of the Manhattan-based outdoor how-to mags), so Bill Heavey caught me by surprise. I’d never read anything he had written, and as soon as I dipped into this collection I knew I’d been missing out on a fine talent. Heavey’s humor tends to be a bit more over-the-top than Fersen’s, but it’s just as rib-tickling. He writes that “Hunting and fishing are far too important to be left to the capable alone. This is a book for the rest of us: those with more enthusiasm than competence.” (Though I’d have to say he sounds like a very competent deer hunter, particularly using a bow.)
Heavey lives in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and some of his pieces are set there, whereas others originate in places as various as the American West, Mongolia and the Amazon Basin. He writes of hunting (big game, mostly) and fishing and the odd predicaments you sometimes find yourself in when engaging in fieldsports. Like the time he left before dawn to go bowhunting, parked his truck near his chosen spot and discovered he’d left his rubber boots “standing at attention by the front door. I looked down at my shoes: 6-year-old orange leatherette bedroom slippers with vinyl soles that I can locate in the morning by smell alone.” (Hey, he ended up arrowing a nice six-pointer that day.)
There are ruminations on the Cabela’s catalog (the most recent one, says Heavey, “runs to 711 pages and weighs more than some Korean automobiles”; “the day is coming when a cabela will refer to a unit of weight”) and that skill useful to all outdoor enthusiasts, lying, which Heavey calls “hunting’s oldest tradition. In fact, linguists now conjecture that language first arose among hominids to fulfill that most fundamental of impulses: the need to lie. ‘Korg, I was so close when that mas-todon farted that it blew all the hair on my forehead straight back.’”
OK, that last example, like the book’s title, is way over the top. But Heavey gives the reader a lot more than sophomoric stuff. His report “The Lion Dogs,” describing a hunt in the steep, dangerous canyon country of the Desert Southwest, is taut, visceral and bleak. And the personal essay “Lilyfish,” in which the author faces the death of his baby daughter, is honest and deeply touching. Like Fersen, Heavey gives good weight. Their books? Don’t choose between them. Get both.

Rough Shooting
By Mike Swan (Swan Hill Press; distributed by Stackpole Books, 800-732-3669, www.stackpolebooks.com; 2007) 185 pp. $34.95.

Writes Mike Swan in the new third edition of this English title: “The rough shooter makes his own sport.” Rough shooting differs notably from driven shooting in the British Isles. Instead of firing at game that beaters have sent past the Gun, the rough shooter must strike out on his own, usually in the company of a dog, and find and flush the game, which can include pheasants, woodcock, partridge and wood pigeons, rabbits and hares, and geese and ducks. Swan, head of education at The Game Conservancy Trust and a frequent contributor to English sporting magazines, bases his treatise on practical personal experience in pursuing and shooting lowland game in woods, fields, marshes and pools. (He does not get into the moorland species, such as red grouse and ptarmigan.)
The book is organized into three sections. First, Swan defines “Basic Woodcraft”: learning about your quarry, keeping unobtrusive and moving with stealth. He gives advice on dogs, including flushing and pointing breeds and retrievers. (He writes, “There is no doubt that spaniels, and particularly the best of them, are very demanding dogs to train and handle.” I would like to add several exclamation points to that statement.) Swan discusses shotguns and cartridges, clothing and equipment, and gunning ethics. The book’s second section focuses on the game, with detailed life-history information and methods of finding, decoying and bagging the different species. The third and final section delves into the conservation of game and habitat management.
Rough Shooting is well written and nicely illustrated with photographs and chapter-opening sketches by Jonathan Yule. It has a pleasantly British tone, as in this photo caption: “Just pop in the ferret, load up and stand back. Bolting rabbits are ripping sport.” What ho! In fact, Rough Shooting is full of excellent practical advice, much of it transferable to American game and hunting situations. And if you’re planning a trip to Britain, it may convince you to arrange for some rough shooting in addition to the driven.

Gianfranco Pedersoli—Master Engraver
By Dag Sundseth (Blue Book Publications, 800-877-4867; www.bluebookinc.com; 2007)

In a foreword, publisher and editor S.P. Fjestad characterizes this lavish volume as “an art book on engraving, not simply another firearms engraving book.” It’s also a biography of the Italian gun engraver Gianfranco Pedersoli and a survey of engraving techniques that this master artist employs.
Here’s a sketch of Pedersoli’s life: quit school and started engraving at age 14, apprenticed to another engraver in his native Val Trompia, was on the Beretta work-force for five years, got bored with traditional scrollwork and began freelancing. The self-taught Pedersoli perfected bulino, the signature Italian engraving style that relies on punched dots and lines rather than traditional chiselwork.
According to author Dag Sundseth, Pedersoli’s “specialty and hallmark technique [is] his successful blending of a variety of engraving patterns, including scroll, game scene, floral ornamentation, and grotesque, all done with a combination of different engraving styles and techniques.” Pedersoli, now 61 and semi-retired, remains in demand for decorating fine guns produced by F.lli Rizzini, FAMARS, Fabbri, Ferlib, Piotti and others.
The heart of the book is 175 pages of sharp, close-up photographs of Pedersoli’s work, his design drawings for each engraving in the background, accompanied by captions devised by Pedersoli himself and translated into English by Elena Micheli-Lamboy. Feast your eyes on gamebirds, hunting dogs, big game, intricate scrollwork, floral scenes, voluptuous nudes and flight-of-fancy grotesques: ogres, serpents, horned ladies. Pedersoli’s goal is “to create emotions. He wants people to look at his works in surprise, astonishment, or even shock.” The book includes a foldout page depicting Pedersoli’s masterwork, the “Alpini gun,” a FAMARS side-by-side engraved with scenes of Italy’s elite Alpine corps in World Wars I and II. The detail on this and the other guns is nothing short of astounding.
The publisher projects the Pedersoli book will be the first in a series on Italian master engravers.

Charles Fergus’s classic book about upland hunting, A Rough-Shooting Dog, is available for $16.95 from the Lyons Press, 800-962-0973, www.lyonspress.com.