Nobody I knew ever called her “Patricia”; it was as PAT Ryan that she became famous… Oh, wait a minute. Unless you made a living in the writing trades in the sixties through the eighties, you probably never heard of her. She was the least visible great editor during those years, when you could make …
Author: Steve Bodio
Fishes, wishes… and a caption, please
Guy Boyd, gyr tiercel “Darwin”, huge rainbow. Story? Take it away! Guy’s was “Game is getting thin on the ground around here, so…” At least one person who saw this image “believed ” it– people are distressingly uncertain about raptors and their habits. Of course they also think raptor means Deinonychus… More fish. Sometimes, …
Still more gratuitous dog images
For the end of the year. Jutta’s girls in Germany once again, on a bright windy day… An end- of- the- day game painting Jonathan found in a museum in Brussels, with greyhounds. And Princess Ataika, who can find a throne anywhere… at home or on the road, in this case Jim and Penelope Caldwell’s …
Rigby Returns
The real thing, made in London on the old patents, the old ways. I have owned one once, a “.275”. So did Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell, who shot many elephants with that “tiny”, actually moderate, caliber. And Jim Corbett (man -eating tigers), and Eleanor O’Connor (mostly edible horned things). They have a stock of older …
RIP: Frank Bond, 1943- 2013
Frank Bond, of Santa Fe New Mexico, one of the four founders of the Peregrine Fund; lawyer, rancher, principled politician, father, old- fashioned but innovative conservationist; old friend; perhaps first, in his own mind, falconer, died of a swift- moving cancer last week. The scion of a wealthy sheep -ranching family in northern New Mexico, …
Christmas 2013
Over the desert and up in the range, to Muleshoe ranch we go. Right click for big… Twelve miles of sometimes atrocious dirt and rock track, up to above 8000 feet, with the astronomical telescope on the 10,000 foot ridge above glinting in reflected afternoon light from the west… No art or essays or anything …
Merry Christmas!
Floyd Robbins
Reader and commenter Gil Tracy introduced me to the work of his friend, the wood carver Floyd Robbins of South Carolina. I didn’t think carving was art until I saw these. You have seen the “dead dove” below; take a look at these extraordinary objects. Gil says: “The wisp of snipe has to be seen …
RIP: Mikhail Kalashnikov, 1919- 2013
Kalashnikov was the most influential, if not the most innovative, firearms designer since John Moses Browning. If you had to use your rifle after dropping it in a swamp, would you pick an AR or an AK? He was also an NRA Life member…
Of Colonel Thornton and inedible quarry
My circle of friends has been talking about hunting predators, something I was for a long time reluctant to do for reasons (it now seems) I had not thought out. While I think all quarry should be treated with respect, a coyote skin or a big carnivore skull can be a magical object– as can …