At VERY long last Thomas McIntyre’s Snow Leopard novel is out. I have waited longer for it than I have ever for any other book. Long story… First, let me quote my own recommendation– I pared it down to say exactly what I wanted to: “McIntyre’s tale may have predecessors, but it is unique. I …
Month: September 2012
Flyover Country?
Thesis: talk is as good in Magdalena, or the Spur, as anywhere. It was Sissy Olney, fourth generation rancher and lion hunter, who on seeing me reading Sybille Bedford in that bar, asked me if she were the one who had written “that big fat book about Aldous Huxley”. Joel Becktell is a world- class …
Jesuit “Final Exam”
This was sent by the biographer of the late legendary Jesuit adventurer, mountaineer, hunter, and my sometime mentor Father Anderson Bakewell, S J, who found it in an 80’s Jesuit newsletter among his effects. It has been around in various iterations, but I wonder, given the rifle , if he were also involved in its creation. …
Crab Diaries
A new one for the blogroll: Crab Diaries, the serious, scary, witty, and laugh- out- loud funny journals of… well, she prefers to remain anonymous for now; let us just call her “My friend the Oncologist” and add, since she reveals this in a particularly funny post, that she is a (we met because she …
Altai Roads
Or Central Asian roads in general, are not like western roads. The highway from Ulan Bataaar to Olgii is over six hundred miles long, but it is not paved. It is studded with old car parts and camel bones; sometimes, when the land is flat, its ruts seem to stretch a quarter mile wide and …
California Fieldwork
I spent last week in California doing a survey for a project we have in the San Diego area. The picture above shows the inland scrub environment of the area. If you look closely you can see an old landslide in the middle of the hillside. Believe me, it was plenty hot there last week. This …
Hot Links
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have completed the reconstruction of the Denisovan genome. It still blows me away that the entire collection of physical remains of this group of ancient humans (as different from modern humans and Neanderthals as they are from each other) consists of one finger bone fragment. Underwater …
Becasse, Becassine
We had our first cold snap last night and it somehow has me thinking of the family of snipe, mysterious and delicious migrants. Got them on the wall, pictures of hunts past, and memories, but sure would like to hunt either. Snipe are in the state at least; Tom Daly shot these in Colorado before …
Found Quote
From an article called “The Hound and the Fury” in Esquire for April, 1985, the travel issue; by Alan Furst, now our finest spy novelist, specializing in WW II and before: “Once you own a sight hound– Afghan, Borzoi, Saluki, greyhound, and whippet and some of the others– you are addicted for life.”
Hound Pix of the week
Lure coursing– Jutta Rubesam’s Nhubia in Germany: