Book Review

    As autumn transforms the landscape, we make ready to enter the bird coverts once again. To prime you for the coming days afield, here are reports on four hunting titles and a reprint of some excellent outdoor essays.
 
The Gigantic Book of Hunting Stories
Jay Cassell, editor (Skyhorse Publishing, 212-643-6816, www.skyhorsepublishing.com; 2008) 800 pp., hardcover, $24.95.

    It may not be “gigantic,” but this book is definitely a tome, hefty and solid in the hand. It’s wide-ranging—collecting pieces by Theodore Roosevelt, Ivan Turgenev, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens on through Nash Buckingham and Zane Grey to modern writers like Rick Bass, Diana Rupp, E. Donnall Thomas Jr., Robert F. Jones and others.
    There’s something for every hunter (and reader), including musings about big game, small game, upland birds, wild turkeys and waterfowl, mainly in North America but also in Africa and Asia. Capping the volume are 29 works on the theme “Reflections on Our Sport,” with gems like “The Heart of the Game,” by Thomas McGuane; “Mercy on Beeson’s Partridge,” by the poet Sidney Lea; and Datus Proper’s “Struggle and Chance: Why We Do It,” excerpted from his book Pheasants of the Mind.
    The quality of the writing is generally quite good. The conservationist Aldo Leopold describes a wolf’s howl in his provocative essay “Thinking Like a Mountain”: “A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.”
    Included is Corey Ford’s magical “The Road to Tinkhamtown,” first published in Field & Stream. This short story captivates through the presentation of vivid details interwoven with emotion and thought—a sentimental tale but not a melodramatic one. Unfortunately, the story is presented not by itself but with an attached report on Ford’s own death; because of an editing oversight, the report seems to be part of the original story, making a hash of this superb piece of fiction.
    The Gigantic Book of Hunting Stories delivers plenty of words for the price, and most of those words are very fine indeed. The book would have benefited from closer proofreading and editing, and I would have liked a detailed listing of where and when the various writings were first published so that readers could more easily find the originals. Some of the proceeds from the book’s sales will go to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (www.trcp.org), a coalition of organizations and partners working to preserve our hunting and fishing traditions.

Huns & Hun Hunting
By Ben O. Williams (Willow Creek Press, 800-850-9453, www.willowcreek press.com; 2008) 192 pp., paperback, $19.95.

    Ben Williams lives in Montana, where he encountered his first Hungarian partridge in 1956 while doing some pre-season dog training. In the half-century since then, he has spent much time hunting this challenging non-native gamebird. In a foreword, magazine publisher Steve Smith calls Williams’s new book “the distilled knowledge of more than 5,000 days afield.”
    The Hungarian partridge, also known as the gray partridge, inhabits the Great Plains from Missouri north and west to Saskatchewan and Alberta—a sprawl of grassland and farming terrain that resembles the bird’s native habitat in Eastern Europe.
    In learning to hunt Huns, Williams read books about ruffed grouse and woodcock and how people went about hunting those Eastern birds. “I was able to use those general models to devise a strategy for Huns,” he writes. “My goal was to hunt Huns efficiently and to study the world around them and how they used it.” Williams presents information he has discovered about the natural history, home range and daily habits of his quarry.
    “When you know a particular covey’s daily pattern, they become much easier to find the next time,” he writes. “Once I flush a covey of birds, I pursue them again. I mentally record these locations and every other place they go. Eventually I learn all the spots the birds are familiar with—particular elevations, feeding areas, roost sites, loafing sites, and escape routes.” The author once followed a covey of birds through 11 separate flushes. “They never broke up and they returned to one location three times. I must add that it was late in the season and it took me four hours—and I chose not to kill any birds.”
    Williams gives advice on dogs (he has bred his own line of big-running Brittanys), guns (he favors lightweight 20- and 28-bores), clothing, footgear and other equipment. The book ends with four stories blending action, technical information and Williams’s deep respect for the Hungarian partridge. The work is illustrated with the author’s own photos, which unfortunately are in black & white. That’s a shame, since Williams is famous for his beautiful color photography.

The Keen Shot’s Miscellany
By Peter Holt (Quiller Publishing; distributed by Stackpole Books, 800-732-3669, www.stackpolebooks.com; 2008) 224 pp., hardcover, $29.95.

    This one is all over the board: 300 entries on the subject of game shooting past and present, here and there (although mostly in England, where the book was published), serious and whimsical.
    Holt, a former journalist who now runs his family’s shoot in Shropshire, has written some of the entries and excerpted or quoted others—snippets about dogs, hares, pheasants, Victorian shooters and modern ones, a recipe for rook pie, collective nouns (“A dread of terns”), creative ways of insulting your partner’s dog, and the advisability of making sure your own pooch has “emptied himself” before you take him shooting, there being “nothing worse . . . than a gun arriving at a shoot and his dog promptly dumping on the host’s lawn.”
    We learn that on his 1868 tour of Egypt, “Edward VII, Prince of Wales, began a day’s sport by bagging twenty-eight flamingos on the Nile at Luxor,” and then moved on to the tomb of Pharaoh Ramses IV, where he “started on the bats . . . Alas, the Prince was not on form. He bagged only one.” We hear of the record for starlings killed with one shot, when Lt. Col. Peter Hawker blazed away at a flock in October 1825 using his “great double gun loaded with 30 ounces of shot. Two hundred and forty-three starlings fell dead immediately and between two and three hundred were found the next day dead in the reeds.”
    Did you know the expression “a feather in his cap” comes from the practice of a sportsman placing the pinfeather of a bagged woodcock in his cap band? Or that Cape buffalo “can be taken from behind with a shot up the anus,” denominated by some as “a Texas heart shot”? All this and more can be found between the covers of this highly readable compendium.

Out Home
John Madson (University of Iowa Press, 800-621-2736, www.uiowapress.org; 2008) 218 pp., paperback, $19.95.

    John Madson lived from 1923 to 1995. He was an outdoorsman, a conservationist and a first-rate writer. As a young man, I read his articles on nature and hunting and was inspired, both as a budding writer and as someone who also loved the natural world. Madson used simple, clean prose that grabbed the reader. He thought deeply and clearly about what he saw in nature and how it molded us as humans, and he communicated those concepts ably.
    Out Home was first published in 1979. It focuses on the place Madson knew and loved best: the Midwestern prairie, that great stretch of rolling grassland that includes the author’s home state of Iowa. Another Iowan and Shooting Sportsman Contributing Editor Michael McIntosh, a friend of Madson’s, edited and arranged the 22 pieces, which had run in Audubon, Sports Afield, Outdoor Life and Gray’s Sporting Journal.
    Madson’s essays are every bit as good today as they were when I read them three decades ago. Listen to him describe the prairie grasses: “By Indian summer they had ripened, rich and stately, each clan with its own colors, and those colors shifting and changing with the wind. By September the grasses had lost their greens and had deepened into tones of gold and bronze.”
    Madson writes about a canoe trip tracing part of the Lewis & Clark route, prairie blizzards, crows, white-tailed deer and more. His tone can be wry and humorous, and often it imparts a strong flavor of the past. Here is a memory from the author’s youth, as he returned home on a winter evening late in pheasant season: “By now my corduroy pants are frozen to the knees, as stiff as stovepipes and rattling against each other . . . . One foot ahead of the other, breaking through snow crust at each step, the slung birds cutting through the old sheepskin coat and into thin shoulder, and a sort of homesickness growing at the sight of each lighted kitchen window in farmhouses across the fields. And finally, up ahead in the gathering darkness, a square of yellow reflecting on the snow, strangely warm and vivid after the long hours of unrelieved white and gray.”
    In his essay “The Running Country,” Madson states that the tall-grass prairie “puts a mark on all that lives there, and the mark may outlast the place itself. Prairie people are like their western meadowlarks, seeming to be the same as their eastern relatives, but with a different song. It was the prairie that changed all that. It gave them a new song, and a new reason for singing.”
    These masterful essays are John Madson’s enduring song.

A Quail Hunter’s Odyssey
Joseph C. Greenfield Jr. (Safari Press, 800-451-4788, www.safaripress.com; 2009) 216 pp., hardcover, $34.95.

    A former cardiologist at Duke University Medical Center and a longtime hunter of bobwhite quail, Joseph Greenfield characterizes himself as “self-assured, opinionated and intolerant of the approaches [to bird hunting] taken by others.” As I wrote in a review of an earlier version published by Amwell Press, this memoir “will tell you a good bit about hunting bobwhite quail, both today and during the past half-century, and about that quintessential Southern bird dog, the pointer.” Six new chapters have been added to this edition.

    Charles Fergus’s most recent book about upland hunting, A Hunter’s Book of Days, is available for $27 from www.shootingsportsman.com.