Quote

“A great many rifles and shooting books have passed through my life since the day I purchased that first 7 X 57 40 years ago this month, and the lessons learned have been many. One was to hold onto rifles and books that continually prove not just practical but delightful, and get rid of those …

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Book Review #2

I have been promising a review of Paula Young Lee’s Deer Hunting in Paris for what seems like forever, and I apologize for taking so long. Part of it was thinking my way through to what I thought exactly or critically. I loved it and found it intensely quotable; on the other hand I found …

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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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Teddy’s Team

Just a little photoblogging for today, as I have another deadline. This is Teddy Moritz’s team of Dachshund and Harris, working so well together they barely need a human. Teddy bred our Lil what seems a lifetime ago, and she continues to field her team in places close to civilization on the east coast.

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 …

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Another teaser

I will find out more. But this possible state record was taken about ten miles away, just north of Lee Henderson’s ranch where we hunt. The terrain in the middle photos is low down (well, only 6500 feet) and already rugged; similar rocky conditions prevail right up to the peak. Stay tuned… We saw sheep, …

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Guest Quotes– Teddy Moritz

Teddy writes: “Just finished a book by Christine Byl titled ‘Dirt Work, An Education in the Woods’. This woman worked summers on trail maintenance in Glacier National Park, and in several parks in Alaska. She talks about the grunt work, the digging and clearing and loading and discomfort of physical work. She loved it all. …

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Bonus Photo

… from John Brandt’s Horned Giants: Father Anderson Bakewell, S.J., my Explorers Club mentor, with .416 Rigby “Rifle for Heavy Game” and bison from Alaska’s Delta River herd, the northernmost “plains”herd today, though not in the Pleistocene…

Captain John Brandt, RIP

Captain John Brandt, military man, ethnologist,  zoologist, hunter, and rancher, died a couple of weeks ago, just short of his 86th birthday. He was my “other” sponsor for the Explorers Club, (the first, Father Anderson Bakewell, has been profiled here more than once). Both lived lives of adventure and scholarship of a kind that may …

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