The Coolest Man in the World Has Throat Cancer

Over at the Querencia blog, Steve Bodio mourns that his mongolian friend, Aralbai, who was deemed to be "the coolest man in the world" by Field and Stream magazine, has throat cancer at the very young age of 54, and he is refusing chemo and radiation. Read the rest here.
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Small World Department

Steve Bodio gives a "big water bowl" boost to Lilly the dacshund.

The world is a small southern town. A while back, I discovered that Teddy Moritz's Harris Hawk was sired by Matt Mullenix's retired bird Charlie. Now it turns out that Steve Bodio's long-haired dachshund, Lilly, is related to Teddy's line of long-haired min-dachshunds, while his two lurchers, Pearlie and Plum (short for Plummer), are Hancock-bred animals as was Keeper, Teddy's old shattered-eye lurcher which was, I think, one of the spookiest-looking dogs I ever looked in the face.


Pearlie the lurcher looking guilty for having found a soft seat.



Bear the stag hound (left) and Plum the lurcher (right).

Since I've got a couple of lurcher pictures up, and I mentioned Col. David Hancock, I will quote from a Hancock article that first appeared in the The Countryman's Weekly back on July 14, 2000:

"Dog breeders have a huge moral responsibility, magnified by the increasing loss of role for breeds which once worked. Function once decided design. Now the whim of man all too often distorts a design originally drawn up by knowledgeable people who worked their dogs.

"Pastoral breeds were never intended to possess coats, which would hamper them at work. Working Bloodhounds do not display the degree of wrinkle seen in the breed in the show rings of today. Working Bassets, or English Bassets as they have now become known, do not display the over-long backs and under-length legs found in their show ring counterparts.

"The pursuit of undesirable and harmful exaggerations in breeds of dog tells you more about the moral shortcomings of man than about the faults in individual dogs."

8 To read the full article

PETA Fails the Bible Test

The centerpiece to this table is not tofu.


A hat tip to Steve Bodio who alerted me to the fact that the self-aggrandizing lunatics at PETA have put models of Jesus, Paul McCartney (as Sergeant Pepper), Ghandi and others in a cage in the side of an Airstream trailer that has been made up to look like a diner (a reference to the Last Supper I suppose). The story is up at Maine Hunting Today.

All this does is prove that the folks at PETA have not only never read the Bible, they really did ride the short bus to get to school.

Say what you want about Jesus, but he was a Jew, and as such was raised in a world in which the Torah -- the most sacred book of God -- was not only made of animal skin, but wrapped in animal skins as well. His was a world of sheep and goats, camels and donkeys, horses, and mules. Sheep and goats were routinely sacrificed and eaten, just as they are today. Larger pack animals were used to the very edge of their miserable existence, and then they were killed and skinned for water bags, saddles, drums, shoes, bags, and cord -- just as they are today. In much of the Middle East, little has changed in 2,000 years, and I assure you that there is no notion of Animal Rights at all.

In both the Old and New Testaments, animals do not have rights, and in fact on at least one day every year -- during the Passover sacrifice -- practicing Jews always had to eat meat as it was part of the traditional meal. In fact, while the Bible is not quite a recipe book, it does have instructions. In Deuteronomy 14 we are told:

"These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the red deer, the gazelle, the roe deer, the ibex, the addax, the oryx, and the mountain sheep. Any animal that has hoofs you may eat, provided it is cloven-footed and chews the cud.... "Of the various creatures that live in the water, whatever has both fins and scales you may eat...You may eat all clean birds. "

Jesus was born in a manger -- a place where beasts of burden and service are housed.

The story in the New Testament is not of loaves and Tofu, but of loaves and fishes, and it was fish -- a living thing -- that was killed and which Jesus fed to his followers.

In Mark 7:19 Jesus says all meat is now OK to eat (a major legal difference between the Old and New Testaments), and in Luke 22:8-15, Jesus intructs his followers to prepare lamb for the Last Supper.

Add to this the story in Samuel where the fox's tail is set on fire to help torch the fields of the Philistines (made famous in the Rudyard Kipling poem, "The Fox Meditates"), the Old Testament tales of frogs falling from the sky (not a good day for the frogs, I suspect), and the wholesale drowning of animals (see the Great Flood in Genesis and the un-parting of the Red Sea in Exodus), and it's clear that God is not a PETA member.

We have more direct evidence, of course.

If God made man in his own image, as the Bible says, then God has canine teeth.

Try to reconcile that with vegetarianism.

God did not make man alone, of course. He also made spiders which bind up living things, inject them with poison, and then eat them eat them alive, one piece at a time.

God made the hawk which will rip the head off a fluttering sparrow still grasped in its claw.

God made the fox which will chew the hind legs off a living mouse so that the flapping rodent can serve as a toy for its kits.

In short, God made nature, red in tooth and claw, and I assure you it is not all a mistake.

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Dogs and Hawks at Work and Play

Rina, Matt Mullenix's young whippet, with Smash the Harris' hawk. This picture was taken by Sid Seruntine on his property in in Southeast Louisiana, while Matt hunted with hawk and dog. This picture lifted from the great blog Matt shares with Steve Bodio and Reid Farmer.

Zumbo was (Mostly) Right

Sharp-shooting prairie dogs in South Dakota with a truck-mounted professional-grade shooting stand.



Some years back, I was lurking on several boards and list-servs when PETA came out with an advertising campaign against dairy milk. The folks over at FOL (Foxhunters On Line) went nuts. To listen to them talk, this was the end of the world and PETA's silly campaign was proof that the Anti-Christ was coming.

Over on the Dairy Management list, however, everyone yawned at the PETA campaign, and the talk quickly moved on to more germane matters such as the best low-grade slope to have on a loafing shed (3 percent as I recall).

The point here is that one embattled group -- the fox hunters -- freaked out, squawking like pet store parrots next to a slamming screen door. The dairy folks, on the other hand, knew One True Thing, which is that America will always drink milk.

I was recently reminded of these two divergent reactions when Outdoor Life columnist and Big Game Hunter Jim Zumbo posted a short rant to his blog concerning the use of semi-automatic "assault" rifles to shoot prairie dogs.

The gun community went nuts. Outdoor Life promptly fired Zumbo, and everyone in the Mainstream Media was quick to pronounce Zumbo -- a modest man with a small column in a magazine most people do not read -- as economic toast.

It seems all sides wanted to martyr Zumbo for their own purposes. The black-helicopter-spying, UN-hating, survivalist wing nuts wanted a martyr so they could show that they were powerful. The granola-eating, foreign-aid-giving lefties who assume all depravity is due to deprivation wanted a martyr so that they could prove that the "Gun Nuts" were as myopic, intellectually shallow and intolerant as anyone who ever served on a Taliban governing council.

The editors at Outdoor Life, of course, simply wanted to continue to pimp out America for their corporate advertisers. Zumbo must die so that another ad for something you do not need can be tossed into a land fill at the end of the month.

What no one seems to have actually asked is what was Zumbo actually trying to say in his blog? This is, after all, a man who has spent his entire life buying, carrying, cleaning and firing guns. He has shot deer in every state of the Union and knows how to skin a bear with a pocket knife. Is it really possible he woke up one morning possessed by the demon spirit of PETA-founder Ingrid Newkirk? I seriously doubt it.

While a lot has been written about "L'affaire Zumbo," I think most writers have missed the point -- perhaps because not too many of them actually read what Jim Zumbo said.

Here's a little of that original missive:

"While at the SHOT Show recently, I ran into a guy who complained that too many hunters were taking excessively long shots. He’s an outfitter, and witnessed plenty of people shooting at elk at distances greater than 350 yards. He suggested that that was too far, primary because the majority of those hunters had no clue of ballistics. Most were 'Hail Mary' shots. I agree. We read about people making 500 yard shots and more, and that, to me, is ridiculous.

Then at the SCI convention last week, I talked to a guy who bragged that his custom gun kills deer out at 800 yards and better. To each his own, I suppose, but that isn’t hunting. It’s shooting. And I don’t care how great a marksman you are. The risk of wounding an animal at extremely long ranges is high, and where’s the sportsmanship, the ethics, the satisfaction of taking outrageously long shots? I understand there’s a group in PA that shoots deer at 1,000 yards and more. More power to them. Just don’t ask me to support that kind of 'hunting.'”

Zumbo was making a point: there's a difference between shooting and hunting. We do not call range-shooting hunting, and we do not call skeet-shooting hunting.

In the English language, hunting means something and we all know it, and should be working to preserve and protect it.

Now, where Zumbo strayed on to thin ice is when he began to talk about marmots. I know something about marmots, and I think a man like Zumbo should just leave them the hell alone.

Marmots, you see, are a special problem. While Zumbo the Great White Hunter is definitely the man you want with you shooting elk in the field, he is not the man you want leading a charge into the dangerous thicket known as marmot politics.

In Zumbo's defense, let me point out that he is not the first ship to wreck on these rocks. In the last election cycle, when my friend Andy (a great Medicaid policy mechanic) stopped by my office to tell me he was going to South Dakota to work on the Rosebud Indian Reservation as an election monitor, I was the first one to give him the bad news: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota was political toast. Andy wanted to know why I thought so. "Simple," I said, "He's soft on Marmots."

Andy thought I was kidding. He gave me a weird look (I get those a lot), and changed the topic to something I might have real expertise in: the pricing of anti-psychotic medications.

When Andy came back two weeks later, however, he admitted I was right. "The entire election hinged on marmots," he said. "Marmots!" He was amazed. I was not.

Prairie dogs have long been an emotional issue in parts of the West. In truth, these little animals do no harm and quite a lot of good. Of course, that's not the way cattlemen see them. In arid and marginal country, ranchers are always anxious to blame their misfortunes on something more tangible than the weather, and so they take it out on coyotes, prairie dogs and the IRS, not one of which has the slightest impact on a herd of Angus.

While government-sponsored poisoning is the main cause of prairie dog mortality, recreational shooters also have an impact.

Notice what I called these folks -- shooters. They are not hunters. A prairie dog colony does not move. This year it will be exactly where it was last year, and the year before that. There is no "hunting" for prairie dogs.

Nor is there any woodcraft involved. The shooter knows nothing about marmots nor does he care about them. For the shooter, marmots are simply a small target shot from a great distance.

If you hang out on the prairie-dog and groundhog-shooting sections of varmint-hunting bulletin boards and list-servs, you will find that these folks do not talk about the gestation period of their respective marmots, the symbiotic relationship between the prairie dog and the buffalo, the depth of the burrows, the importance of prairie dogs to black-footed ferrets, or the call structure (both audible and sub-sonic) of marmots. A marmot shooter does not know -- or care -- about these kinds of things.

What interests the prairie dog shooter is not the prairie dog, but the ballistics -- the grains of gunpowder used, the feet-per-second, the effect of wind, and the flatness of the trajectory.

Prairie dog shooters have a fetish for physics. The animal itself is simply a convenient excuse to drive out into the countryside with a couple of sandwiches, a cooler full of beer, and a few small sandbags to help steady the barrel on the hood of a car or portable bench.

Zumbo does not "get it" because he is a hunter, and not a sniper. Zumbo seeks to be involved with the animal and its habitat, while the prairie dog sniper cannot be bothered to leave the hood of his car.

While Zumbo's idea of a proper gun is a well-made bolt action rifle or shotgun with a carefully engraved walnut stock and a history behind it, the prairie dog shooter prefers high-end technology and may even be living a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy, with himself as the deeply embedded Marine Corps sharpshooter, and the prairie dog serving as a proxy for the commandant of a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp. Pull the trigger and you get a "red mist" either way.

In truth, there is a fine line between a hunting rifle and a weapon of war. Vietnam-era snipers used to go into the field with their own guns -- carefully calibrated bolt-action hunting rifles originally crafted for deer. Today's military, of course, has specialized sniper rifles, but in truth some of the better off-the-shelf semi-autos like the AR-15 are about as good a shot as the old Vietnam-era sniping rifles. And so they are used by a certain percentage of prairie dog Fantasy Camp snipers, never mind that using a military-looking semi-auto on a prairie dog looks more than a little bit ridiculous.

Zumbo was remarking about this ridiculousness in his since-removed blog posting.

Now a prairie dog is just as dead with a .17 Hornady as he is with a AR-15 (or even a grenade), but is there anyone in the modern era who thinks image does not matter? Do not ALL of us in the hunting community bear the burden of being forced to carry the dead weight of the most reckless things that the stupidest among us do?

That is what Zumbo was trying to say, and here is what he wrote:

"As I write this, I’m hunting coyotes in southeastern Wyoming with Eddie Stevenson, PR Manager for Remington Arms, Greg Dennison, who is senior research engineer for Remington, and several writers. We’re testing Remington’s brand new .17 cal Spitfire bullet on coyotes.

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

I call them 'assault' rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are 'tackdrivers.'

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I’ve always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don’t use assault rifles. We’ve always been proud of our 'sporting firearms.'

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don’t need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let’s divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the prairies and woods."

Now where Zumbo overstepped the mark is in the last line. You don't need the last line. You see, if Zumbo -- who spends a heck of a lot of time in forest and field shooting and hunting -- has not actually seen assault rifles in the woods and fields, is there really a problem?

I think not.

The good news is that these assault-rifles (or look-a-likes of the same) are mostly in the hands of wanna-be tough guys, ballistic shooters, and a few kids who would be quickly laughed out of deer camp if they showed up with one.

The simple truth is that if you need a 32-round banana clip to kill a deer, you are a joke on legs and no one is going to go hunting with you -- ever.

But the Ballistics Boys who shoot prairie dogs are not hunters. They are shooters, and among this particular tribe, there appears to be a few who are a little low in common sense and a little over-caffeinated to boot.

Apparently there are more than a handful of Walter Mitty fantasy snipers who want to use an AR-15 Bushmaster -- the gun made infamous by D.C.-beltway sniper John Allen Mohamed -- to shoot prairie dogs.

No doubt they also put grease paint under their eyes to cut the glare, and slip on genuine Vietnam-era camouflage before they pretend to be muscular Green Beret commandos on patrol in the Laotian Highlands. Never mind that they are actually pudgy office workers shooting 3-pound marmots on BLM land in Colorado.

Real hunters like Zumbo tend to go the opposite direction. Instead of looking for more fire power and more accuracy, a good shot who really knows the land and his abilities may handicap himself a little bit in order to increase the challenge. He will not shoot over bait. He may chose to hunt wild turkey with an ancient French-built .16 gauge rather than a brand new American-made .12 gauge. He may forgo a high-powered scope, or lower the caliber on his rifle.

True experts handicap themselves in all sports, from cards and golf, to fishing and hunting. The fastest growth in hunting today, I am happy to say, is in the area of black powder shooting -- the very antithesis of semi-automatic fire power. At a time when the entire nation seems to be neck-deep in whitetail deer and turkey, the average hunter is not trying to ramp up for slaughter, but trying to dial down to keep an element of sport in the game.

So was Zumbo wrong? Not at all. Shooting wild game with an AR-15 is such tremendous over-kill that no one needs to say it, and damn few are actually doing it.

Sure there are always going to be some redneck idiots who want to play Rambo, but the proper response is not to legislate or to litigate, but to laugh out loud, draw a few cartoons, and make a joke to their face about the need to "overcompensate for their inadequacies" (And by that you mean shooting inadequacies. If they want to take it another way, that's their problem).

It is a simple truth, that mockery often works better than manifesto.

There is no need to legislate AR-15s from the woods, when laughter alone will work just fine.

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• To read more on this topic, see "The Zumbo Flap" by net-friend Steve Bodio (author of Good Guns and many other fine books) and "More Zumbo" by net-friend Matt Mullenix (author of In Season: A Louisiana Falconer's Journal)

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Whippet Good

Matt Mullenix and Rina the Whippet, with Rina's first brace of rabbits. The title to this post was stolen from an email from Matt -- a reference to an old Devo song.

One of the unplanned benefits of this blog is that I have met, online, some pretty cool people who, though they may hunt differently than I do, share the same three- and four-species trials, tribulations and thrills of making it all work in the field while hunting.

Along with the folks that hunt with ferrets are the long-doggers and, perhaps most interesting of all, the hawkers and falconers. This last group is, without a doubt, the most literate group of complex-primitive hunters.

The picture, above, is of Matthew Mullenix and his young whippet Rina. There was a hawk in this hunt, of course, but as Matt explains it (quoting Gregg Barrow, another online friend), "The first season belongs to the dog," and these rabbits are purely Rina's.

The first season, of course, refers to the dog's first season -- not the hawk's or the human's. Matt's well-written and insightful journal this season is more about Rina the whippet (at least so far) than his veteran hawk Smash.

It was on Matt's blog that I learned that his old bird, Charlie, is now in stud at the Coulson's down in Louisiana (Tom and Jennifer Coulson are Harris Hawk breeders, fliers and mentors par excellence) and that Charlie had sired the new Harris Hawk that digger and hawker Teddy Moritz is now flying in New Jersey. A small universe, eh? Teddy's new hawk nailed its first bunny back in mid-October -- a development I learned on Matt's blog.

Matt took a long hawking swing around America recently. To read a little about his visit at Steve Bodio's, see the Querencia blog where he and Reid Farmer also blog with Steve.

Steve Bodio and Reid Farmer are another pair of interesting writers I stumbled upon due to this blog -- the kind of people who write about Turkish pigeons (No Dear, not Turkish prisons, Turkish pigeons), and the commonalities found among petroglyphs across the world. Three voices and three interests make for a rich gumbo at Querencia -- with occassional dashes of good stuff from other bloggers, naturalists, hawkers and doggers to spice it all up.

OK, back to dogs -- specifically hawking dogs.

I observe that a very rich and diverse variety of canines are found in the hawking world, and that the choice of dog may have less to do with the hawk than with the countryside being hawked and the collateral game than can be had in non-hawking seasons.

Teddy Mortiz, for example, hawks under a small pack of long-coated miniature dachshunds -- dogs that are useful for busting rabbits out of the tight thick stands of multiflora rose that are found in the East, but which also do double dirt dog duty on groundhog, fox, raccoon and possum.

Steven Bodio, who lives on one of the high flat stretches of upland New Mexico, has a love affair with the type of Turkish long-dog know as a Tazi -- a function of the jack rabbits, coyotes, and vast open spaces he has in his neck of the woods.

Hawker Rebecca O'Connor recently acquired a nice red Brittany. Her first Brittany was so well acclimated it licked the Falcon on the face and the bird actually tolerated it. A small all-pupose bird dog, Brittany's do well in a wide variety of cover -- a good all-rounder for California.

In other parts of the country, Jack Russells and beagles are popular for busting bunnies out of brush, while down in Louisiana, Matt has a fondness for whippets which are good warm-weather dogs for swamp rabbits and cotton rats as well as for busting birds out of tall tropical grasses.

For more on the subject, see >> Rabbit Hawker's Dogs.




A young male Harris Hawk and a longhaired dachshund named Fitz (as in Fitz-in-dens) which has an 11 inch inch chest, both owned and hunted by Teddy Moritz. The young tiercel Harris has been doing the business on eastern cotton tails.

Good Writing, Good Reading

Thanks to Querencia -- the excellent blog written by Steve Bodio, Reid Farmer and Matthew Mullenix -- I was steered to Rebecca O'Conner's well-written essay on duck hawking (or falconry if you want to be fancy) in The South Dakota Review (link is to a PDF). It's recommended reading for all.

Rebecca's blog (as well as the Querencia blog previously mentioned) are permanent links in the right-hand margin of this blog.

Rebecca's piece, entitled "Mercy" is about the mixed feelings we all have at the conclusion of a hunt and the need to kill quickly -- far quicker than death naturally occurs in the wild.

Humans have a sense of mercy -- a falcon, a fox, a cat or a coyote do not. And neither does disease or the infirmity of old age.

On a wild animal's last day, the best it can hope for is to find itself in the hands of an experienced hunter.

A Shot of Expresso in the Morning

“…Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can…”

The reason I hit Querencia -- the blog of Steve Bodio, Matthew Mullenix and Reid Farmer -- pretty often is because the three guys that blog there can write their ass off, and they always get me thinking.

The above quote is from Moby Dick, and starts up a musing on the burden of blogging in hawking season and the creaking of age as it begins to show up in your bones (and if it has not yet, just wait).

Everyone does their own thing in the morning. Mine is to dash off a few emails and correct the typos in what I put up the night before and to check a few web sites before I scurry off to work and get on the wheel and make it go around again in the pet shop window.

On the train I read or edit more stuff. On walks from the subway station to work I think a bit about the things I have read, and they crawl up the old rock of my brain to sun themselves on top like a lizard.

Sure I read newspapers and books and magazines -- quite a lot of all of them actually -- but where else but on the internet do you get Moby Dick worked into a discussion about hawking and blogging and aging? And so, out of the millions of web sites that are out there, I have chosen a few to read regularly, and Querencia is one of them.

Ten Items Off the Nightstand

I hated writing book reports when I was a kid, and I'm not too fond of them now.

When I do write a book note or two now, they tend to be very short and to the point -- a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" kind of thing.

My opinions are just that -- one man's opinion -- and nothing more. In my defense, I at least buy the books and read them carefully.

You would be surprised how many people do not do that. They buy nothing and read even less, gleaning everything they know from idle chatter on bulletin boards or idle talk at dog shows or feed stores.

I would not want to know that little, and so I read quite a lot, field test what I am told, and look hard for serious books about things I am actually interested in.

There are different ways to judge a book: as entertainement and as information. A book is truely defective if it fails at both elements, and yet a surprising number of books do fail on both scores.

People who know me know I'm cheap, and yet I consider time more precious than money. Occassionally I will re-read a book, but just as often I will thrown one out.

In any case, here are 9 books and one video that have come on to my nightstand and moved off of it and onto a shelf in the library.

1. "The Goshawk" by T.H. White. White is a great writer, but I found re-reading The Goshawk quite unsatisfying. The book is an uneven piece by White who did not have very much to say other than the fact that he, himself, is an idiot. Better writing and more knowledge can be had (for free!) at Rebecca O'Conner's blog.
   
   
2. "An Outside Chance: Classic and New Essays on Sport" by Thomas McGuane. An Outside Chance has a truely great piece in it about elk hunting which I first read in a collection of stories assembled by David Peterson. I ordered two of McGuane's books on the strength of that story, but the books I selected did not sustain the strength of that original piece. I will sample a little more Tom McGuane in the future -- I sense there is better stuff on his lengthy menu of written work.
   
   
3. "Querencia" by Stephen Bodio. I was told this book was literature, and by God it was. It is a book not just about a place, but about several places, and the voyage of the mind that goes on between. It is a love story about several things, not least of which is Bodio's late wife who was quite a character in her own right. Nothing loved is ever lost, and in this book Bodio has memorialized quite a lot -- hawks, dogs, neighbors, landscape and a special woman. I was a little "verklempt" at the end. Buy the book -- no caveats to this recommendation.
   
   
4. "On the Edge of the Wild: Passions and Pleasures of a Naturalist" by Stephen Bodio. This book is a collection of essays, and it reads well -- most essay collections do not. Bodio's description of how some easterners look at large landowners and working ranch hands is deadly accurate. Not quite as good as Querencia (see above), but then not too much is.
   
   
5. "The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing" by Thomas McGuane. McGuane writes well, but I have to say that this book did not do it for me. I am interested in fish as biology and fishing as sport, but I am not all that interested in fishing stories that do not have a larger message or point. A book to lend and not want back.
   
   
6. "Aloft: A Meditation on Pigeons & Pigeon-Flying" by Stephen Bodio. I like all common birds with histories behind them. This book was a bit on the thin side (I wanted to read more), but it was well written and very interesting and has a very nice and simple narrative form. Now I want to read a longer book about pigeons (history, genetics, science, etc.) and another about chickens too. If this book was food, it would be a crisp springroll.
   
   
7. "Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature" by Barash. This book has a great title, but the concept is bit tortured. I do not read literature this way, and the "Darwinian" stuff was not new to me. If you like Freudian interpretations of Iago, you might like this one, but otherwise this is a book to skim in the store and not buy.
   
   
8. "The Insightful Sportsman: Thoughts on Fish, Wildlife and What Ails the Earth" by Ted Williams. Williams is a pretty good writer and very smart when it comes to wildlife and politics, but his magazine articles (always excellent) do not quite hold together as a book. This is a common problem with collected essays and articles. That said, if I lent this book out, I would want it back.
   
   
9. "Sport with Terriers" by Patricia Adams Lent. This is a short book without too much practical advice. A re-read of this publication is a reminder of how thin the shelf is when it comes to American terrier work. An important book in terms of history, but otherwise forgettable.
   
   
10. Rabbit Snaring DVD by Woodga. American cottontail rabbits are entirely different from those found in the UK, but I am always interested in practical stuff by masters of their art, and Woodga certainly qualifies when it comes to snaring. The sound on this DVD can be a bit dodgey at times (due to wind), and Woodga has a pretty thick accent for American ears (Will someone please teach the British how to speak English?), but this DVD is the real deal and not a second of time is wasted on idle prattle. After watching this video you will know more than a few things about spinning brass wire, bending tealers and placing snares at the right height. As with all things, practice makes perfect, but Woodga's video is clearly the fast ramp to success. I think the hoop snare technique would work well with groundhogs -- something to remember if a farmer has a problem where terriers and digging are not an option.

A Polar Bear in a Roadside Zoo

The internet is this beautiful thing. It's a million times more powerful than the ancient library that burned in Alexandria, and a million times larger than all the coffee houses of Vienna. And though a lot of true ugliness comes out of it, sometimes some really great people are located and some shining talents rise up to smack you in the head

This is one of those stories.

A daisy chain of good things started with a note from Gregg and Soo Barrow in Texas. Gregg is houndsman and breeder of working Giant Schnauzers. He had been reading the blog from time to time, and had also stumbled across a speech I had given on street drug markets. He liked the speech and shot me a line to say so -- much appreciated

Gregg, in turn, mentioned the blog to Matthew Mullenix, a hawker in Louisiana who has his own web site and blog. I love hawks (I used to work for Audubon). It turns out that Matthew and I have at least one common acquaintence in the hawking world. It is a small world, after all.

Mathew, in turn,, mentioned this blog to Steve Bodio in New Mexico, another hawker and dog man who also happens to be an author.

Steve shot me a line to say "hi" just as I was coming to his essay in David Peterson's anthology on hunting ("A Hunter's Heart").

How odd is that? Pretty odd.

Well, to be make a short story long, I started reading Steve's Blog which he writes with Matthew Mullenix and Reid Farmer, and then I started reading the blogs linked to that blog. And then I ordered off for two of Steve's books.

Let's start with a quick book report. The blogs are great but the books are really good stuff. I will not review two books at once, but this is what I wrote Matt as I started the first:

I got one of Steve Bordio's books in the mail yesterday (On the Edge of the Wilds) and I am just 9 pages into it and am knocked out. It's depressing to find smart sons of bitches who can really right and actually have something to say, 'cause basically you know you will never be able to say it half as well. On the other hand, it's exhilirating too -- new ideas and turns of the phrase that just pop in your brain. I feel like an apartment dog taking his first long walk though a zoo. Pretty grand this place!

In the pages I've covered so far, Steve's talking about the smug disdain that the well-bred, over-fed, I-got-me-a-medical-plan and a college education crowd feel towards people that work with their hands and, conversely, the folks that actually own large ranches and farms.
It's more than the fact that Steve says it all very well (smooth, smooth); it's that he has something to say that really needs to be said and (as far as I know) has not been said before. I think it must help to be from the East and have gone West and stayed and really paid attention -- it is an expatriot journey every bit as clarifying as what deToqueville did (and certainly just as far geographically). It is an old observation that to write best about Somewhere it helps to be from Elsewhere -- Hemingway in Idaho and Florida writing about Paris, etc. Anyway, it is at some level depressing and inspiring to read something this well put together. Writing this good reminds me that done properly writing is more than typing -- it is craft.

All of this to say that I have finished the first book, and will start the second today. A third book on pigeons is already ordered.

Does any more need to be said? This is a writer worth reading and I am going the distance with the books. And the blog is a link off this one now -- as are the others.

As I told Matt after reading Steve's Blog (and Matt's and Reids) and several of the blogs linked off of it (The Alpha Environmentalist, Operation Desert Dove, the Nature Blog):

"For the longest time I have felt a little like a polar bear at a road-side zoo -- pretty sure there must be others like me, but without much evidence of that reality. Now I see there are others out there with a similar bend in the brain -- not a lot of us, but more than one, and that's a pretty thrilling thing on this end. I know some professional environmental types, but I have to say most seem to know almost nothing about critters -- it's either an academic excercise or a romantic thing, or a legal construct (lots of lawyers!) or else it's just the fear-mongering tribe they chose out of college. For whatever reason, there is often not much real connection to things that snap or go squish under foot, or that fly up or bite back in the hedge. A dissapointment."

But not a permanent disappointment. One of the great things about the internet is that all of the red-headed Eskimos on the planet can now find each other.

There may be only a few of us in the tribe, but the world as we know it did not really start with too many more than that.

Two will do, and we already have more than that.
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