Chukar Hunting the Old Way

My long- time Canadian hunting correspondent, Alex Sharif, who I met through Valerius Geist, is primarily a sheep hunter and a mountaineer. But when he sent me a few photos from his cousin Afshin in Idaho,I was intrigued. Afshin is a Goshawker, and he hunts Chukar in the kind of country they have always inhabited, …

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Tim Murphy

In a just world, North Dakota’s Tim Murphy would be not just the Poet Laureate of his beautiful Siberian state, our truest North; he would be the Poet Laureate of the USA. Good (but lesser) honored real poets, like Dana Gioia, know and say this,.. But like any cradle Catholic, even one lapsed or “relapsed”, …

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Weekend Doggage

Daniel, with his new Civil War beard, trains one of his astonishingly beautiful pointers, art married to genes… look at that tail!

More Doggage

Daniel Riviera’s younger pointer is not as well- mannered as Boone (see below). Meanwhile,  in Laramie, Carlos and his dogs take a walk and a nap: “They ran up the trail and came back, laughing the contagious laughter of dogs in snow…”

A little more photoblogging…

From Scott McNeff,  to cheer us all by demonstrating how a bird (Sharpshin “Boomer”) and a dog (viszla “Fran”, after Fran Hamerstrom) can bond quite on their own. He writes: “… One day last week, “Boomer” caught a bird on the wing – the dog had steadied up at the flush, and I watched as …

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Another Poet

Tim Murphy is not just one of our finest living poets, and the only one I know who celebrates what I have called “our Siberia”, the chilly plains of North Dakota. He is a living rebuke to stereotypes: a farmer, a businessman, a Yale graduate who studied under Robert Penn Warren; a classicist who writes …

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Training

Very busy and a bit under the weather, so expect photos and no long text. Here are pics of Daniel’s recent training. Call me provincial– I didn’t know they had places like that in California.